After the closure of the world’s largest illegal marketplace on the Darknet, according to the authorities, investigations into further suspects are ongoing. “There were other administrators and so-called managers who have not yet been identified,” said the Koblenz attorney general Jürgen Brauer of the dpa. Because of the aliases they used, their number is still unclear.

The DarkMarket platform was closed on Monday and its servers been switched off. The 34 – year-old alleged operator, an Australian, was arrested at the weekend near the German-Danish border, came into custody and, according to Brauer, still did not comment on the matter .

DarkMarket should almost 500. 000 Users and more than 2400 sellers. According to the General Prosecutor’s Office in Koblenz, more than 320. 000 transactions were carried out – especially with Drugs, but also with counterfeit money, stolen or falsified credit card details, anonymous SIM cards and malware.

The trail leads to the cyberbunker According to Brauer, the illegal marketplace will be in June 2019 in the cyber bunker in Traben-Trarbach on the Moselle. In the old bunker, a gang is said to have operated an illegal data center for criminal business in the Darknet on a large scale for years. In September 2019 hundreds of police officers excavated the underground cyberbunker. There is currently a trial against eight alleged operators in Trier.

In the case of DarkMarket, investigators have now confiscated more than 20 servers in Moldova and Ukraine. The data stored there should lead to new search approaches. Prosecutor General Brauer assumes a direct connection with the Moselle valley: “We do not yet know whether the servers moved to Moldova and Ukraine immediately after the cyber bunker was shut down, but we suspect that the shutdown was the reason.”

(anw)