This decentralised model makes it far more challenging to target with a single operation. In a news conference Tuesday, U.S. officials framed the operation within the Biden administration’s broader effort to crack down on illegal fentanyl distribution. The pills sold on darknet marketplaces are often counterfeit and laced with the powerful opioid, Attorney General Merrick Garland said. From June 11 to 13, the agency said, a series of coordinated law enforcement actions targeting the platform’s administrator, moderators, key vendors and technical infrastructure took place across Germany, the Netherlands, Romania, Spain and Sweden.
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Over five years, it became a bustling hub where over 3,200 vendors sold more than 17,000 drug listings, spanning cocaine, heroin, cannabis, MDMA, amphetamines, and highly dangerous synthetic opioids like fentanyl. With a staggering 612,000 users, the platform processed over €250 million (approximately \$289 million) in transactions, primarily in the privacy-focused Monero cryptocurrency. On March 20, 2024, U.S., German, and Lithuanian law enforcement agencies seized Nemesis’ servers in a joint operation. Since the takedown of Nemesis, Parsarad has discussed setting up a new darknet marketplace to take the place of Nemesis with vendors that were once active on the marketplace.
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In addition, financial institutions and other persons that engage in certain transactions or activities with the sanctioned individual may expose themselves to sanctions or be subject to an enforcement action. The prohibitions include the making of any contribution or provision of funds, goods, or services by, to, or for the benefit of any designated person, or the receipt of any contribution or provision of funds, goods, or services from any such person. Police also took out a vital part of the dark web’s infrastructure, the information and review site Deepdotweb.com, arresting two suspected administrators in May in France and Israel, and seizing €7.5 million (£6.7 million) in bitcoins.
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The growth that has been experienced is pretty good, taking into consideration that Revolution has been around for almost an entire year. Both stealth and packaging are essential aspects of delivery, and they frequently have an effect on how customers rate a vendor. The term “stealth” refers to the method by which the product is disguised to look like a genuine delivery item, particularly with regard to x-ray machines used by the postal service. Some dealers will send drugs or contraband concealed within DVD cases, the battery compartments of torches, or even the spines of books in an effort to conceal them. Over its five years of activity, the marketplace amassed over 612,000 users with a total transaction volume of over €250 million (approximately $289 million) in Monero cryptocurrency transactions. Police said they’d seized the Crimemarket domain address and are currently studying seized data, documents and evidence, which will be making some users of the marketplace somewhat nervous.
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DF claims they are safe from investigation as the site’s business model differs from that of DeepDotWeb, which took affiliate sales fees in return for keeping lists of URLs updated. Although the sale of party drugs like ecstasy (MDMA) and cocaine went down as a result of the pandemic, the EMCDDA says users have turned to lesser known psychoactive drugs instead. Authorities at EMCDDA say, “The events of 2020 are likely to have a longterm impact on the future challenges arising in the area of drugs.” Those big announcements came on the same day the European Monitoring Center for Drugs and Drug Addiction (EMCDDA) released its annual European Drug Report. The EMCDDA said authorities had seized 181 tons of cocaine in 2018 (the last year covered in the 2020 report), 40 tons more than in 2017; heroin seizures almost doubled during that same period. US Deputy Attorney General Jeffrey Rosen said, “Criminals selling fentanyl on the darknet should pay attention to Operation DisrupTor,” adding, “there will be no safe haven for drug dealing in cyberspace.”
International
Europol also said the market allowed the sale of fentanyl and “other highly potent synthetic opioids.”Authorities seized the site’s online infrastructure, which was hosted in the Netherlands, and arrested its 30-year-old German administrator in Barcelona, Spain. A moderator and six prominent vendors were arrested simultaneously in other countries, and officers seized assets worth about $9 million. WASHINGTON (AP) — Law enforcement officials in the U.S. and Europe have arrested 150 people and seized more than $31 million in an international drug trafficking investigation stemming from sales on the darknet, the Justice Department said Tuesday.
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The United States saw 153 arrests as part of the international operation, followed by the United Kingdom, with 55, and Germany, with 52, according to the European Union law enforcement agency Europol, which coordinated it. In Europe, Germany is among the top three biggest markets for drugs, next to the UK and the Netherlands, and they have a lot of darknet markets operating in the country. People from all walks of life partake in recreational drugs, whether it be to relax or because they want to chase a high.
Two men from the German state of North Rhine-Westphalia are believed to be the masterminds behind the world’s second largest Darknet market that was taken down this week by US and European law enforcement. DarkMarket’s bust was not the first for German authorities, which have found illegal platform operators on German soil in recent years. In 2019, Koblenz prosecurots announced the discovery of darknet servers hosted from a former NATO bunker in a sleepy German town. Authorities say drugs, counterfeit money, stolen credit card data, anonymous SIM cards and malware were all traded on the site, which had a half a million users and transacted business in cryptocurrencies equivalent to a value of €140 million ($170 million).
