WASHINGTON (AP) — Law enforcement officials in the U.S. and Europe have arrested 150 people and seized more than $31 million in an international drug trafficking investigation stemming from sales on the darknet, the Justice Department said Tuesday. The Archetyp Market takedown comes at a time of continued growth and transformation in the digital drug trade. According to TRM Labs, cryptocurrency-enabled online drug sales grew by more than 19% from 2023 to 2024, reaching nearly USD 2.4 billion in total volume. At the same time, 2024 saw a 42% decline in the number of new darknet marketplaces launched year over year — a signal that while the market is consolidating, it is also becoming more sophisticated. Notably, the proportion of newly launched marketplaces that accept only Monero, a privacy-focused cryptocurrency, rose sharply from just over one-third in 2023 to nearly half in 2024, highlighting a growing shift toward obfuscation and anti-surveillance tactics among darknet operators. That sting, led by Germany’s federal criminal police (BKA) with the assistance of Dutch national police, the European agencies Eurojust and Europol, and various US agencies, took down the darknet marketplace known as Wall Street Market.
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- On February 24th, the authorities allowed Maximilian to meet the courier to receive 25,000 ecstasy pills, 20 kilos of hash, 10,000 doses of LSD and 27 kilos of amphetamine without incident.
- The darknet ecosystem is highly dynamic, with vendors and buyers quickly migrating to other platforms.
- An international operation by US and European police agencies has led to the arrests of more than 170 suspected online criminals.
- Law enforcement authorities across Europe have dismantled Archetyp Market, the most enduring dark web drug market, following a large-scale operation involving six countries, supported by Europol and Eurojust.
- Srinivasan received virtual currency as payment for the drugs and then routed that virtual currency through cryptocurrency exchanges.
The change in tactics netted a record number of arrests for the operation, beating the 150 arrested following the takedown of DarkMarket, and 179 following the takedown of Wall Street Market. Users across multiple forums had previously expressed concerns about being victims of an exit scam, where marketplace administrators simply disappear with customers’ funds. Such signatures are intended to confirm that vendors still have access to their accounts and have not been arrested or compromised. While the method has its limitations, HugBunter argued that failure to provide a cryptographic signature alongside continued account activity could be telling. On the Reddit-style dark web forum known as “Dread,” users are trying to determine which vendors were compromised by the operation, Straight Arrow News found. The dark web is a collection of sites that are not indexed by search engines and can only be viewed with specialized web browsers designed to provide privacy and anonymity.
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Where one marketplace collapses, Telegram facilitates dozens of replacements, each with lower visibility and faster growth curves. Instead of disappearing, Hydra’s network simply adapted to a new medium, underscoring the difficulty of suppressing illicit commerce with infrastructure takedowns alone. German law enforcement hasn’t responded to Recorded Future News’ request for comment about whether the website’s administrators were arrested. Visitors to the cybercrime website were greeted on Thursday with a red banner announcing the takeover.
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The operation comes several months after German police took down a notorious dark web marketplace known as Kingdom Market. “The internet is not an area free of criminal prosecution,” German federal police President Holger Münch has repeatedly declared. But the Darknet perpetrators are difficult to prosecute — especially since drug-dealing is often “victimless crime” that neither party has an interest in reporting.
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Srinivasan also used the encrypted messaging application Wickr to communicate with and sell drugs to customers. Srinivasan received virtual currency as payment for the drugs and then routed that virtual currency through cryptocurrency exchanges. “Operation RapTor shows that the dark web is not beyond the reach of law enforcement,” said Head of Europol’s European Cybercrime Centre, Edvardas Šileris. “Through close cooperation and intelligence sharing, officers across three continents identified and arrested suspects, sending a clear message to those who think they can hide in the shadows. Europol will continue working with our partners to make the internet safer for everyone.” One key moderator and six top vendors — some responsible for thousands of drug shipments — were arrested in Germany and Sweden.
Only trusted vendors may make use of the Early Finalization or the 50 percent FE option. PGP support and two-factor authentication are both available on the market as an additional layer of security. Even though relatively small in comparison to the overall retail market for drugs, the sale of pharmaceuticals in these markets is significant and appears to be growing.
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- This shift has not only reshaped how operations are run but also how law enforcement approaches surveillance and takedowns.
- That case, like Archetyp, demonstrates how darknet infrastructure is often transnational, technically sophisticated, and deeply intertwined with the global financial system.
- “Operation RapTor shows that the dark web is not beyond the reach of law enforcement,” said Head of Europol’s European Cybercrime Centre, Edvardas Šileris.
