Police Confiscate 11,000 Bitcoin Wallets; Shut Down Dark Web Site
As the final legal chapters close on Ross Ulbricht’s Silk Road website held within the “Dark Web”, the proliferation of many, many more dark markets is making international news. Authorities have closed down one of these Dark Web havens, and have confiscated thousands of bitcoin wallets in association with its use. Under code name “Operation Babylon”, Italian officials have shut down the site that hosted over 14,000 members, performing over 170,000 transactions using Tor’s web browser. The illegal activity said to have taken place ranged from child pornography to drug and arms sales, to....
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The Argentinian Tax Authority (AFIP) will now be able to confiscate the assets that taxpayers have in digital wallets if they have debts with the organization. The recommendation for attorneys of this institution to include these digital accounts was made last year, but the execution of debt collection was suspended during the Covid-19 pandemic period. However, these procedures started being executed on January 31.
Argentinian Tax Authority Eyeing Digital Wallets
The AFIP, the Argentinian Tax Authority, has included funds in digital wallets as one of the assets that can be....
Illicit goods obtained by Dutch and German police. Source: om.nl. The Dutch public prosecution service is reporting that Dutch and German police have shut down and seized assets of Utopia, a dark net website only accessible via the Tor network used to trade illegal goods such as drugs, stolen credit card numbers, and weaponry similar to the Silk Road website shut down last year by American authorities. Five individuals with ties to the marketplace have been arrested and taken into custody, and authorities have seized about 900 bitcoins, worth about $595,000 at the time of this writing.....
Exactly one year after it went live on November 6 2013, Silk Road 2.0 has been taken offline in a joint operation between the FBI and Europol. Visitors to the deep web drug marketplace have been met with an official police notice informing them of the site's seizure. The New York FBI announced on Twitter that the site's operator Blake Benthall, was arrested in San Francisco. "Operator of Silk Road 2.0, Blake Benthall, arrested yesterday by FBI agents in San Francisco, CA. Business Insider reports the arrest of a major online drug dealer in Ireland, as part of Operation Onymous. European....
A major darknet marketplace, Sipulimarket, has been shut down and its assets, including bitcoin, were seized by Finnish Customs, in cooperation with Europol and the Polish police. Darknet Marketplace Shut Down, Bitcoin Seized Europol and Finnish Customs (Tulli) announced last week that they “have shut down the Sipulimarket dark web marketplace and seized all its content.” The operation was in close cooperation with the Polish Provincial Police Headquarters in Wroclaw (Komenda Wojewódzka Policji we Wroclawiu), Europol’s European Cybercrime Centre (EC3), and....
Texas police arrested Backpage.com CEO Carl Ferrer on Thursday and will move to shut down the site. The classified ad site is accused of human trafficking through its adult services section, which reportedly makes 90 per cent of its revenues. The arrest was a joint operation between the Texas and California attorneys-general offices. This case does not accuse anyone of providing or paying for adult services with bitcoin. However, digital currency was a popular payment method for site advertisers who could not use mainstream payment channels. Bitcoin brokerage Paxful produced this video,....