The German, Dutch, Romanian and American police, together with Europol, are said to have confiscated the servers of a marketplace on the dark web called Wall Street Market. That’s what ZDNet reports. On Wall Street Market, illegal products such as drugs, weapons and login details were stolen.
The seizure of the website follows two tumultuous weeks before the marketplace and its users. In April the administrators of the website already said they had problems with their bitcoin-server, according to Silicon Angle. The website used an escrow service, in which money that has to be shifted between buyers and sellers is kept until the transaction is completed. However, users of the website said that that money had been stolen as part of a scam at the beginning of April.
The administrators of the marketplace are said to have been guilty of an exit scam, in which owners of a website stop offering the promised service and leave with the customers’ money. In this case, it would be $30 million in bitcoins.
Meanwhile one of the moderators of the website – Med3l1n – started blackmailing sellers and buyers on Wall Street Market. He asked for 0.05 bitcoin, about 280 dollars, and threatened to share details of the buyers and sellers who shared various details in support requests in a non-encrypted form with police.
Confiscation
It is unclear whether the blackmail was actually successful. A few days later, however, Med3l1n published the IP address and login details for the backend of Wall Street Market on a Reddit-like community for dark web users called Dread. This IP address is also from the Netherlands.
This brought out the server location of the market. In addition, everyone could enter the administrative department of the marketplace and gather information about the users, orders and other details of the website, which can be used to make buyers and sellers known.
Six days later, on 30 April, an error message appeared on the website. Yesterday the website was completely taken offline. It is not clear whether the publication of the login details directly led to or played a major role in the seizure of the website.
This news article was automatically translated from Dutch to give Techzine.eu a head start. All news articles after September 1, 2019 are written in native English and NOT translated. All our background stories are written in native English as well. For more information read our launch article.
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