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Two of the three largest dark web markets are closed for business.
The Department of Justice and Europol announced Thursday that they have that served hundreds of thousands of customers trying to get their hands on illegal goods online.
While you or I can easily buy groceries, electronics and clothes online, when it comes to finding drugs, weapons and stolen identities, things can get a little more complicated. Merchants of contraband hide out on the dark web, . There, buyers and sellers are anonymous, and so is the currency, darknet market markets links with most transactions happening through bitcoin.
AlphaBay alone had 200,000 customers and more than 40,000 sellers peddling illegal goods, making it the largest takedown for a dark web marketplace ever. The website had 100,000 listings for sale when the governments took it down. In comparison, , had 14,000 listings when the FBI shut down the site four years ago. Hansa was the third largest dark web darknet market when it shut down.
“I believe that because of this operation, the American people are safer from the threat of identity fraud and malware, and safer from deadly drugs,” attorney general Jeff Sessions said at a press conference Thursday. He called the bust one of the “most important criminal cases” of the year.
The website made $1 billion in sales before it was shut down in a joint operation of the FBI, the Drug Enforcement Agency, Dutch police and Europol.
“They coordinated a takedown and have punched a big hole in the operating ability of drug traffickers and other serious criminals around the world,” Europol director Rob Wainwright said.
Visitors first noticed AlphaBay was down on July 5, when Alexandre Cazes, better known as Alpha02, the website’s creator and admin, was arrested in Thailand. On July 12, he was found dead while in custody there, in an apparent suicide. Frequent AlphaBay users were concerned that the shutdown was an “exit scam,” in which a darknet market owner takes the money and runs.
“The operation at AlphaBay was well run and sophisticated, and it struck me as highly unlikely that the darknet market would go down as an exit scam with anything other than calculated precision,” Emily Wilson, the director of analysis at Terbium Labs said, in an email.
Terbium Labs had been following the dark web for months, specifically in marketplaces like AlphaBay. After the fallout in early July, Wilson said former moderators and well-known users were left in confusion.
After AlphaBay’s shutdown, its users flocked to Hansa, increasing the dark market‘s traffic in eightfold, Wainwright said. Dutch police took over Hansa last month and have been collecting thousands of user’s information in an undercover operation.
Wainwright said officers are tracking down Hansa buyers and sellers through their usernames and passwords.
But that’s just one chapter in the fight against illegal online transactions. Just as AlphaBay rose and became 10 times larger than , FBI deputy director Andrew McCabe predicts there will be another dark web darknet market to fill the void.
“There are some criminals that think of cybercrime as a freebie,” McCabe said. “They think they will get away with it because there are too many players and too many countries, they think they will get away with it because the schemes are too complex and because they operate in the shadows.”
: Check out a sample of the stories in CNET’s newsstand best darknet market markets edition.
: A crowdsourced science fiction novel written by CNET readers.
has announced a spike in far-right and warned that political extremists are ‘the biggest threat to our country.’
The interior ministry reported another annual increase in anti-Semitic crimes, up by 15.7 per cent in 2020, with 2,351 total incidents – 94.6% of which were committed by a far-right suspect.
Of the total, darknet magazine 62 were acts of violence while the majority were antisemitic hate speech and other related crimes, frequently on social media.
Interior dark web sites Minister Horst Seehofer said: ‘This development in Germany is not only troubling, but in view of our history, deeply shameful.’
A protester with an Iron Cross draped over his back outside the Reichstag at a far-right demonstration against lockdown during the summer.
The symbol harks back to imperial Germany and was re-appropriated by the Nazis under Adolf Hitler
Far-right crime rose by 5.65 per cent in 2020, accounting for more than half of all politically-motivated criminality.
Seehofer said: ‘This shows again that right-wing extremism is the biggest threat for our country.’
It comes as Berlin police arrested a 53-year-old man on Tuesday on suspicion of sending dozens of threatening neo-Nazi letters to politicians, lawyers and journalists.
The suspect, whose name wasn’t released for privacy reasons, has previous convictions for ‘numerous crimes, including ones that were motivated by right-wing ideology,’ said prosecutors in Frankfurt, dark web darknet markets who are handling the case.
The letters were signed ‘NSU 2.0.’ A German group called the National Socialist Underground was responsible for a string of violent crimes between 1998 and 2011, including the racially motivated killings of nine men with immigrant backgrounds and a police officer.
The group’s name was derived from the full name of the Nazi, or National Socialist, party.
Police think the suspect sent almost 100 letters to dozens of people and organizations across Germany and Austria since 2018.
German news agency dpa reported that investigators think the suspect may have obtained personal data on the people he targeted from official records or darknet market forums.
German security agencies warned of the growing threat of violent far-right extremism.
In July 2019, a regional politician from Chancellor Angela Merkel’s party was killed by a neo-Nazi; three months later, a gunman tried to force his way into a synagogue on Yom Kippur, killing two people.
Moshe Kantor, president of the European Jewish Congress, said the German numbers revealed by the interior ministry today highlighted a broader issue.
‘This is a wake-up call, not just for Germany, but for the whole world,’ he said.
‘These figures should ring alarm bells, because we are seeing similar trends across the Western world.’
In 2020, Germany recorded a 72.4% increase in anti-immigrant crimes, up to 5,298 total cases over 3,073 in 2019, Seehofer said.
A bullet lies on the street in Hanau in February, 2020, after a right-wing terrorist shot nine people before turning the gun on himself
Forensic officers investigating in Hanau after the shooting which targeted immigrants in February, 2020
In the most deadly incident, nine people with immigrant backgrounds were shot dead in Hanau, near Frankfurt, in February by a gunman who had called for genocide.
Authorities have raised concerns about the role the Alternative for Germany party allegedly played in stoking a climate of resentment toward immigrants and the government.
The party, which placed third in Germany’s 2017 election, has moved steadily to the right in recent years, drawing increasing scrutiny from the country’s domestic intelligence agency.
On Tuesday, Alternative for Germany’s section in Berlin condemned a member who appeared to lament the absence of attacks on Merkel.
The news website Business Insider reported that AfD’s former chairman in Berlin, Guenter Brinker, forwarded a message stating that ‘either that piece of dirt is so well protected that nobody can get at her, or don’t the Germans have any balls?’
Brinker said later that he had mistakenly forwarded the message and regretted doing so, and that he rejected ‘all forms of hatred and violence.’
Many in the AfD have expressed support for, and participated in, the regular protests in Germany against lockdown measures, darknet market markets onion address organized by the so-called Querdenker movement.
Interior Minister Horst Seehofer (pictured on Tuesday) said: ‘This (anti-Semitic) development in Germany is not only troubling, but in view of our history, deeply shameful.’
The demonstrations have become increasingly violent, and the country’s domestic intelligence service late last month said it had put some members of the loose-knit Querdenker movement under observation.
The protests have brought together a broad range of demonstrators, dark web market including people opposing vaccinations, others who deny the existence of the coronavirus, mask opponents, conspiracy theorists and others.
Seehofer said the protests have also attracted neo-Nazis and other right-wing extremists, and have regularly become violent.
‘At these gatherings organized by the so-called Querdenker movement, attacks are directed against police officers and the press,’ Seehofer said.
‘Of the 260 reported crimes against journalists, dark web sites 112 were related to corona’ protests, he said.
‘I want to say here very clearly: These acts of violence are no longer about exercising a constitutional right (to demonstrate), but are acts of violence of a criminal nature that I condemn in the strongest possible terms.’
