The darknet marketplace “Germany on the Deep Web” was the main point of contact for drug trafficking for several years. Now the suspected operator of the illegal platform has been arrested.
The investigation against the alleged administrator of “Germany on the Deep Web”, a 22-year-old student from Lower Bavaria, is being conducted by the Federal Criminal Police Office and the Bavarian Cybercrime Center (ZCB). The arrest took place on Tuesday, October 25. As part of the police measures, two residential properties were also searched with the participation of a public prosecutor of the ZCB and numerous pieces of evidence, including computers, data carriers and cell phones were seized. The measures carried out were preceded by months of undercover and technically demanding investigations in order to be able to identify and ultimately arrest the suspect who was operating anonymously on the darknet.
The darknet marketplace of “Germany on the Deep Web” was first published on the Tor network in 2013. In 2016, the perpetrator of the Munich rampage used the platform at the time to procure the murder weapon and ammunition. As a result, the website was shut down in 2017 by the BKA on behalf of the General Public Prosecutor’s Office in Frankfurt am Main. The operator at the time was arrested and sentenced to seven years in prison in 2018.
Since 2018, two new versions of the platform appeared under the name “Germany on the Deep Web,” on which drugs in particular were traded under the self-given motto “No control, everything permitted.”
The current criminal proceedings are directed against the operator of the third version of the darknet platform. He is alleged to have administered it since November 2018. The defendant is suspected of having operated a criminal trading platform on the Internet pursuant to Section 127 of the Criminal Code. The law provides for a prison sentence of one to ten years for this.
The platform, which had not been accessible to users since March 2022, had around 16,000 registered users, including a total of 72 active traders. This made “Germany on the Deep Web” one of the largest German-language darknet platforms. In order to draw attention to the activities of the investigative authorities with regard to “Germany on the Deep Web,” this seizure banner has now been published under the original accessibility of the website: