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BKA – Germany’s Federal Criminal Police Office announced the detainment of a 22-year-old student in Bavaria, suspected of operating the ‘Deutschland im Deep Web’ (DiDW), one of the major darknet markets in the country.
The platform was taken down in March 2022, with 16,000 registered members, 28,000 posts, and 72 high-volume vendors of illegal products like narcotics and guns.
The suspect is now being investigated for allegedly running an illegal trading platform, a crime that carries a sentence of up to ten years in jail.
BKA takeover on DiDW3
DiDW: A Short History
The initial DiDW platform was introduced in 2013 as a discussion forum for anonymization and IT security. It received 6 million monthly hits and 23,000 registered users at its height in 2017.
Unfortunately, the site was also used to sell illegal products such as firearms and drugs, with payments handled through an escrow system to guard members from false listings. This ultimately transformed DiDW into a darknet market masquerading as a forum.
In its announcement of the arrest, the BKA gives the example of a shooter in Munich in 2016 who used the same platform to get the murder weapon and ammunition. After that incident, police authorities shut down the website and arrested and jailed its operator.
In 2018, two new versions of the website debuted on the dark web with the motto “No control, anything allowed’, meaning the new operators no longer tried to conceal their illegal activities. These shut down on their own in 2019, and ten days later, a third version surfaced online, according to Bleeping Computer.
After five years of investigation, on October 25, 2022, the federal police arrested the alleged DiDW. It is not unusual for cybercrime detectives to work on cases for years in order to identify the administrators of darknet networks that have been dormant for years, adds Bleeping Computer.
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Madalina, a seasoned digital content creator at Heimdal®, blends her passion for cybersecurity with an 8-year background in PR & CSR consultancy. Skilled in making complex cyber topics accessible, she bridges the gap between cyber experts and the wider audience with finesse.
