Almost 300 suspects have been arrested in an international police operation against a large darknet marketplace for trafficking narcotics. At the same time, more than 50 million euros in cash and cryptocurrency were confiscated, Europol announced on Tuesday in The Hague. The basis for the action was investigations by the Central Criminal Inspectorate (ZKI) Oldenburg against the darknet marketplace "Monopoly Market".

It was a joint action by security agencies in the US, UK, Brazil and Europe, Europol said. 288 suspects were arrested. In addition, almost a ton of drugs and 117 firearms were seized.

For their part, the Public Prosecutor's Office in Frankfurt am Main and ZKI Oldenburg said that investigations into the "Monopoly Market" had begun in close cooperation with the US Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) at the end of November 2021. At the end of December 2021, the darknet marketplace, which had been in existence since mid-2019 and was used exclusively to trade narcotics, had already been secured and shut down.

Previously, it had been determined that the marketplace had been technically operated via servers in Germany and Finland, the German investigators explained. On the marketplace, transactions worth the equivalent of around 21 million euros had been transacted.