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Cyber
One of the world's biggest ever dark web police stings leads to 150 arrests
2021-10-27
[Daily Mail, where America gets its news] including 65 in US and 24 in UK

  • Police forces across the globe arrested 150 suspects in massive sting operation

  • Operation Dark HunTOR targeted buyers and sellers on darknet marketplaces

  • 24 people from the UK were arrested, while 65 were also picked up in the US

  • £22.45million in cash and virtual currencies were also confiscated in the raids

  • Police also seized 45 guns and 516lbs of drugs, including 25,000 ecstasy pills


The bust stems from a German-led police sting earlier this year taking down the 'world's largest' darknet marketplace.

Darknet markets are e-commerce sites designed to lie beyond the reach of regular search engines and are popular with criminals, as buyers and sellers are largely untraceable.

Dark HunTOR, 'was composed of a series of separate but complementary actions in Australia, Bulgaria, France, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, Switzerland, the United Kingdom, and the United States,' the Hague-based Europol said.

Italian police also shut down the 'DeepSea' and 'Berlusconi' marketplaces, 'which together boasted over 100,000 announcements of illegal products', said Europol, which coordinated the operation together with its twin judicial agency Eurojust.

German police in January closed down the 'DarkMarket' online marketplace, used by its alleged operator, an Australian, to facilitate the sale of drugs, stolen credit card data and malware.

Europol said the arrest of the alleged operator, caught near the German-Danish border at the time, and the seizure of the criminal infrastructure provided 'investigators across the world with a trove of evidence'.

German prosecutors at the time said DarkMarket came to light in the course of a major investigation against the web-hosting service Cyberbunker, located in a former NATO bunker in southwest Germany.
Related:
Cyberbunker: 2013-03-29 'Bazooka' attacks slowing Internet: security experts
Cyberbunker: 2013-03-27 Global internet slows after 'biggest attack in history'
Posted by:Skidmark

#4  This really isn't as impressive as it sounds. TOR only encrypts traffic in transit. If you compromise either end of the transaction you have access to everything in cleartext.
Posted by: Angstrom   2021-10-27 10:43  

#3  I suspect one or more of the TOR onion routers are LEO compromised.
Posted by: Skidmark   2021-10-27 09:46  

#2  Italian police also shut down the 'DeepSea' and 'Berlusconi' marketplaces

What, no more bunga-bunga?
Che fai... Che cazzo fai!
Posted by: Merrick Ferret   2021-10-27 08:06  

#1  
I guess those VPN's & TOR like browsers did not Cover Their Tracks after all ☺.
Posted by: NN2N1   2021-10-27 07:15  

00:00