The “BOYSTOWN” platform has existed since at least June 2019 and dark market url web markets was only accessible via the so-called darknet market, the Frankfurt public prosecutor’s office and the BKA Federal Police said in a statement.

The website has more than 400,000 users and was used for dark market onion the worldwide exchange of child pornography.

It enabled members to retrieve child pornography content and darknet market site exchange footage with each other in chat areas as well as via voice channels.

“Among the images and video recordings shared were also recordings of the most severe sexual abuse of young children,” prosecutors said.

Police arrested three main suspects, who are accused of operating and maintaining the platform, during raids on seven properties in mid-April.

The suspects are a 40-year-old man living in Paderborn in western Germany, a 49-year-old man from the Munich area and a 58-year-old man from northern Germany who has been living in South America for several years, police said.

A fourth man, a 64-year-old from Hamburg, has also been arrested on suspicion of having registered as a member of the platform in July 2019 and Dark markets 2024 having posted over 3,500 contributions on the site, making him one of the most active users.

Following the raids, the BOYSTOWN platform has been taken down, police said.

(Reporting by Caroline Copley; Editing by Giles Elgood)

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US authorities have said they were able to access the ‘private key’ to the hackers’ bitcoin account of ransomware hackers Darkside

Regulators have repeatedly criticised the growth of cryptocurrencies such as bitcoin because of their popularity with criminals but the technology’s transparent transactions can also work against law breakers.

The lesson is one that has been learnt by cybercriminal hackers Darkside the hard way after the organisation extracted a $4.4 million ransom from oil company Colonial Pipeline in bitcoin.

Following the ransomware extortion, which forced the shutdown of a major fuel network in the eastern United States last month, the US Justice Department said it has clawed back $2.3 million of the funds by tracing financial transactions.

“Following the money remains one of the most basic, yet powerful, tools we have,” US Deputy Attorney General Lisa Monaco said on Monday.

The financial forensics to track crypto transactions are more complex on the decentralised and anonymous networks.

The lesson is one that has been learnt by cybercriminal hackers Darkside the hard way after the organisation extracted a $4.4 million ransom from oil company Colonial Pipeline in bitcoin.

For a traditional bank payment, police can turn to the bank that sent or received the money but for bitcoin, the registry that records these transactions — the blockchain — does not ask users to reveal their identity.

But the blockchain is also public and available to everyone to download and piece together who might own the anonymous addresses where the bitcoin arrives.

While some users keep their bitcoin safe in an offline wallet, for example on a USB stick or hard drive, Darkside’s bitcoins were always linked to an online account.

Without specifying how they came by it — whether by hacking or through an informant — US authorities have said they were able to access the “private key” to the hackers’ online account.

In 2019, analysis of the blockchain enabled British and American authorities to dismantle a child pornography ring and darknet marketplace arrest more than 300 people in 38 countries.

The complex tracking of transactions has become an industry in its own right.

Firms specialising in blockchain analysis have developed, darknet market markets such as Chainalysis in the United States and Elliptic in Britain.

– Russian Hydra –

According to a Chainalysis report released in February, cryptocurrency transactions for illegal purposes reached $10 billion in 2020, one percent of total cryptocurrency activity for darknet websites the year.

In 2019 criminal activity using the online currencies reached a record $21.4 billion.

The total cost of ransomware payments alone made in cryptocurrencies soared to nearly $350 million in 2020.

“Cryptocurrency remains appealing for criminals, primarily due to its pseudonymous nature and the ease with which it allows users to instantly send funds anywhere in the world, ” Chainalysis said.

Elliptic analysts believe they have identified the bitcoin wallet that received the ransom payment from Colonial Pipeline to Darkside, and found that at least one other payment of $4.4 million.

More importantly, analysis of the transactions can identify the bitcoin sales platforms that received the wallet’s ill-gotten funds.

“This information will provide law enforcement with critical leads to identify the perpetrators of these attacks,” Elliptic researcher Tom Robinson wrote.

dark market list regulators have put pressure on cryptocurrency exchange platforms.

Many, best darknet market markets such as Coinbase, now require users to disclose their identity before making transactions. But other platforms are not following the same rules.

Both Elliptic and darknet market Chainalysis point to the growing role of Hydra, a sales site for Russian-speaking customers, which is accessible via the darknet market, a version of the web not listed on search engines and where users can remain anonymous.

