German police have arrested a 22-year-old student in Bavaria suspected of running 'Deutschland im Deep Web' (DiDW), one of the country’s biggest dark web marketplaces.
Deutschland im Deep Web, which first emerged in 2013, sold drugs, weapons, and ammunition. In 2016, the perpetrator of the Munich terrorist attack used the platform to buy weapons. A year later, the marketplace was shut down by the German authorities along with the arrest of its operator who eventually received a seven-year prison sentence.
In 2018, two new versions of the platform appeared on the dark web, using the motto “No control, everything allowed.” They both were taken down in 2019. According to Germany’s criminal police (Bundeskriminalamt), the arrested individual has allegedly been the operator of the third version of the platform dismantled in March 2022. At the time, the marketplace had around 16,000 registered users, with 72 of them being active traders.
Last week, a notorious British hacker was charged in the US for running the now-defunct The Real Deal dark web marketplace that sold illicit goods ranging from hacking tools, botnets and stolen account credentials to drugs and weapons.