Operation Dark HunTOR was carried out jointly by Australia, Bulgaria, France, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, Switzerland, the United Kingdom and the United States.
Some 150 people who bought or sold drugs or weapons on the ‘dark web’ have been arrested around the world in one of the largest operations to date against the clandestine version of the Internet, Europol announced on Tuesday.
“This operation, called Dark HunTOR, was made up of a series of separate but complementary actions in Australia, Bulgaria, France, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, Switzerland, the United Kingdom and the United States,” Europol said in a statement.
This police action arose after the dismantling of the “DarkMarket” platform in January in Germany, considered by researchers as the “biggest” selling point on the cyber black market.
In the United States alone, some 65 people were arrested, while 47 were detained in Germany, 24 in Great Britain, and four in Italy and the Netherlands, among others.
Some of the detainees “were considered targets of great value” by Europol.
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Agents also seized 26.7 million euros ($ 31 million) in cash and virtual currencies, as well as 45 pistols and 234 kilograms of drugs.
The Italian police also closed the markets “DeepSea” and “Berlusconi”, “which together had more than 100,000 advertisements for illegal products,” said Europol, which coordinated the operation with its sister judicial agency Eurojust.
“A treasure trove of evidence”
The arrest in January of the suspected “DarkMarket” operator, a 34-year-old Australian detained on the German-Danish border, “provided investigators around the world with a trove of evidence,” according to Europol.
The dismantling of “DarkMarket”, which sold drugs of all kinds, such as counterfeit money, stolen or falsified credit card details, anonymous SIM cards or even computer viruses, was linked to a raid dating back to September 2019 in Germany against a large number of illegal darknet services called “Cyberbunker,” the prosecution noted at the time.
This illegal data center, installed in a former NATO bunker in southwestern Germany, was suspected of having hosted several drug sales platforms, but also servers used for trafficking in child pornography or cyberattacks.
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Since then, Europol’s European Cybercrime Center (EC3) has collected information to identify key targets, the agency explained.
The dark web, a parallel version of the web where the anonymity of users is guaranteed, has been increasingly persecuted in recent months by the international police.
“The goal of operations like this is to warn criminals operating on the dark web that the law enforcement community has the means and global partners to expose them and hold them accountable for their illegal activities, including in areas of the dark web,” he said. Europol’s Deputy Director of Operations, Jean-Philippe Lecouffe.
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For Rolf van Wegberg, a cybercrime investigator at Delft University of Technology, the operation marks a change in police action against suspected criminals operating on the Internet.
“In the past, this type of operation was aimed at shutting down the operators of these markets and now we see the police departments behind the main sellers,” he told investigative journalists from the Dutch public channel KRO-NCRV. (I)
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