On the same day that a suspected operator of a darknet market was formally prosecuted in the United States, a new DNM-related arrest occurred in Germany on October 25th. An unknown 22-year-old student from Lower Bavaria was arrested after a year-long investigation in the country. He is suspected of being the operator of a market known as “Germany on the Deep Web.”
Germany on the Deep Web was operational on the Tor network as early as 2013, and rose to notoriety in 2016 after it was found that the perpetrator of a mass shooting in Munich had purchased ammunition from the market. By 2018, the site had become large enough to necessitate a split, resulting in the formation of a separate, drug-focused darknet market, which was administrated by the newly arrested suspect, who is believed to have been operating it under that role since November 2018.
A takedown notice is now shown on the Tor site “Germany on the Deep Web.”
The suspected operator of was caught and convicted in 2019 on accusations of hacking into the computer network of the university he attended, though the link to his admin duties in Germany on the Deep Web was not established at the time.
The market, which had over 16,000 registered users and 72 active traders, has been offline since March of this year and was regarded as one of the major German-language darknet markets.
During the arrest, the Federal Criminal Police Office and the Central Office for Cybercrime Bavaria seized laptops, external hard drives, and mobile phones belonging to the suspect. The accused admin is being charged with running a criminal trading platform on the internet. He faces a prison sentence of one to ten years if convicted.