THE world’s biggest dark web marketplace has been busted by cops.
Two of the operation’s admins have been arrested and more than £6.5 million worth of cryptocurrency seized.
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The marketplace was made up of two entities – Bohemia and Cannabia.
It offered users the ability to buy malware and hire cyber attacks, as well as a drugs market that predominantly sold cannabis.
At its peak, the shady marketplace made more than €12 million (£10million) in September 2023.
Some 82,000 advertisements were made daily and 67,000 transactions facilitated every month, it’s understood.
Administrators are estimated to have made a profit of about €12 million (£4.1 million) from the undercover operation.
But cops have now pulled the plug on the site after a long-term investigation into what they called “largest and longest running international darkweb market of all time worldwide”.
Dutch police said: “Never before has a darkweb market of this size been discovered by the police.”
They arrested a man at Amsterdam’s Schipol airport on June 24 and seized electronic devices incriminating data and access keys to Bitcoin wallets, reports Bleeping Computer.
A second man was arrested in Ireland in connection with the marketplace.
In total, Dutch police and partners in the UK, Ireland and the US seized more than £6.5 million worth of cryptocurrency.
Police said they started investigating the platform in 2022 – but believe the operators became aware in 2023.
It allegedly prompted them to pull a so-called “exit-scam” that saw them close the service and make off with the operation’s funds.
But police said they were still able to identify several administrators and snare two suspects.
Stan Duijf, head of the operations unit of the National Investigation and Interventions, said: “Administrators, sellers and buyers of and on illegal marketplaces often believe themselves to be elusive to the police and the judiciary.
“By conducting criminal investigations and prosecuting these criminals, it becomes clear that the dark web is not at all as anonymous as users may think.
“Due to international cooperation, the credibility and reliability of these markets have once again been severely damaged.”
What is the dark web?
THE internet is made up of three different layers: the surface web, the deep web and the dark web.
The top layer, the surface web, are web pages that show up using search engines such as Google – like The Sun website that you’re looking at right now.
The deep web are web pages which search engines can’t access and are therefore hidden, accessed via passwords and authorisation.
Any time you log into an account you’re accessing deep web content that won’t show up on a search engine.
For example, work intranets, password-protected areas of online banking and draft blog posts are all stored on the deep web.
This means that if someone was to Google your name, your banking information or Amazon wishlist won’t show up in the results.
The dark web is a network of untraceable online activity and websites on the internet. They cannot be found using search engines and to access them you need to use specific software, configurations or have authorisation. They are used by lots of different people to keep their web activity hidden.
