It is a judgment with a signal effect: Not only those who offer criminal services on the Internet have to go to jail, but also those who provide the infrastructure for them.

On Monday, the operators of the so-called cyber bunker in Traben-Trarbach in Rhineland-Palatinate were sentenced to prison terms.

The main defendant, the Dutchman Herman X., has been imprisoned for five years and nine months, and another six have been sentenced to between two and four years in prison.

Another defendant was given a one-year suspended sentence.

The Trier district court saw it as proven that the accused had formed a criminal organization.

Julian Staib

Political correspondent for Hesse, Rhineland-Palatinate and Saarland based in Wiesbaden.

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In an earlier bunker on a well-secured area above the Moselle, the accused had operated hundreds of servers.

The building - a former Bundeswehr data center - is built into the ground over five floors.

Hundreds of officers searched it in a raid in September 2019 and seized more than 400 computers.

"Not a single legal page" could be found on the servers, according to the Koblenz Public Prosecutor's Office at the beginning of the trial about a year ago.

You can't tell if data is illegal

Darknet platforms such as "Wall Street Market" and "Darkmarket" were operated on the servers, on which drugs, counterfeit money and stolen credit cards were traded. An attack on Telekom routers is also said to have been controlled by the servers in 2016. The operators once said: "Customers can host anything they like - except child pornography and everything that has to do with terrorism".

According to the prosecutor's office, the accused are said to have promoted the acts, the charges were of aiding and abetting and of forming a criminal organization. The defense had pleaded for acquittal and argued that the operators were neither obliged nor able to control what was offered on the servers. The main defendant X. had stated in court that he had no knowledge of the illegal activities of his customers.

It is not illegal to provide the bare infrastructure, one of X.'s defenders, Michael Eichin, said in an interview with the FAZ before the trial was over.

One does not see from the data that it is illegal, it was also often encrypted.

Eichin accused the investigative authorities of “putting the lever right at the front, with those who make the structures available” in order to achieve a deterrent effect.

His client had no intention of hosting illegal data, although of course, says Eichin, "with a certain reputation" was played.

Around 150 arrests worldwide

The district court did not follow this presentation. The accused were sentenced for forming a criminal organization, but not for aiding and abetting. With its verdict, the court failed to meet the demands of the public prosecutor's office, which had demanded a prison sentence of seven and a half years for X. The defense lawyers announced that they would appeal.

The investigation has so far resulted in almost 230 follow-up proceedings against customers of the data center.

Most of them had been hired because there had been no investigative attempts to identify the customers, Chief Public Prosecutor Jörg Angerer from the State Central Office for Cybercrime at the Koblenz Public Prosecutor's Office recently announced.

But from the largest follow-up proceedings - the one against the operator of the “Darkmarket” platform - the investigators found approaches that led to around 150 arrests worldwide.