Skurio comment on DarkMarket Europol takedown
January 2021 by Skurio
Given the recent news around the shutdown of DarkMarket by Europol authorities, Skurio CEO Jeremy Hendy provides the following comments:
“Takedown of Dark Web marketplaces for illicit goods is positive news and law enforcement agencies have had significant success over recent years. We have seen, however, a pattern of marketplaces rising and falling and where the “top” market has been taken down only to be replaced by larger, easier to access markets. So, the recent announcement by Europol is unlikely to have any long-term impact on the illicit trading scene.
Whilst these efforts by law enforcement cause temporary disruption for suppliers, the reality is that these actions are unlikely to have any long-term impact. They are almost certainly pushing vendors to operate on multiple markets and embrace new ways of trading, using end-to-end encrypted applications such as Telegram and Signal.
In the past, we have also seen that Dark Web site shutdowns have been initiated by organisers themselves as exit scams. A recent example is Empire along with other markets including BitBazaar in August, Apollon in March and Nightmare in August 2019”.