- “The investigation to bring to justice the administrators of and vendors on Nemesis Market continues,” a spokesperson for the U.S.
- With a Bitcoin payment, you could order whatever you liked, and Shiny Flakes always tried to be service oriented.
- German police said they seized the infrastructure of the popular illegal darknet marketplace known as Nemesis and took its website down.
The market’s takedown came after years of effort from Germany, Netherlands, Romania, Spain, Sweden and the United States. The U.S. Treasury Department also announced Tuesday it was sanctioning Hydra as well as a virtual currency exchange, Garantex, that operates out of Russia. The department said both entities have been used to help finance the activities of ransomware gangs. Maximilian made two mistakes that ultimately sealed his fate and drew the attention of the Leipzig Police. One was not putting the correct postage on some of his packages; one of them ended up being detained for having suspicious contents at a mail center in Leipzig after being returned to sender. Maximilian’s other mistake was always using the same package station located not far from his house.
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The BKA also said 20 additional properties were searched, mainly targeting Archtetyp moderators and vendors. In total, police seized 47 smartphones, 45 computers, as well as narcotics and other assets, which will be analyzed for further investigative leads. The suspected admin of the operations owns property in Hanover and Bucharest too, all of which were searched by domestic law enforcement. The focus of the investigators was on a 30-year-old German who is suspected of having acted as the administrator of Archetyp Market. In parallel, German and European authorities searched 20 other properties – including residential houses, server rooms, and hideouts of accomplices. The Dutch national police’s Cyber Enabled Crime Team was involved in the operation, codenamed SpecTor.
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During the year-and-a-half-long investigation, they discovered marketplace infrastructure in Germany and Lithuania, the BKA said. The website launched in 2015 selling drugs, hacked materials, forged documents and illegal digital services such as Bitcoin-mixing – which cyber-criminals use to launder stolen or extorted digital coins. This operation marks a critical blow to Europe’s darknet drug trade, yet underscores the evolving challenges of cyber-enabled crime. Europol said German authorities seized Monopoly Market’s infrastructure more than two years ago, allowing the agency to create intelligence packages that were shared with international partners across Europe as well as in the United States and Brazil.
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Archetyp may be gone, but the features that drove its success are already being carried forward by others. Code named Deep Sentinel, the operation was the latest in a series of strikes by European authorities against high-volume dark web markets. Led by Germany’s Federal Criminal Police Office (BKA) with support from the Netherlands and the Czech Republic, the operation extended to Spain, Sweden and Romania. Authorities seized Archetyp’s back-end servers in the Netherlands, froze €7.8 million in assets and arrested eight suspects, including a 30-year-old German national believed to be the platform’s founder. Behrouz Parsarad (Parsarad), residing in Iran, was the sole administrator of Nemesis. In this capacity, Parsarad established Nemesis and held full control over the marketplace and its virtual currency wallets.
The platform, active since 2020, facilitated over €250 million in drug sales using the privacy-focused cryptocurrency Monero (XMR) and operated via the Tor network. Law enforcement agencies labeled the sweep as Operation SpecTor, after the Tor browser that allows access to the dark web. The DarkMarket operation was called DarkHunTor and the Wall Street Market operation was dubbed DisrupTor. It added that a number of the suspects were considered “high-value targets” by police, and that investigations to identify additional people behind dark web accounts were still ongoing. But most of all, Shiny Flakes made it incredibly easy for customers with no dark web experience to order drugs over the internet and was able to draw in countless consumers with his image-heavy web shop. Shiny Flakes offered basically everything, from MDMA and ecstasy to speed and crystal meth to LSD and marijuana, which he stopped selling occasionally because of high demand.
Four alleged administrators were arrested, and €3.6 million in cryptocurrencies were seized in coordinated U.S.-Italian operations. Department of the Treasury’s Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) sanctioned Iran-based Behrouz Parsarad (Parsarad), the sole administrator of Nemesis, an online darknet marketplace, which was subject of an international law enforcement operation and was taken down in 2024. Prior to its takedown by law enforcement, narcotics traffickers and cybercriminals openly traded in illegal drugs and services on Nemesis, which was designed with built-in money laundering features.
Authorities seized €7.8 million in assets and arrested eight individuals across five countries during coordinated raids. The darknet is a part of the internet hosted within an encrypted network and accessible only through specialized anonymity-providing tools, most notably the Tor Browser. The Justice Department says investigators have seized over $31.6 million in cash and virtual currency and 45 guns. Police everything the needed to pursue further investigations and even took the liberty to troll potential customers with an advertising banner on the website promoting police recruitment.
