An important case out of Germany in the news there, as machine translated by Google, below.
From DerStandard:
A good two years after the “cyber bunker” on the Moselle was blown up, there were 227 follow-up proceedings against customers of the illegal data center for criminal transactions in the Darknet. Most of them had to be stopped because there were no investigative approaches to identify the customers, said Chief Public Prosecutor Jörg Angerer from the State Central Office for Cybercrime at the General Public Prosecutor’s Office in Koblenz. Investigations are still ongoing in some proceedings.
Old German bunker as the setting
The cyberbunker trial comes to an end this Monday with a verdict. Eight defendants have had to answer before the Trier Regional Court since October 2020: They are accused of having operated a data center for illegal websites in an old bunker in Traben-Trarbach on the Moselle as a criminal organization for years. They are charged with complicity in more than 240,000 criminal offenses. The underground facility was excavated at the end of September 2019 in a major action involving hundreds of police officers after five years of investigations.
Read more at DerStandard.
Elsewhere, Tagesschau reports on the convictions:
The main defendant, a Dutch national, was sentenced to five years and nine months in prison. Another six defendants received terms of between two years and four months and four years and three months in prison. The Trier judges sentenced the eighth accused to one year imprisonment, which was suspended.
All of the defendants therefore formed a criminal organization.
From drug trafficking to hacker attacks
According to the indictment, the customers of the illegal server center include the operators of the large darknet marketplaces “Wall Street Market” and “Fraudsters”, which have since been shut down. Accordingly, there were a total of almost 250,000 offenses, most of which were drug offenses.
Read more at Tagesschau.
Thanks to @z0man for the links.