“Hydra offers cash-out services alongside narcotics, hacking tools and fake IDs,” Robinson explained.

Using sites like Hydra in conjunction with cryptocurrencies, Darkside’s hackers have reportedly already resold some of the ransomed bitcoins.

As the price of bitcoin has soared in recent months regulators are adapting their strategies.

The Bank of England said on Monday that payments in stablecoins, fixed-price cryptocurrencies, should be regulated to the same standards as bank payments.

The post Bitcoin proves double-edged sword for criminals appeared first on The News Max.

BERLIN (AP) – German prosecutors said Tuesday that they have taken down what they believe was the biggest illegal marketplace on the darknet market and arrested its suspected operator.

The site, known as DarkMarket, was shut down on Monday, prosecutors in the southwestern city of Koblenz said.
All sorts of drugs, forged money, dark web darknet market links stolen or forged credit cards, dark web market list anonymous mobile phone SIM cards and malware were among the things offered for sale there, they added.

German investigators were assisted in their months-long probe by U.S. authorities and by Australian, British, Danish, dark market onion Swiss, Ukrainian and Moldovan police.

The marketplace had nearly 500,000 users and darknet marketplace more than 2,400 vendors, prosecutors said.

They added that it processed more than 320,000 transactions, and Bitcoin and Monero cryptocurrency to the value of more than 140 million euros ($170 million) were exchanged.

The darknet market is a part of the web accessible only with specialized identity-cloaking tools.

The suspected operator, a 34-year-old Australian man, was arrested near the German-Danish border.

Prosecutors said a judge has ordered him held in custody pending possible formal charges, and dark darknet market list he hasn’t given any information to investigators.

More than 20 servers in Moldova and Ukraine were seized, German prosecutors said. They hope to find information on those servers about other participants in the marketplace.

Prosecutors said the move against DarkMarket originated in an investigation of a data processing center installed in a former NATO bunker in southwestern Germany that hosted sites dealing in drugs and other illegal activities.

It was shut down in 2019.

The post German investigators shut down big darknet marketplace appeared first on The News Max.

Eric Eoin Marques is entitled to withdraw his guilty plea from last year if the judge departs from the sentencing range prosecutors and defense attorneys recommended.

But U.S.

District Judge Theodore Chuang isn’t bound by the terms of the Justice Department´s plea deal.

“It’s too flawed, and I also don’t agree with the outcome,” Chuang said.

The judge said he’s inclined to give Marques a longer sentence for darknet market markets onion address operating a dark web sites hosting service that enabled users to anonymously access millions of illicit images and videos, many depicting the rape and torture of infants and toddlers.

The judge criticized a provision of the plea deal that wouldn’t give Marques credit for six years he spent in custody in Ireland while fighting extradition after his 2013 arrest in Dublin. Chuang said he can’t tell the federal Bureau of Prisons to refrain from counting those years when Marques likely is entitled to get credit for that time.

The judge said he isn’t prepared to impose a sentence of 15 to 21 years if Marques does get credit for those six years.

“I want a sentence higher than that,” Chuang added.

“It’s not going to be 21 minus 6 to 15. That’s not going to happen. I don’t have to follow what you all did. It’s clear neither of you really understood what you were doing.”

Chuang also expressed frustration that prosecutors and defense lawyers still couldn’t agree on certain facts of the case even after spelling them out in writing as part of the deal.

“I certainly think the process was such that I shouldn’t defer to the parties’ agreement when I’m not sure they really thought it out that carefully,” he said.

Defense attorney Brendan Hurson told the judge that his remarks give them a “platform to negotiate further.”

“If we can’t get somewhere, then we would ask for some time to set a trial date,” Hurson said.

Chuang instructed the attorneys to provide him with a status report by June 25.

Marques, a 35-year-old dual citizen of the U.S.

and Ireland, darknet sites was extradited to Maryland darknet market magazine in March 2019, and pleaded guilty in February 2020 to conspiracy to advertise child pornography. He faced a mandatory minimum of 15 years and a maximum of 30 years in prison before the plea deal.

Marques created and operated a free, anonymous web hosting service, called “Freedom Hosting,” on the darknet market between 2008 and darknet markets url 2013.

The darknet market is part of the internet but hosted within an encrypted network. It is accessible only through anonymity-providing tools, such as the Tor browser, and allows users to access websites without revealing their IP addresses.

Marques´ attorneys have questioned how federal investigators were able to pierce the Tor network´s anonymity and trace the IP address of the server to a web hosting company in Roubaix, France.

