The longest-standing dark web drug market worth £200million has been dismantled following a years-long investigation, as its mastermind is arrested in Barcelona.
The site, known as Archetyp Market, was busted last week by European authorities with the help of the US in an effort dubbed ‘Operation Deep Sentinel’.
Europol said in a statement on Monday that between June 11 and 13, 300 officers were deployed to carry out a ‘series of coordinated actions’ across Germany, the Netherlands, Romania, Spain and Sweden targeting the platform’s administrators, vendors and technical infrastructure.
It added that the platform’s infrastructure in the Netherlands was taken offline and that the mastermind behind the operation – a 30-year-old German known as ‘Big Boss’ – had been arrested in Barcelona.
Users of the Archetyp Market website are now met with a banner informing them the site has been taken down.
‘This operation led by the German authorities marks the end of a criminal service that enabled the anonymous trade in high volumes of illicit drugs, including cocaine, MDMA, amphetamines, and synthetic opioids’, the statement said.
Europol said the takedown comes after years of investigation into the platform’s ‘technical architecture’ and the individuals behind it, adding that its findings were achieved by analysing digital forensic evidence.
Europol’s Deputy Executive Director of Operations Jean-Philippe Lecouffe said: ‘With this takedown, law enforcement has taken out one of the dark web’s longest-running drug markets, cutting off a major supply line for some of the world’s most dangerous substances.
‘By dismantling its infrastructure and arresting its key players, we are sending a clear message: there is no safe haven for those who profit from harm.’
It comes after international law enforcement agencies led by the FBI seized a sprawling dark web marketplace popular with cybercriminals back in 2023.
The hacker cyber-bazaar, known as Genesis Market, was seized in a multinational crackdown dubbed ‘Operation Cookie Monster’ after the site’s specialization in stolen digital fingerprints, known as cookies.
According to the FBI, Genesis Market offered access to data stolen from more than 1.5 million compromised computers around the world, containing over 80 million account access credentials.
The stolen data included passwords for services such as online banking, Facebook, Amazon, PayPal and Netflix, as well as digital fingerprints that can be exploited by criminals to bypass online security checks by spoofing the victim’s device.
In coordinated raids around the world, more than 200 searches were carried out and about 120 people were arrested, including 24 arrests in and around the British town of Grimsby, UK law enforcement officials said.
The raid on Genesis followed a similar US-led enforcement actions in 2023 against other darknet hacker market places, including Hydra Market and Breach Forums.
But experts warned that hacker gangs are often slippery, and similar markets often soon re-emerge.
