Student Who Ran One of the Largest Darknet Marketplaces in Germany Arrested

The German Federal Criminal Police Office says a 22-year-old student has been arrested in Bavaria on suspicion of running Deutschland im Deep Web (DiDW), one of the largest darknet marketplaces in the country.

The original DiDW platform was launched back in 2013 and was originally used as a forum to discuss IT security and anonymity. At its peak in 2017, the site had 23,000 registered users and about 6,000,000 visits per month.

However, rather quickly, the resource began to be used to sell illegal goods, including weapons and drugs, and also began to use an escrow system to protect participants in such transactions from fraud. In fact, this turned DiDW into a full-fledged forum-based marketplace.

Law enforcers write that in 2016, the shooter who committed the massacre in Munich purchased the murder weapons and ammunition from DiDW. As a result, in 2017 the site was closed by law enforcement agencies, and its operator was arrested and sentenced to seven years in prison.

However, in 2018, two new versions of the platform appeared on the dark web at once, the new operators of which openly stated that they no longer cared about disguising illegal activities on DiDW. The second iteration of the site closed in 2019 without explanation, but just ten days later, the third version of the marketplace appeared on the network.

According to the police now, after five years of investigations, the alleged administrator of the third version of DiDW (his name was not disclosed) was finally identified, who was arrested on October 25, 2022.

At the same time, the third iteration of DiDW stopped its work in March 2022, and at that time the site had about 16,000 registered users, 28,000 posts, and 72 large sellers of prohibited goods worked on it.