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Koblenz (dpa) - Almost three weeks after the shutdown of what is probably the world's largest illegal Darknet marketplace, DarkMarket, the investigators found a suspected operator on the net.
The public prosecutor's office in Koblenz (Rhineland-Palatinate) announced on Friday that it was the wife of a 34-year-old who had already been imprisoned as an administrator at the beginning of January.
The 32-year-old was arrested in Oldenburg (Lower Saxony) and has been in custody since Thursday.
Like her husband, she is an Australian citizen.
According to the attorney general, the woman has not commented on the allegations.
Her husband hadn't got involved either.
It had been placed near the German-Danish border.
A permanent address of the accused is not known.
The servers of the DarkMarket platform were shut down on January 11th.
At the time of the closure, the marketplace with almost 500,000 users and more than 2,400 sellers was probably the largest in the world on the Darknet, the authority said.
More than 320,000 transactions were carried out - mainly with drugs, but also with counterfeit money, stolen or forged credit card details, anonymous SIM cards and malware.
A sum of more than 140 million euros is said to have been moved there in crypto currencies.
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The illegal marketplace is said to have started in June 2019 in the so-called cyberbunker in Traben-Trarbach on the Moselle.
In the old bunker, a gang is said to have operated an illegal data center for criminal business in the Darknet on a large scale for years.
Hundreds of police officers excavated the underground cyberbunker in September 2019.
There is currently a trial against eight suspected operators in Trier (Rhineland-Palatinate).
© dpa-infocom, dpa: 210129-99-221354 / 2