“This anonymity is notoriously difficult for government investigators to penetrate,” they wrote.

Defense attorneys said they received an initial answer to that question when the government revealed “vague details” of how they discovered the IP address and location of the server.
“It appears that this disclosure was delayed, in part, because the investigative techniques employed were, until recently, classified,” they wrote in December 2019.

Investigators found what appeared to be more than 8.5 million images and videos of child pornography on the Freedom Hosting server, including nearly 2 million images that were new to authorities, according to a court filing that accompanied Marques’ guilty plea.

Marques was living in Ireland at the time of the offenses.

He used the encrypted server in France to host more than 200 websites that site administrators and users used to upload and download child pornography.

In 2013, FBI agents in Maryland connected to the network and accessed a child pornography bulletin board with more than 7,700 members and more than 22,000 posts.
Agents downloaded more than 1 million files from another website on the network, nearly all of which depicted sexually explicit images of children.

In July 2013, Irish authorities searched Marques’ home and vehicle and detained him. When investigators entered his home, Marques moved toward his computer but was subdued before he could turn it off, authorities said.

After his release from custody, Marques purchased a new laptop and logged into his server to lock out the FBI and other law enforcement, the filing says.

Authorities seized nearly $155,000 in U.S.

currency from Marques. During an August 2013 extradition hearing, Marques said his business had been “very successful” and profitable.

In an April 28 court filing, a prosecutor said a government witness was prepared to testify at Wednesday’s sentencing hearing that law enforcement had identified Marques as the largest purveyor of child pornography in the world and that he made approximately $3.6 million in U.S.

currency from his servers.

___

This version corrects that the judge set a June 25 deadline for a status report from attorneys, not a status conference for that date.

The post Judge rejects plea deal for darknet child porn purveyor appeared first on The News Max.

Heather Morgan was freed by a judge Monday, dark web darknet market urls pending trial by a federal court.

But her husband Ilya Lichtenstein remains behind bars due to prosecutors’ fears that he could seek immunity in , where he is also a citizen.

Judge Beryl Howell said on Monday that 31-year-old Morgan, referred as ‘Razzlekahn’ due to her rapping background, was no longer held in custody after the government deemed that she wasn’t as involved in the planning of the alleged crimes as her 34-year-ld husband, dark market list Ilya Lichtenstein, who was largely in control of the funds. 

The judge also considered Morgan’s health issues as a factor, after she had recently had surgery to remove a lump in her breast.

With follow-up appointments expected, she will be closely monitored with an ankle bracelet GPS monitor while she is under house arrest. 

Morgan has also been given restrictions on computer use, and a ban on carrying out cryptocurrency transactions. 

The defense told the court that both defendants would guarantee to appear for all remaining court dates, and pointed out that both of their families, who were in court, were willing to bet their homes on it.

However, Howell finally ruled that there would be a significant ‘flight risk’ for Lichtenstein and agreed with federal prosecutors who insisted that just a portion of the millions in cryptocurrency that the couple stole could buy a new house or darknet market markets 2024 ‘buy each of their parents a private island.’ 

The judge also shared her concerns that Lichtenstein, who is a dual citizen of the United States and Russia, could seek refuge in a eastern European country, where he could possibly be granted immunity.

Federal prosecutors also revealed that Lichtenstein had a file on his computer titled ‘passport ideas,’ which included several darknet market vendors that sell passports, bank cards and other forms of identification. 

The New York couple was arrested earlier in February after they conspired to launder cryptocurrency that was stolen during the 2016 hack of Bitfinex, a virtual currency exchange platform, and currently estimated at $4.5 billion. 

Both are accused of using several techniques to launder Bitcoin, including using fake identifies to create accounts; coding computer programs to execute fast, automated transactions; depositing stolen funds in several accounts across one crypto exchange to cover their previous transactions; converting Bitcoin to other forms of cryptocurrency; and creating U.S.-based business accounts to wire their funds and make them seem legitimate. 

Over five years, a hacker allegedly laundered 119,754 bitcoin through 2,000 transactions on Bitfinex’s website before transferring the crypto funds into Lichtenstein’s digital wallet. 

The couple could face up to 25 years years behind bars if found guilty. 

Bitfinex is a cryptocurrency exchange registered in the British Virgin Islands.

In August 2016, hackers were able to breach its security firewall before stealing about 120,000 bitcoin from its customers.

The amount that was stolen was worth roughly $70 million at the time, when the price of bitcoin was around $600.

At the time, Bitfinex announced to its customers that they would lose 36 percent of their funds to compensate for the losses from the incident.

It also created special digital tokens that were able to keep track of customers’ losses. 

Some of the tokens could exchanged for shares of iFinex, the company that operates Bitfinex, while other tokens could be redeemed if the stolen bitcoins were recovered in the future.

The US Department of Justice announced that it would create a special judicial process for victims of the hack to reclaim their losses.

The hackers have never been identified. 

Morgan and Lichtenstein were arrested by federal prosecutors of laundering the bitcoin stolen from Bitfinex, but they are not being accused for actually stealing the bitcoin in the hack.

Authorities were able to recover $3.6B after seizing couple’s private keys to digital wallets after their arrest earlier this month. 

The post Wife freed while husband jailed pending trial for Bitcoin laundering appeared first on The News Max.

A government shutdown of dark web marketplaces AlphaBay and Hansa has merchants and consumers looking for a new home.

Authorities , the largest online marketplace for illegal goods, on July 4, and took down Hansa, the third largest, on Thursday. The sites, where people could buy drugs, guns and child pornography, had flourished since 2014, when a predecessor, Silk Road, was shut down. 

Fueled by Tor browsers and cryptocurrencies that offer anonymity, AlphaBay, Hansa and other sites avoided much government detection, allowing  in the wake of Silk Road’s demise. AlphaBay replaced as the biggest, growing to be 10 times larger. 

When one dark darknet market falls, dark market 2024 buyers and sellers just move on to the next one.

The migration of buyers and sellers comes as authorities around the world crack down on digital marketplaces that cater to growing numbers of shadowy sales. at the time it was taken offline. By comparison, Silk Road had just 14,000 when the Federal Bureau of Investigation closed it four years ago.

Many of the sites . A recent study by the University of Manchester and think tank Rand Europe found 811 arms-related listings on . The researchers found nearly 60% of the weapons came from the US and most of the sales were headed to Europe. Worryingly, one gun bought on a cryptomarket was used in a .

FBI deputy director Andrew McCabe acknowledged shutting down such markets was like playing whack-a-mole. His agency would likely have to in the future, he said.

“Critics will say as we shutter one site, another will emerge,” McCabe said at a press conference. “But that is the nature of criminal work. It never goes away, you have to constantly keep at it, and you have to use every tool in your toolbox.”

One such tool: using a captured marketplace as a trap.

After the fall of AlphaBay, Dutch police said they saw traffic heading to Hansa spike eight-fold. That was something the cops were anticipating. 

Dutch police had full control of Hansa on June 20, but waited a month before shutting it down hoping to catch the new users in marketplace chaos.

“We could identify and disrupt the regular criminal activity that was happening on Hansa darknet market but also sweep up all of those new users that were displaced from AlphaBay and looking for a new trading platform for their criminal activities,” Rob Wainwright, the Europol director, said at the press conference.

Dutch police now have the usernames, passwords and IP addresses of thousands of Hansa users, and are tracking them down.

An underground in flux

The ploy has dark web darknet market users on edge. Many are concerned about whether the next available platform will be compromised as well. That has them questioning Dream Market, a marketplace that’s been in business since 2013 and benefitted from the shutdown of rivals. 

“After the closure of the AlphaBay market, many vendors expressed that they were moving their operations to Hansa and Dream Market,” Liv Rowley, an analyst at Flashpoint, darkmarket url said. “The shuttering of Hansa now leaves Dream the only remaining major option.”

Rowley noticed chatter on forums and subreddits pointing to Dream Market as the next AlphaBay, but people are wary after the Dutch police ploy.

Reddit users on several  threads have expressed concerns the website has been compromised in a similar fashion. A user who speculated Hansa had been compromised in a thread posted  returned on Thursday to warn that .

“This is a warning you will want to heed,” the user, who goes by , posted. “They are waiting to gather as many refugees from AB & Hansa as they can and then drop the hammer.”

Other marketplaces, like Tochka and Valhalla, could also rise in the vacuum AlphaBay and Hansa have left. Some smaller dark web darknet markets 2024 are even appealing to those lost in AlphaBay’s shake-up. 

Security company was offering vendors from AlphaBay a discount if they moved to their platform.

“The entire illegal underground is in flux right now,” Flashpoint’s Rowley said.