Where one marketplace collapses, Telegram facilitates dozens of replacements, each with lower visibility and faster growth curves. Instead of disappearing, Hydra’s network simply adapted to a new medium, underscoring the difficulty of suppressing illicit commerce with infrastructure takedowns alone. German law enforcement hasn’t responded to Recorded Future News’ request for comment about whether the website’s administrators were arrested. Visitors to the cybercrime website were greeted on Thursday with a red banner announcing the takeover. At the bottom, the police placed an animated spaceship reminiscent of a 1990s video game called Nemesis. Investigators seized the Nemesis Market platform’s server infrastructure in Germany and Lithuania on Wednesday, as well as cryptocurrency worth 94,000 euros ($102,000), Germany’s Federal Criminal Police Office said in a joint statement with Frankfurt prosecutors.
The coordinated law enforcement actions took place between June 11 and 13, involving roughly 300 officers. The infrastructure was dismantled in the Netherlands, while arrests spanned Germany, Spain, and Sweden, including the suspected administrator—a 30-year-old German national arrested in Barcelona. Archetyp Market operated as a drug marketplace for over five years, amassing more than 600,000 users worldwide with a total transaction volume of at least €250 million. With over 17,000 listings, it is one of the few darknet markets that allowed the sale of fentanyl and other highly potent synthetic opioids, contributing to the growing threat posed by these substances in Europe and beyond. Archetyp Market quietly emerged on the dark web in May 2020 and quickly became a dominant force in illegal narcotics distribution.
He also had the tools for setting up magnetic cards to send and receive goods from the package station with hacked post accounts. Maximilian was a busy young man who planned his operations meticulously and was adequately equipped for comprehensive trade in narcotics worldwide. He seems to have been especially diligent about securing the door to his room—to this day the defendant claims that his mother and stepfather knew nothing about his profitable startup because he would fortify himself in his room whenever he was conducting business. Another thing that stood out to investigators was the routine nature of his deliveries. According to prosecutors, a courier from the Netherlands drove to the Gohlis district of Leipzig each Thursday to replenish Maximilian’s supply of drugs—investigators knew this from watching the package station and the entrance to his house.
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- Investigators also recovered a slew of illegal drugs, including counterfeit medication and opioid pills, along with more than 152 kilograms of amphetamine, 21 kilograms of cocaine and 32.5 kilograms of MDMA, according to prosecutors.
- In a decisive international crackdown, law enforcement agencies from six countries have dismantled Archetyp Market — a notorious darknet drug marketplace that operated under the radar for over five years.
- For detailed information on the process to submit a request for removal from an OFAC sanctions list, please click here.
- Gibbons rejects the idea that shutdowns are a pointless and expensive waste of police time.
- This was when he began the clandestine setup of distribution channels for his steadily growing drug business.
Notably, the proportion of newly launched marketplaces that accept only Monero, a privacy-focused cryptocurrency, rose sharply from just over one-third in 2023 to nearly half in 2024, highlighting a growing shift toward obfuscation and anti-surveillance tactics among darknet operators. That sting, led by Germany’s federal criminal police (BKA) with the assistance of Dutch national police, the European agencies Eurojust and Europol, and various US agencies, took down the darknet marketplace known as Wall Street Market. Europol says evidence seized in that “akedown “provided investigators with quantitative data and materials to identify suspects behind dark web accounts used for illegal activity.”
The administrator faces charges under Sections 29a and 30a of Germany’s Narcotics Act, which mandate minimum sentences of 1–5 years for large-scale, gang-linked trafficking. Eurojust and Europol facilitated cross-border cooperation, with 300 officers executing raids during a three-day action week. On June 11, 2025, a special unit of the Spanish National Police arrested the German national at his Barcelona residence.
Users across multiple forums had previously expressed concerns about being victims of an exit scam, where marketplace administrators simply disappear with customers’ funds. Such signatures are intended to confirm that vendors still have access to their accounts and have not been arrested or compromised. While the method has its limitations, HugBunter argued that failure to provide a cryptographic signature alongside continued account activity could be telling. On the Reddit-style dark web forum known as “Dread,” users are trying to determine which vendors were compromised by the operation, Straight Arrow News found.
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These leads allow U.S. and international law enforcement agencies to identify darknet drug vendors and buyers, resulting in a series of coordinated, but separate, law enforcement investigations, reflected in the statistics announced today. In furtherance of Operation RapTor and in its first action as a JCODE member agency, the Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) additionally sanctioned Iranian national Behrouz Parsarad for his role as the founder and operator of Nemesis Market following seizure of the market. Parsarad was also indicted by a federal grand jury in the Northern District of Ohio on drug trafficking charges related to the illegal business he ran on the dark web.
