The following is a machine translation of a press release on BKA.de, website of Germany’s federal criminal police, Bundeskriminalamt, that appeared on October 27:
The Darknet marketplace “Germany on the Deep Web ” was the main point of contact for drug trafficking for several years. The alleged operator of the illegal platform has now been arrested.
The Federal Criminal Police Office and the Central Office for Cybercrime Bavaria ( ZCB ) are investigating the suspected administrator of “Germany on the Deep Web “, a 22-year-old student from Lower Bavaria. The arrest took place on Tuesday, October 25. As part of the police measures, two residential properties were also searched with the participation of a ZCB public prosecutor and numerous pieces of evidence, including computers , data carriers and mobile phones, were seized. The measures carried out were preceded by months of covert and technically demanding investigations in order to be able to identify and ultimately arrest the suspects who were acting anonymously on the dark web.
The Darknet marketplace of Deutschland im Deep Web was first published on the Tor network in 2013. In 2016, the perpetrator of the rampage in Munich used the platform at the time to procure the murder weapon and ammunition. As a result, the website was shut down in 2017 by the BKA on behalf of the Frankfurt am Main Public Prosecutor’s Office. The operator at the time was arrested and sentenced to seven years in prison in 2018.
Since 2018, two new versions of the platform have been published under the name “Deutschland im Deep Web “, on which drugs in particular were traded under the self-imposed motto “No control, everything allowed”.
The current criminal proceedings are directed against the operator of the third version of the Darknet platform. He is said to have administered them since November 2018. The accused is suspected of operating a criminal trading platform on the Internet in accordance with Section 127 of the Criminal Code . The law provides for a prison sentence of one to ten years.
The platform, which has not been accessible to users since March 2022, had around 16,000 registered users , 72 of whom were active traders. This makes “Germany in the Deep Web ” one of the largest German-speaking Darknet platforms. To draw attention to the activities of the investigative authorities in relation to “Germany on the Deep Web “, this backup banner has now been published under the original accessibility of the website:
Source: BKA.de