The police in Germany have shut down one of the most significant dark web market place Chemical revolutions that allowed the users to buy drugs through bitcoins. The Federal Police Office of Germany has informed that they have arrested eleven criminals who were connected with this.
The investigation started after an arrest of a 26-year-old last year in Berlin. The police had confiscated drugs in many kilograms and later had arrested many other individuals as well that included Dutch and German individuals. The operation was carried out collectively by the Federal Organisations of Germany, Netherlands, Poland, and France.
The other market places that were closed were AlphaBay and Hansa, which were also using the cryptocurrencies like Monero. The trading of cryptocurrencies in dark web markets has however increased even after closing AlphaBay and Hansa in 2017 the report suggests by Chainalysis. This suggests that bitcoin and other popular cryptocurrencies will continue to be a payment method for some time now.
Recently the German member of the European parliament Marcus Ferber did present his views against the newly announced cryptocurrency of Facebook and believed that cryptocurrencies might become a “shadow bank.” Recently Edward Snowden, the whistleblower of U.S. also expressed his concerns with cryptocurrencies and confessed that he did use bitcoins to pay the journalists to leak the data. Snowden said, “The lack of privacy is an existential threat to bitcoin. Is the only protection users have from political change,”.
Over the past few years, police have been working on taking down such dark web marketplaces. These dark web marketplaces are outpacing the law enforcement’s ability in tracking down the illegal operations. However, law enforcement is not that far behind and are making their efforts in handling these operations even though they have technologically outpaced.