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Police around the world closed this month the largest active black market on the net, according to ads from law enforcement agencies in the US, Germany and the Netherlands released Friday. .
The Wall Street market, known as the black market site, was the subject of a one-and-a-half-year multinational investigation. Three Germans were arrested on April 23 and 24 in Germany for their alleged role in the creation and administration of the site selling illegal drugs, documents, weapons and data.
"WSM was one of the largest and largest darknet network markets of all time," said FBI Special Agent Leroy Shelton in the criminal complaint released Friday.
The site is the latest in a long list of black markets on the black web to fall. The most famous is Silk Road, an anonymous site that ran from 2011 to 2013 before being shut down by a highly publicized FBI investigation that resulted in a double life sentence for Ross Ulbricht, the culprit of the crime. to have designed and directed the market. Since then, many sites have adopted the model of the Silk Road and have adopted it – and, the forces of order having made these lucrative sites a priority, almost as many have resulted in battles multinational police officers.
According to the US Department of Justice, the Wall Street market had 1.15 million customer accounts and 5,400 registered sellers. However, do not take these numbers for accurate census counts: users are anonymous, sellers and buyers often create multiple accounts, and it is not possible to realistically count the number of people active in a market. like this one.
A better way to understand the size of a black market like this is to look at the amounts actually invested. Last month, Wall Street market administrators stole about $ 11 million from user accounts, authorities said.
"An" exit scam "would have been committed last month when WSM administrators seized all the virtual currency held in blocked accounts of the market and users – estimated by investigators at about $ 11 million – and then diverted them to their own accounts. "Exit scams are commonplace in the major Darknet markets, which typically keep money frozen while a supplier delivers them illicit goods," said the prosecutor's office on Friday. American in Los Angeles.
Here is a photo of the site around March 2018 of the American criminal complaint:
In addition to the three arrested Germans, a Brazilian was accused of public relations on the site.
"These two surveys show the importance of police cooperation at the international level and show that illegal activities on the dark Web are not as anonymous as criminals think," said Europol Executive Director Catherine De Bolle. in a statement.
The fall of the Wall Street market is considered the biggest collapse of the black market since the US survey that destroyed the AlphaBay market in 2017.
Selected image: Mark Wilson (Getty)
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