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A judicial officer leads a defendant into the courtroom (symbolic image)
Photo: Harald Tittel / dpa
Because they are said to have operated one of the largest illegal marketplaces on the Darknet, the Koblenz Public Prosecutor's Office has brought charges against two alleged cyber criminals.
The couple from Australia are said to have operated an online trading platform called DarkMarket with previously unidentified accomplices, as the authority announced on Tuesday.
Illegal drugs, counterfeit money, stolen credit cards and malware were sold there.
The couple has been accused of assisting drug trafficking in more than a hundred thousand cases.
Investigators from the General Public Prosecutor's Office in Koblenz and the Central Criminal Inspectorate in Oldenburg managed to take what is possibly the world's largest illegal marketplace on the Darknet offline.
He admin, she mediator
The man is said to have been the administrator of the platform.
It was said that he had activated the seller for use and monitored and paid the accomplices.
His wife is said to have been responsible for the design of the shop and the settlement of disputes between salespeople and customers.
The two are said to have kept a commission from the sales made through their website.
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According to the indictment, the couple is said to have activated a total of 1,499 sellers and assisted 172,562 drug deals between July 2019 and January 2021.
They are also said to have imported 1023 tablets of the opiate oxycodone from Denmark on January 10, 2021 and carried a butterfly knife, which is banned in Germany, ready to use.
The couple were arrested after arriving from Denmark and have been in custody ever since.
Servers in Ukraine and Moldova
At the time of the shutdown in January, DarkMarket was one of the world's largest illegal marketplaces with around 500,000 users and more than 2,400 sellers.
A total of at least 320,000 transactions were carried out.
Various crypto currencies were used to pay for.
At the time of the shutdown of DarkMarket, their value corresponded to a sum of more than 140 million euros.
The marketplace servers were seized in Ukraine and Moldova.
According to the attorney general's office, the couple have not yet commented on the allegations.
The Trier Regional Court must decide whether to initiate proceedings.
According to the Koblenz Public Prosecutor's Office, the import of drugs is "threatened with a minimum sentence of five years." Aiding and abetting drug trafficking is punishable by up to eleven years and three months in prison.
In the future, the operators of such marketplaces could face even higher penalties: Last week, the Bundestag passed new laws against the operation of such darknet marketplaces, which provide for prison sentences of up to ten years.
mak / AFP
