The Reactor graph below shows this vendor’s connection with drug vendors on Abacus Market. As reported last year, some drug shops have been outsourcing services like website hosting and payment processing. IKlad.biz and Klad.cc, shown in the chart above, are examples of those infrastructure providers.
Start Your Day With Fact-based News
What these cases, along with the dozens of arrests across Europe, have in common is that the investigations largely stem from last year’s Wall Street Market takedown. At the time, German authorities arrested the site’s alleged operators and two of its most prolific vendors. Europol confirmed to WIRED today that it was also able to recover the Wall Street Market backend server, providing investigators with an invaluable trove of evidence. The arrests were part of an effort by federal authorities to address “the growing number of illicit vendors operating on the darknet providing large quantities of harmful substances to thousands of people across the United States,” according to the Justice Department. Federal prosecutors have accused the men of operating 10 virtual storefronts on 17 different dark web marketplaces from September 2018 through February, the department said in a statement.
‘It’s Happening Everywhere’: 1 In 3 ICE Detainees Held In Overcrowded Facilities, Data Show
Gevorgyan is charged with one count of possession with intent to distribute MDMA and one count of possession with intent to distribute ketamine. Grigoryan is charged with one count of possession with intent to distribute methamphetamine. Nersesyan is charged with three counts of possession with intent to distribute methamphetamine, one count of possession with intent to distribute cocaine, and one count of possession with intent to distribute MDMA. All four defendants are charged with one count of conspiracy to distribute and possess with intent to distribute cocaine, methamphetamine, ketamine, and MDMA (Ecstasy).
Silk Road 20
The Dutch national police’s Cyber Enabled Crime Team was involved in the operation, code-named SpecTor. Investigators received leads from local police departments investigating overdose deaths, including that of a 19-year-old man in Colorado who loved learning languages and building his own computers, according to FBI Deputy Director Paul Abbate. OFAC’s designation of Parsarad was the result of strong partnership and coordination with the FBI, the Drug Enforcement Administration, Internal Revenue Service-Criminal Investigation, FinCEN, and a range of European law enforcement partners. HugBunter, the anonymous user who founded the forum in 2018, asked “market admins, vendors, and other service operators” to provide “proof-of-life” by signing posts with what’s known as a PGP encrypted signature, a form of cryptographic proof.
More recently, in September 2024, the BKA and ZIT announced the dismantling of dozens of cryptocurrency exchanges that they accused of enabling money laundering and other offenses. What current policing strategies neglect is that dark web markets are not isolated to the storefronts that are the popular target of crackdowns. These are communities stretched across dark and surface web forums which develop shared tutorials and help one another adapt to any new changes. These closures bind users together and foster a shared resilience and collective experience in navigating these environments. The durability of these markets tells us that if policing responses keep following the same playbook, they will keep getting the same results. And by focusing so heavily on these hidden platforms, authorities are neglecting the growing digital harms in the spaces we all use.
Prior to its takedown by law enforcement, narcotics traffickers and cybercriminals openly traded in illegal drugs and services on Nemesis, which was designed with built-in money laundering features. Nemesis had over 30,000 active users and 1,000 vendors and facilitated the sale of nearly $30 million worth of drugs around the world between 2021 and 2024, including to the United States. Today’s sanctions designation is OFAC’s first action as a member of the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI)-led interagency Joint Criminal Opioid and Darknet Enforcement (JCODE) Team. Archetyp Market had operated for over five years, amassing more than 600,000 registered users and processing at least EUR 250 million in transactions. With more than 17,000 product listings, the platform served as a hub for narcotics trafficking, including the sale of cocaine, MDMA, amphetamines, and particularly dangerous synthetic opioids such as fentanyl — making it one of the few major markets to openly permit such listings.
- While announced as a package today, the arrests in the US have trickled through over the last several months.
- Silk Road, AlphaBay, WallStreet and Monopoly Market are all familiar names in the digital graveyard of the dark web.
- During the investigation, federal law enforcement seized cryptocurrency valued at $75 million at the time of the seizures and cash and precious metals.
- Lin was the operator of Incognito Market, a major darknet hub that, between 2020 and 2024, handled over $100 million in illicit drug sales.
- CACI’s DarkBlue Intelligence Suite is designed to address these exact challenges, offering comprehensive monitoring and analysis of the dark web’s most secure and decentralized spaces.
