Law enforcement agencies from around the world have arrested 288 people suspected of buying or selling drugs on the dark web. In a pair of press releases published on Tuesday, the US Department of Justice and Europol said the joint effort also shut down the dark web market, the monopoly market.
The operation, codenamed SpecTor, was carried out in cooperation with nine countries, including the United States, the United Kingdom, Austria, France, Germany, the Netherlands, Poland, Brazil and Switzerland. While 155 of the arrests took place in the United States, authorities seized $53.4 million in cash and digital currency, 850 kilograms (or 1,873 pounds) of drugs, and 117 firearms worldwide.
Monopoly Market has been on the dark web since 2019 and since then has served as a hub where criminals can buy and sell drugs, according to CyberScoop. German authorities caused the site’s forensic infrastructure to be demolished in 2021, Europol notes, which had served as “the basis for hundreds of national investigations”. Law enforcement also obtained buyer lists from illegal sellers of the site, which could lead to “thousands” of arrests worldwide.
“Operation SpecTor was a coordinated international law enforcement effort, spanning three continents, to disrupt drug trafficking on the dark web and represents the largest number of money seized and the largest number of arrests of any coordinated international action led by the Department of Justice against drug traffickers in the US,” the US attorney general said. Merrick B. Garland on the “Dark Web” statement.