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Aerial view of the bunker area: server rooms underground
Photo: PRESS OFFICE LANDESKRIMINALAMT RHEINLAND-PFALZ / HANDOUT / EPA-EFE / REX
With a spectacular access, investigators took over an underground data center in September 2019, a switching point for multi-million dollar criminal transactions on the Darknet.
The process against the operator will begin in a few days.
The judgment could possibly point the way.
In an old Bundeswehr bunker in Mont Royal above the Moselle town of Traben-Trarbach, the accused had set up an underground data center with more than 400 servers.
These computers were used, among other things, to operate drug marketplaces, launch cyberattacks and conduct other criminal transactions.
Among other things, the darknet marketplace "Wall Street Market", the drug exchange "Cannabis Road" and the underground forum "Fraudsters" are said to have found a home via the servers on the Moselle.
The eight defendants now have to answer before the Trier district court for alleged aiding and abetting around 250,000 crimes.
As a "bulletproof hoster", however, the data center operators only provided the technical infrastructure for these machinations.
The process will therefore revolve around how much they knew about the illegal things that were going on their computers, whether they supported these machinations - and to what extent they can be proven all of this.
The process raises the fundamental question in which cases a host can even be held responsible for the content on the servers it provides.
"It is the first such procedure," says Chief Public Prosecutor Jörg Angerer from the State Central Cybercrime Office of the Koblenz Public Prosecutor's Office.
So far, the focus has always been on the perpetrators who sell drugs or weapons on the Darknet - not those who make this business technically possible.
Four Dutch, three Germans and one Bulgarian are accused.
The "head of the group" is the 60-year-old Dutchman Herman Johan Xennt, who acquired the bunker previously used by the Bundeswehr at the end of 2013.
According to the indictment, he was the one who made all business decisions.
Another Dutchman is said to have acted as a kind of manager, a German was responsible for the bookkeeping.
The rest of the team, aged between 21 and 60, were administrators responsible for technology and IT.
They are said to have been involved in the deeds in varying degrees.
The case has caused a sensation nationwide - not only because of the extensive police operation.
(Read the large SPIEGEL reconstruction on the subject here.)
Among other things, the question quickly arose how the alleged criminals were able to get to a highly secured Bundeswehr site, which later made access particularly difficult.
Since Xennt is said to have run a company with a similar concept in a Dutch bunker before, there were even warnings about the sale.
And even if some had suspected quickly after the sale, the investigation by the police took several years before it was accessed.
"Because it was very time-consuming to prove that the operators were aware of the machinations of their customers," says Angerer.
But that was central to being able to charge her with aiding and abetting.
It was successful by monitoring the network node in the data center.
Among other things, chats can be used to prove that the criminal organization knew about the machinations and "significantly supported and promoted" them by providing the server.
It may never be possible to obtain a complete overview of what has happened on the servers: the amount of data secured when accessing 886 physical and virtual servers, among other things, is two million gigabytes, according to the Rhineland-Palatinate State Criminal Police Office.
Some physical and virtual servers are still "fully encrypted".
According to prosecutor Angerer, the evaluation is still ongoing.
It could be that after the "fine evaluation" of the computer, the gang would face further charges of new aiding and abetting offenses.
The proceedings on the bunker will begin on October 19 and, according to the Trier Regional Court, will be scheduled for two trial days per week until the end of 2021.
On the first day of the trial, the 40-page indictment could be read out first.
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yeah / dpa