It’ll be quiet on the dark web until people can find a reliable marketplace again, but eventually they will, said Emily Wilson, the director of analysis at Terbium Labs.

She called the busts a “sizable hiccup” but not “an irreversible blow.” 

It’s unclear who’ll emerge from the fallout. But the FBI estimates that more than 40,000 merchants are looking for a place to sell. And there are more than 200,000 customers looking for places to buy stuff they can’t get on Amazon. 

With AlphaBay, the Amazon of illegal goods, now shut down, the market is fragmenting. If you want malware, there’s a market for that on the dark web. The same for guns and for drugs. So business will go on, albeit less conveniently.

“For now, there are plenty of smaller and more specialized markets for vendors and buyers to continue trading,” Wilson said. 

First published July 21, 8 a.m. ET

Update, 5:04 p.m.: Adds background on scope of the markets, weapons sales. 

: Online abuse is as old as the internet and it’s only getting worse. It exacts a very real toll.

: CNET chronicles tech’s role in providing new kinds of accessibility.

The post First Silk Road. Now AlphaBay. What’s next for the dark web? appeared first on The News Max.

Adrian V., 28, a computer technician and the ringleader, led the sexual abuse from a shed belonging to his mother – who fetched the men breakfast as they assaulted the victims

Four paedophiles have been jailed in for raping boys after luring them to a shed where they drugged them and abused them for dark market link darknet market onion days.

Adrian V., 28, a computer technician and the ringleader, led the sexual abuse in a shed belonging to his mother – who fetched the men breakfast as they assaulted the victims.

Along with three other men, Adrian V.

was found to have trapped boys in the garden shed from April 2020, where the victims were drugged and raped over the course of three days.

One of the victims, now 11 years old, was the son of his girlfriend.

Prosecutors presented some 30 hours of video evidence, much of which had been shared in darknet market forums.
The other men are believed to have met Adrian V. online. 

They are Marco Sch., 35, an IT expert from Hanover; Tobias Sch., 30, a craftsman from Hesse; and Enrico L., 42, dark markets 2024 a care provider from Brandenburg. Germany’s privacy laws mean that surnames are not disclosed.

The chief defendant’s mother Carina V., 45, was found to have been aware of the abuse.

The court heard that she had brought the men breakfast while they took turns assaulting the children.  

Presiding judge Matthias Pheiler expressed shock at the ‘horrific events’ covered in the trial, calling the video recordings ‘deeply disturbing’.

‘The proceedings also clearly showed how paedophiles operate: they trick, they lie, they manipulate those around’ the victims, he said, adding that he was repulsed to see that the defendants ‘grinned’ and even ‘laughed loudly’ while evidence against them was presented.

Pheiler said he was relieved none of the victims had had to testify in the trial. 

Adrian V., from Münster, was jailed for 14 years. The other three men were jailed for between 10 and 12 years.

The mother, Carina V., onion dark website was jailed for five years for aiding and abetting. 

Police are still screening evidence uncovered from the abuse in the shed and have used it to identify suspects across Germany and abroad. 

Five men have already been convicted and sentenced in connection with the case and investigators have identified 50 suspects, of whom around 30 are in custody.

The current trial began last November and the sentences were broadly in line with what prosecutors had demanded.

It is just one of a series of gruesome child abuse cases to rock the German state of North Rhine-Westphalia over the last year, prompting a tightening of legislation.

In June 2020, investigators said they were probing some 30,000 suspects as part of an investigation into a large online paedophile network linked to the city of Bergisch Gladbach.

In an earlier scandal in Luegde, 80 miles from Munster, several men abused children hundreds of times at a campsite over a number of years.

In response to the series of cases, the German parliament in March agreed tougher punishments for using and sharing child pornography.

The law also gives police and prosecutors broader powers to monitor online communication of suspects.

The post Four paedophiles jailed in Germany for raping boys in garden shed appeared first on The News Max.

Footage has emerged of the inside of a five-storey abandoned underground NATO bunker built with 31inch thick concrete walls in Germany allegedly converted by criminal gangs into a high tech data centre to host darknet market websites. 

An Australian man was arrested on Monday accused of running a $220million illegal darkweb marketplace – called the biggest in the world and ‘ for criminals’ – after ha was tracked following the bunker’s discovery. 

The joint investigation by Australian Federal Police, Scotland Yard, the , Europol, and dark market onion darknet market url German authorities, among others, arrested the man, 34, as he allegedly tried flee across the Danish border into . 

The man, known only as Julian K, is the alleged operator of DarkMarket and has been detained by German investigators.

DarkMarket was shut down on Monday and its new servers, located in Ukraine and Moldova after relocating from the bunker, darknet market links were taken off the internet, prosecutors in the city of Koblenz said.

‘Until its closure, DarkMarket was probably the largest marketplace worldwide on the darknet market, with almost 500,000 users and more than 2400 sellers,’ prosecutors said. 

More than 320,000 transactions were conducted via the website including the sale of drugs, counterfeit money, stolen or falsified credit cards, anonymous SIM cards and malware.

The transactions were reportedly worth a total of 4,650 bitcoin and 12,800 monero – two cryptocurrencies – for dark web market urls web link an equivalent sum of more than $221million. 

The servers will be forensically examined by authorities to uncover information about the website’s operations and criminal network. 

The accused man has already fronted a German court and been denied bail – to be transferred to a German prison in the next few days. 

He has reportedly refused to speak to investigators or court officials. 

German prosecutors said the man was trying to flee Denmark into Germany when arrested and was travelling through Europe either on holiday or conducting business for the illegal website. 

They said the investigation around DarkMarket originated after the discovery of the data processing centre run by criminals in the 5,000sqm former unused bunker in south-west Germany. 

The data facility hosted illegal websites, which included DarkMarket temporarily, and was shut down in 2019. 

The building, constructed by the West-German military, in the mid-1970s descended five-storeys below the surface and was built with 31inch thick concrete walls to withstand a nuclear blast. 

A meteorological division of the military used the facility after the Cold War until 2012 to forecast weather patterns where German soldiers were deployed. 

The building was sold to a foundation based in Denmark in 2012 after officials could find no other buyers for the vacant facility. 

A number of people were arrested after the discovery of the data centre – accused of being part of a criminal network and being accessories to hundreds of thousands of illegal transactions involving prohibited material such as drugs and hacking tools. 

Some already went on trial in October. 

The darkweb was originally developed for the United States military but has been overrun by criminals because they can conceal their identity on the platform. 

The post Inside busted illegal $220million darknet data centre appeared first on The News Max.

Frankfurt prosecutors said in a statement together with the Federal Criminal Police Office that in mid-April three German suspects, said to be the administrators of the “Boystown” platform, were arrested along with a German user.
One of the three main suspects was arrested in Paraguay.

They also searched seven buildings in connection with the porn ring in mid-April in Germany.

The authorities said the platform was “one of the world’s biggest child pornography darknet market platforms” and had been active at least since 2019.

Pedophiles used it to exchange and watch pornography of children and toddlers, darknet market marketplace most of them boys, from all over the world.

Prosecutors wrote that they found “images of most severe sexual abuse of toddlers” among the photos and video material.

“The platform had several forums and chats – the illegal pictures and videos were kept in the forums; in the chats, the members could communicate,” prosecutor Julia Bussweiler said.
“There were several language channels to facilitate the communication.”

A German police task force investigated the platform, its administrators and users for months in cooperation with Europol and law enforcement authorities from the Netherlands, Sweden, Australia, the United States and dark web link Canada, the statement said.

The three main suspects were a 40-year-old man from Paderborn, a 49-year-old man from Munich and a 58-year-old man from northern Germany who had been living in Paraguay for many years, the prosecutors’ statement said.

They worked as administrators of the site and gave advice to members on how to evade law enforcement when using the platform for darknet market illegal child pornography.

A fourth suspect, a 64-year-old man from Hamburg, is accused of being one of the most active users of the platform having allegedly uploaded more than 3,500 posts.

Germany has requested the extradition of the suspect who was arrested in Paraguay.

No names were given in line with Germany privacy regulations.

After the raids in mid-April, the online platform was shut down.

Germany’s top security official thanked the authorities for their success.

“This investigative success has a clear message: Those who assault the weakest aren’t safe anywhere,” German Interior darknet market lists Minister Horst Seehofer said.

“That’s what investigators work for day and night, online and offline, globally.”

“We’ll do everything within our power to protect the kids from these disgusting crimes,” he added.

___

Christoph Noelting in Frankfurt, Germany, contributed to this story.

The post Germany busts international child porn site used by 400,000 appeared first on The News Max.

A government shutdown of dark web marketplaces AlphaBay and Hansa has merchants and consumers looking for a new home.

