The German police has arrested an operator of an allegedly the world's largest illegal online marketplace called DarkMarket.
Subscribe to our Telegram channel to stay up to date on the latest crypto and blockchain news.
According to an official announcement, a 34-year-old Australian citizen, the alleged operator of the platform, was arrested near the German-Danish border. German police say it succeeded to detain the operator in a cooperation with the American authorities FBI, DEA and IRS and the Australian, British, Danish, Swiss, Ukrainian and Moldovan police.
The Koblenz Public Prosecutor’s Office assumed that DarkMarket was the world's largest darknet marketplace with almost 500,000 users and more than 2,400 sellers. In total, at least 320,000 transactions were carried out on the marketplace with more than 4,650 in bitcoin (EXANTE: Bitcoin) and 12,800 in monero (XMR).
"In addition, counterfeit money, stolen or counterfeit credit card details, anonymous SIM cards, malware and much more were offered for sale," the police said
The investigators claim an extensive infrastructure with more than 20 servers in Moldova and Ukraine was seized as well. As iHodl recently reported, White House Market, a popular darknet marketplace, stopped accepting BTC and started accepting XMR as payment method.
The platform said on Twitter it had made the decision due to "unexpected blocking of access from the Tor network." This blocking has reportedly been caused by a change in the MorphToken API, which is used by the darknet marketplace.
Access more than 50 of the world's financial markets directly from your EXANTE account – including NASDAQ, London Stock Exchange and Tokyo Stock Exchange.