Seventeen people have been arrested in a series of co-ordinated raids on underground websites selling illegal drugs, a top Europol official said yesterday, in one of the largest crackdowns on the so-called ‘darknet’ to date.
Dutch prosecutors said the arrests were made in the US, Ireland, and Germany.
Head of the European police agency’s cybercrimes division Troels Oerting said it co-ordinated police operations in more than a dozen countries on Thursday from its headquarters in The Hague, Netherlands.
The raids included a US operation in which the FBI announced the arrest in San Francisco of a man accused of running the Silk Road 2.0 online bazaar, where drugs including ecstasy, cocaine, and LSD were sold openly.
“We will go after drug dealers regardless of whether they operate in the physical or virtual world,” Oerting said.
Europol said that, in addition to the Silk Road site, it has seized or shut down numerous other virtual marketplaces with names such as Hydra, Cloud Nine, Pandora, and Blue Sky. Police seized $1m (€800,000) in digital currency and $225,000 worth of cash, drugs, gold and silver.
Source: Toby Sterling Amsterdam, Irish Examiner, 08/11/2014
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