German Police Arrest Student Suspected of Operating Drug Trafficking Marketplace on the Dark Web

Germany’s Federal Criminal Police Office has announced the arrest of a 22-year-old student who allegedly ran a Darknet marketplace used for drug trafficking.

“The Federal Criminal Police Office and the Central Office for Cybercrime Bavaria (ZCB) are investigating the suspected administrator of ‘Germany on the Deep Web,’ a 22-year-old student from Lower Bavaria,” reads the machine-translated press release.

After months of undercover investigations, police raided two of the suspect’s residences and found “numerous items of evidence, including computers, data carriers and mobile phones.”

“The alleged operator of the illegal platform has now been arrested,” the police said.

The Deutschland im Deep Web marketplace first emerged on the Tor network in 2013. Reports say the author of a 2016 mass shooting in Munich used the platform to buy the murder weapon and ammunition.

German police soon shut down the illegal marketplace, only to see it resurface in 2018.

“Since 2018, two new versions of the platform have been published under the name ‘Deutschland im Deep Web,’ on which drugs in particular were traded under the self-imposed motto ‘No control, everything allowed,’” according to the press release.

The current investigation is directed against the administrator of this – the latest version of the marketplace, which is no longer available as of March.

Before it was shuttered, the platform had around 16,000 registered users, including 72 active traders, the report notes.

“This makes ‘Germany in the Deep Web’ one of the largest German-speaking Darknet platforms,” the police said.

If found guilty, the suspect faces one to 10 years behind bars for operating a criminal trading platform on the Internet, in accordance with Section 127 of Germany’s Criminal Code.