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Shutdown banner on “Nemesis Market”: A pixel-look spaceship destroys the lettering on the darknet site
Photo: BKA
The Federal Criminal Police Office (BKA) and the Frankfurt am Main Public Prosecutor's Office have succeeded in striking a blow against the darknet site "Nemesis Market", which is popular with cybercriminals. The investigators took over the site on the night of Wednesday to Thursday and shut it down.
According to the BKA, “Nemesis Market” is the world’s third largest criminal trading marketplace on the Darknet. Most recently, more than 150,000 users and over 1,100 seller accounts were registered there. On the site, dealers offered various drugs, stolen credit card details and hacking services. Only certain offers, such as child pornography, contract killings, weapons or the particularly dangerous drug fentanyl, were banned by the administrators.
Further investigations against the dealers
The authorities accuse the operators of drug trafficking and operating a criminal trading platform. However, according to SPIEGEL information, no administrators could be arrested or identified.
However, the BKA said in a press release on Thursday that servers had been confiscated in both Lithuania and Germany. The seized data would be used to investigate those who offered criminal products via the platform, it said. Furthermore, cryptocurrencies worth around 90,000 euros were confiscated. For years, law enforcement authorities have strategically focused on weakening criminal offerings on the Darknet by striking their infrastructure.
The investigations against “Nemesis Market” have been ongoing for a year and a half. With the help of technical surveillance measures, the German officials discovered that part of the server infrastructure was located domestically. Because this also led to leads abroad, an international cooperation was launched, in which prosecutors in Lithuania, the FBI and the drug investigation agency DEA in the USA were also involved.
Gaming reference on the dark web
As usual, the authorities placed a banner on the dark web site after their takeover. To celebrate their success and send a message to the scene, they came up with something special. A spaceship in the style of the 1990s video game “Nemesis” flies over the animated logo. The spaceship fires one of its usual laser shots in the Game Boy game and hits the lettering “Nemesis,” which then explodes in a 1990s pixel look.
Investigative authorities and cybercriminals have been playing a cat-and-mouse game on the Darknet for many years. While the police regularly and successfully shut down platforms, criminals set up new sites under different names. Now officials apparently want to reinforce the message that no site stays online for too long. In any case, “Nemesis Market” lasted around three years.