Underground marketplace: BKA shuts down Crimenetwork and arrests technicians
Investigators accuse the suspect of operating an illegal trading platform on the darknet and being involved in drug trafficking. He is in custody.
A little cringe, Diggi: The BKA flanks the Crimenetwork raid with an AI-generated video with a retro look. Incidentally, the police car in the picture is driving backwards.
(Image: BKA / Screenshot: heise security)
The Federal Criminal Police Office (Bundeskriminalamt, BKA) reports a successful strike against criminal marketplaces on the Internet. Together with the Dutch police from Zeeland-West-Brabant and under the leadership of the Central Office for Combating Cybercrime (ZIT), investigators have taken down the "Crimenetwork" and arrested an administrator.
According to the BKA, the platform was the largest German-language online marketplace for the "underground economy" with more than 100,000 users and over a hundred sellers. They traded in illegal goods and services, such as drugs or "hacking for hire".
According to BKA estimates, at least 1,000 BTC (around 90 million euros) and 20,000 XMR (Monero, currently worth around 3 million euros) have been traded on Crimenetwork over the past six years. One to five percent of the turnover went to the platform operator as commission, who also collected monthly advertising and license fees from the sellers.
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User data confiscated, admin in custody
During the raid, the BKA took the platform's servers offline and arrested a 29-year-old man. The accused is mainly accused of operating the platform as a technical administrator, but also of dealing in narcotics. The man has been in custody since Monday. One million euros in crypto assets and several high-value vehicles also ended up in the prosecutors' coffers.
The BKA assumes that the Crimenetwork users are mainly located in German-speaking countries. If they have disregarded the usual security precautions on the darknet, they could soon receive mail from the public prosecutor's office: Both user data and information on criminal transactions were confiscated by the BKA during the raid.
The BKA flanked the operation with a website that promised more information on the case. Instead, the viewer is presented with an apparently AI-generated film with a retro pixelated look, which retells the arrest of the admin to cheerful synthesizer sounds.
The job description of a darknet marketplace operator is not for the faint-hearted. Last year, the Federal Criminal Police Office took down the server infrastructure of the "Kingdom Market". In Russia, operators of an underground marketplace called Hydra were recently sentenced to draconian sentences ranging from five years to life imprisonment.
(cku)
