World’s Largest Dark Web Market Taken Down

DarkMarket, which has been described as the largest illegal marketplace on the dark web, is now offline following an international operation involving police in Australia, Denmark, Germany, Moldova, Ukraine, the United Kingdom and the United States of America. The key to the operation was the recent arrest of an Australian citizen near the German-Danish border by the Central Criminal Investigation Department in the German city of Oldenburg. This led police to locate and seize 20 servers situated in Moldova and Ukraine.

The market was used to sell:

  • anonymous SIM cards
  • malware
  • credit card details
  • drugs
  • counterfeit money

More than 2,400 vendors used DarkMarket to provide their wares to almost half a million users. The total value of transactions on the market is said to have been approximately USD140mn. Now police will turn their attention to the data on the seized servers in a bid to identify moderators and users of DarkMarket.

You can read the Europol press release here.

Eric Priezkalns
Eric Priezkalnshttp://revenueprotect.com

Eric is the Editor of Commsrisk. Look here for more about the history of Commsrisk and the role played by Eric.

Eric is also the Chief Executive of the Risk & Assurance Group (RAG), an association of professionals working in risk management and business assurance for communications providers. RAG was founded in 2003 and Eric was appointed CEO in 2016.

Previously Eric was Director of Risk Management for Qatar Telecom and he has worked with Cable & Wireless, T‑Mobile, Sky, Worldcom and other telcos. He was lead author of Revenue Assurance: Expert Opinions for Communications Providers, published by CRC Press.

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