Dark Web Drug Busts Lead To 150 Arrests
We will automatically post your comment and a link to the news story to your Facebook timeline at the same time it is posted on MailOnline. But experts warned that hacker gangs are often slippery, and similar markets often soon re-emerge. Ghost guns, assembled with prefabricated parts and without required serial numbers, are nearly always designed to be semi-automatic firearms, and are almost impossible to trace.
Operation RapTor And Continued Disruption
The operation was conducted across the United States, Europe, and South America, and was a result of the continued partnership between JCODE and foreign law enforcement against the illegal sale of drugs and other illicit goods and services on the darknet. Operation SpecTor builds on the successes of prior years’ operations and takedowns of marketplaces, which result in the seizure of darknet infrastructure providing investigators across the world with investigative leads and evidence. These leads allow U.S. and international law enforcement agencies to identify darknet drug vendors and buyers, resulting in a series of coordinated, but separate, law enforcement investigations, resulting in the statistics announced today. Department of the Treasury’s Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) sanctioned Iran-based Behrouz Parsarad (Parsarad), the sole administrator of Nemesis, an online darknet marketplace, which was subject of an international law enforcement operation and was taken down in 2024.
The Chainalysis 2025 Crypto Crime Report
According to court documents, for six years, the married couple operated an online storefront called “MrsFeelGood” to illegally distribute a variety of narcotics across the United States. 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. In some cases, established sellers on closed-down markets are welcomed onto new markets as digital “refugees” and have joining fees waived. Compared to its predecessors, Archetyp enforced enhanced security expectations from its users.
BNB Attestation Service (BAS) Price Prediction 2025–2030
The U.S. Department of Justice’s Joint Criminal Opioid and Darknet Enforcement (JCODE) team spearheaded this international initiative, teaming up closely with Europol and numerous law enforcement agencies throughout Europe, Asia, and South America. Officials are calling Operation RapTor the most successful JCODE effort yet, both in terms of the sheer amount of contraband seized and the number of suspects apprehended. The agency, based in The Hague, built intelligence based on evidence from Germany, which it said seized the marketplace’s “criminal infrastructure” in December 2021. Teresa McGrath of Sunland-Tujunga and Mark Chavez of downtown Los Angeles pleaded guilty to trafficking drugs and both face minimum prison sentences of 15 years. In Operation DisrupTor (a play on words; Tor is a privacy-first browser that acts as a gateway to the dark web), law enforcement used information obtained from the takedown of the darknet market, Wall Street Market, in May 2019, to trace criminals.
At its peak, Nemesis counted over 150,000 user accounts and 1,100 seller accounts worldwide, with about 20% of them being based in Germany. John is a veteran Chicago journalist with experience in print, television and online platforms and has been with the CBS Chicago team since 2007. Prosecutors said Pavey and Hamilton told customers about features designed to thwart counterfeit detection tools and make counterfeit currency appear to be genuine currency. Usually these products are sent to the buyer by post and money transferred to the seller through the escrow system.
- The Nemesis Market was launched in 2021 as a new marketplace to purchase illegal drugs and narcotics, stolen data and credit cards, and various cybercrime services related to ransomware, phishing, and distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks.
- In 2020, he was named alongside his colleagues as a Pulitzer Prize finalist in explanatory reporting.
- These are communities stretched across dark and surface web forums which develop shared tutorials and help one another adapt to any new changes.
- From June 11 to 13, 2025, law enforcement authorities in Germany, the Netherlands, Romania, Spain, Sweden, and the United States executed a series of synchronized actions targeting the platform’s administrator, moderators, top vendors, and core infrastructure.
- The US and Europe have seen an increase in nitazine-related overdose deaths in recent years, perhaps due to the halt in the heroin supply following the Taliban’s crackdown.
- “We collated the information and then we sent out what we call intelligence packages to all the concerned countries.
THE HAGUE, Netherlands (AP) — Authorities in the U.S. and Europe arrested nearly 300 people, confiscated over $53 million, and seized a dark web marketplace as part of an international crackdown on drug trafficking that officials say was the largest operation of its kind. Those arrested had sold drugs on a variety of darknet marketplaces, among them AlphaBay, Empire and DeepSea. A massive international law enforcement operation has seen one of the longest-standing dark web marketplaces finally taken offline. Law enforcement confiscated criminal servers and seized data that could help to identify users of the platform, the BKA said. They also obtained €94,000 ($102,000) worth of cryptocurrency assets, allegedly earned through illegal activity.