Authorities , the largest online marketplace for illegal goods, on July 4, and took down Hansa, the third largest, on Thursday. The sites, where people could buy drugs, guns and darknet market markets url child pornography, had flourished since 2014, when a predecessor, Silk Road, was shut down. 

Fueled by Tor browsers and cryptocurrencies that offer anonymity, AlphaBay, Hansa and other sites avoided much government detection, allowing  in the wake of Silk Road’s demise. AlphaBay replaced as the biggest, growing to be 10 times larger. 

When one dark darknet market falls, buyers and darknet market markets 2024 sellers just move on to the next one.

The migration of buyers and sellers comes as authorities around the world crack down on digital marketplaces that cater to growing numbers of shadowy sales. at the time it was taken offline. By comparison, Silk Road had just 14,000 when the Federal Bureau of Investigation closed it four years ago.

Many of the sites . A recent study by the University of Manchester and think tank Rand Europe found 811 arms-related listings on . The researchers found nearly 60% of the weapons came from the US and most of the sales were headed to Europe. Worryingly, one gun bought on a cryptomarket was used in a .

FBI deputy director Andrew McCabe acknowledged shutting down such markets was like playing whack-a-mole. His agency would likely have to in the future, he said.

“Critics will say as we shutter one site, another will emerge,” McCabe said at a press conference. “But that is the nature of criminal work. It never goes away, you have to constantly keep at it, and you have to use every tool in your toolbox.”

One such tool: using a captured marketplace as a trap.

After the fall of AlphaBay, Dutch police said they saw traffic heading to Hansa spike eight-fold. That was something the cops were anticipating. 

Dutch police had full control of Hansa on June 20, but waited a month before shutting it down hoping to catch the new users in marketplace chaos.

“We could identify and disrupt the regular criminal activity that was happening on Hansa darknet market but also sweep up all of those new users that were displaced from AlphaBay and looking for a new trading platform for their criminal activities,” Rob Wainwright, the Europol director, said at the press conference.

Dutch police now have the usernames, passwords and IP addresses of thousands of Hansa users, and are tracking them down.

An underground in flux

The ploy has dark web market users on edge. Many are concerned about whether the next available platform will be compromised as well. That has them questioning Dream Market, a marketplace that’s been in business since 2013 and benefitted from the shutdown of rivals. 

“After the closure of the AlphaBay market, many vendors expressed that they were moving their operations to Hansa and Dream Market,” Liv Rowley, an analyst at Flashpoint, said. “The shuttering of Hansa now leaves Dream the only remaining major option.”

Rowley noticed chatter on forums and subreddits pointing to Dream Market as the next AlphaBay, but people are wary after the Dutch police ploy.

Reddit users on several  threads have expressed concerns the website has been compromised in a similar fashion. A user who speculated Hansa had been compromised in a thread posted  returned on Thursday to warn that .

“This is a warning you will want to heed,” the user, who goes by , posted. “They are waiting to gather as many refugees from AB & Hansa as they can and then drop the hammer.”

Other marketplaces, like Tochka and Valhalla, could also rise in the vacuum AlphaBay and Hansa have left. Some smaller dark web markets are even appealing to those lost in AlphaBay’s shake-up. 

Security company was offering vendors from AlphaBay a discount if they moved to their platform.

“The entire illegal underground is in flux right now,” Flashpoint’s Rowley said.

It’ll be quiet on the dark web until people can find a reliable marketplace again, but eventually they will, said Emily Wilson, the director of analysis at Terbium Labs.

She called the busts a “sizable hiccup” but not “an irreversible blow.” 

It’s unclear who’ll emerge from the fallout. But the FBI estimates that more than 40,000 merchants are looking for a place to sell. And there are more than 200,000 customers looking for places to buy stuff they can’t get on Amazon. 

With AlphaBay, the Amazon of illegal goods, now shut down, the market is fragmenting. If you want malware, there’s a darknet market for that on the dark web. The same for guns and for drugs. So business will go on, albeit less conveniently.

“For now, there are plenty of smaller and more specialized markets for vendors and buyers to continue trading,” Wilson said. 

First published July 21, 8 a.m. ET

Update, 5:04 p.m.: Adds background on scope of the markets, weapons sales. 

: Online abuse is as old as the internet and it’s only getting worse. It exacts a very real toll.

: CNET chronicles tech’s role in providing new kinds of accessibility.

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