The Federal Criminal Police Office in Germany (BKA) and the internet-crime combating unit of Frankfurt (ZIT) have announced the seizure of Kingdom Market, a dark web marketplace for drugs, cybercrime tools, and fake government IDs.
The law enforcement operation also included authorities from the United States, Switzerland, Moldova, and Ukraine, while one of the administrators has been arrested in the US.
Kingdom Market was an English-speaking marketplace on the dark web with international reach that has operated since March 2021. Platform members sold drugs, malware, cybercrime services, stolen personal information, and forged documents, and paid in cryptocurrencies such as Bitcoin, Litecoin, Monero, and Zcash.
According to a BKA press release, the marketplace hosted 42,000 items for sale, 3,600 of which were from Germany. The authorities mention that Kingdom Market had tens of thousands of customer accounts and several hundred registered sellers.
BKA's
press release concludes that investigations to identify the people who operated the illegal market are underway, now also aided by analysis of the seized server infrastructure.
So far, one arrest has been confirmed, that of Alan Bill, aka "Vend0r" or "KingdomOfficial," a Slovakian who allegedly held an administrator role on the darknet platform and acted as a moderator for the market on Reddit.
US court documents state that Alan Bill was
arrested on December 15, 2023, with the US government unsealing
the complaint against the suspect yesterday.
