The long arm of the law has finally managed to make its way across the Internet, resulting in one major drug website bust along the way. In this international crackdown on underground websites that have put up illegal drugs on sale, up to 17 people have been arrested to date – and it does not look as though this is going to be the end of it, rather, it is just the start. According to Dutch prosecutors, the arrests were said to have happened across two continents, coming in the U.S., Ireland and Germany.
Troels Oerting, the head of the police agency’s cybercrimes division, did mention that it performed co-ordinated raids in over a dozen countries, where they included a U.S. operation. Over here Stateside, the FBI made an announcement concerning the arrest in San Francisco, where a man was accused of running the Silk Road 2.0 online drug bazaar. Oerting said, “We will go after drug dealers regardless of whether they operate in the physical or virtual world.”
Apart from the Silk Road site, Europol has also mentioned that they have successfully seized or shut down many other marketplaces that carried fancy names while involved in illegal drug sales, including the likes of Hydra, Cloud Nine, Pandora and Blue Sky, picking up $1 million (800,000 euros) in digital currency as well as up to $225,000 worth of cash and drugs.
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