Dark web’s longest-standing drug market seized in multinational effort

The longest-standing dark web drug market was taken down by European authorities last week with the aid of the United States. The site, known as Archetyp Market, had a total transaction volume of at least 250 million euros, or about $289 million, according to Europol.

In a press release on Monday, June 16, Europol, the police agency of the European Union, announced the market’s dismantling after a years-long investigation dubbed “Operation Deep Sentinel.”

From June 11 to 13, the agency said, a series of coordinated law enforcement actions targeting the platform’s administrator, moderators, key vendors and technical infrastructure took place across Germany, the Netherlands, Romania, Spain and Sweden. The police actions involved about 300 officers.

‘Cutting off a major supply line’

The dark web is a collection of sites that are not indexed by search engines and can only be viewed with specialized web browsers designed to provide privacy and anonymity. Many sites specialize in selling illegal goods that are not readily available on the public internet.

Archetyp Market, which boasted more than 600,000 users, operated for more than five years and contained more than 17,000 listings for illicit substances, including cocaine, MDMA and amphetamines. Europol also said the market allowed the sale of fentanyl and “other highly potent synthetic opioids.”

Authorities seized the site’s online infrastructure, which was hosted in the Netherlands, and arrested its 30-year-old German administrator in Barcelona, Spain. A moderator and six prominent vendors were arrested simultaneously in other countries, and officers seized assets worth about $9 million.

“With this takedown, law enforcement has taken out one of the dark web’s longest-running drug markets, cutting off a major supply line for some of the world’s most dangerous substances,” Europol’s Deputy Executive Director of Operations Jean-Philippe Lecouffe said in a statement. “By dismantling its infrastructure and arresting its key players, we are sending a clear message: there is no safe haven for those who profit from harm.”

U.S. Homeland Security Investigations, the Internal Revenue Service criminal investigation division and the Justice Department aided the investigation, Europol said.

Who’s been compromised?

Visitors to the Archetyp Market website are now greeted by a banner detailing the takedown.

On the Reddit-style dark web forum known as “Dread,” users are trying to determine which vendors were compromised by the operation, Straight Arrow News found. 

HugBunter, the anonymous user who founded the forum in 2018, asked “market admins, vendors, and other service operators” to provide “proof-of-life” by signing posts with what’s known as a PGP encrypted signature, a form of cryptographic proof.

Such signatures are intended to confirm that vendors still have access to their accounts and have not been arrested or compromised. While the method has its limitations, HugBunter argued that failure to provide a cryptographic signature alongside continued account activity could be telling.