Europol, FBI crack down on ‘dark’ marketplaces online
Seventeen vendors and administrators of these Internet supermarkets for drugs and guns arrested, Europol says
ANKARA
Law enforcement officials from sixteen European countries, in cooperation with the U.S, have cracked down on markets for illegal goods on the Internet, the European Union’s law enforcement agency Europol said Friday in a statement.
“The action aimed to stop the sale, distribution and promotion of illegal and harmful items, including weapons and drugs, which were being sold on online ‘dark’ marketplaces,” the statement said.
Seventeen vendors and administrators who ran those online marketplaces were arrested, and more than 410 'dark' markets were closed down, Europol said.
The statement said that, in addition, “bitcoins worth approximately $1 million, 180,000 euro ($222,900) in cash, drugs, gold and silver were seized”.
The Silk Road 2.0, an anonymous marketplace which was operated as a hidden "TOR" service, was also taken down by the FBI and the operator was arrested. "TOR", which is an acronym for "The Onion Router," is a free network designed to anonymise real Internet Protocol addresses -- locations on the Internet -- by routing your traffic through many different servers on the "TOR" network.
This major law enforcement operation was coordinated by Europol’s European Cybercrime Centre, working with the U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation, U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, U.S. Homeland Security Investigations and the EU’s agency Eurojust.
“Today we have demonstrated that, together, we are able to efficiently remove vital criminal infrastructures that are supporting serious organized crime,” Troels Oerting, the head of Europol’s European Cybercrime Centre said.
“And we are not just removing these services from the open Internet; this time we have also hit services on the 'Darknet' where, for a long time, criminals have considered themselves beyond reach,” he said. The "Darknet" consists of private networks only available to members.
