The world’s largest online illegal marketplace today was taken offline and an Australian man accused of running it has been arrested.

The unnamed 34-year-old man from Australia said to be behind the marketplace, DarkMarket, was picked up by police in the city of Koblenz in the southwest of Germany. According to police, the investigation was a collaboration of law enforcement in Germany, the U.K., Denmark, Switzerland, Moldova, Ukraine, Australia, as well as the FBI, the Drug Enforcement Agency’s narcotics law enforcement division and the Internal Revenue Service. It was all coordinated by Europol, Europe’s police agency.

According to that investigation, DarkMarket — run on the dark web, a shady part of the internet that can host illicit activity — had almost a half-million users. It had 2,400 sellers working within the marketplace, and more than 320,000 transactions had taken place there. This amounted to about $171 million transferred via the cryptocurrencies bitcoin and Monero.

The main items sold in the marketplace were illegal drugs, counterfeit money, stolen or counterfeit credit card details, anonymous SIM cards and malware. Police seized more than 20 servers in Ukraine and Moldova, which they hope will give them more information about the sellers and buyers in the marketplace. As for the Australian man, he’s currently being held by police, although it’s reported so far he hasn’t given any information.

According to reports, the COVID-19 pandemic played a big part in the rising popularity of DarkMarket. With many drug traffickers and dealers finding it harder to do business on the street, the internet became the place where transactions were made.

In September last year, Europol said the “golden age” of dark markets had come to an end after 179 vendors and buyers were arrested for doing illegal business on the dark web. Nonetheless, the online war on drugs has been compared to the decades-long war on drugs, in that once one person, or marketplace, is taken down, another pops up soon after.

DarkMarket was once said to be the “Silk Road the FBI can never seize” thanks to its decentralization and open-source nature.

Photo: SoulRider.222/Flickr