Archetyp News - YGW/ANT aka Marc Hegemeister : Archetyp | Torhoo darknet markets

I am translating some recent news published on the Spanish media LaVanguardia. I will post the link on the comments.

A fan and computer musician: Thus the largest drug boss in Europe fell

In the early hours of Wednesday, June 11, a dozen agents from the German and Spanish police stormed an attic of a luxurious urbanization of Diagonal Mar and arrested a young German, Marc Hegemeister: the creator of Arco Archetyp Market, the largest online supermarket in the drug in Europe, which for four years he directed from Barcelona.

Carsten Meywirth, director of cyber crimes of the German Federal Police (Bundeskriminalamt), announced that the operation, called Deep Sentinel, dismantled "one of the oldest drug markets in the Dark Web." According to Europol, in addition to cutting "an important line of supply of some of the most dangerous substances in the world" sent a clear message to cybercriminals: "There is no refuge for those who earn money to harm."

Hegemeister, indeed, had become very rich. Police explained that Archetyp had 612,000 users and 3,200 registered vendors and in the five years he had been active, he had made transactions worth 250 million euros ... and of all he took a 5%commission.

Cybersecurity specialists explain that the platform operated as a drug Amazon: it contacted vendors with buyers, who could be both particular for self -consumption and wholesalers. He sold heroin, cocaine, ecstasy, and other synthetic drugs and especially cannabis, which was approximately 40% of its operations.

His fall has generated an unfortunate avalanche in the forums specialized in drug use, with his users asking "how can I surely find my medicine?", After the fall "of the best" seller, "the most reliable." "I had not bought at anyone else," said another forero.

Hegemeister combined the efficiency and a very German Puritan sense (his motto was: "Without weapons, without pornography, without racism, without poisons, without fraud") with the business studies that he studied in Monden-Lübbecke, a town in the northeast of the country. There he obtained the Business Economist Certificate, a non -university degree issued by vocational training centers, equivalent to our FP.

In Archetyp buyers scored sellers based on the punctuality of the shipping and quality of the product; He had a forum in which they debated and shared their experiences; He mediated with complaints and claims, and offered discounts to sellers if they offered welcome discounts to new clients.

This "professionalism" allowed Archetyp to take advantage of the dismantling of the other two large European clandestine markets, Dream Market and Silk Road, and become a key logistics knot of drug trafficking.

Its same success, however, was the origin of its fall. Hegemeister was obsessed with security. His supermarket operated on the Tor Network, where he had several “mirror” domains, he only admitted new users with invitation and demanded payment in the monero cryptodivisa, considered one of the ones that most protect the privacy of transactions.

However, he suffered constant attacks of bots of ddos (denial of services), some of their own competitors, linked to professional networks of drug traffickers who had reopened supermarkets that had been previously dismantled.

The police also considered its fall a priority objective: due to the large sales volume and because it was one of the few online platforms sold the hardest drugs, such as heroin and fentanyl. Cybersecurity experts speculate that one of those DDOS attacks, which the platform suffered in April, was really launched by the police, to be able to track the administrators of the network when they opened new mirror domains to keep it operational. Others ensure that the police arrived at the network by tracking the data of the vendors of another online store, Nemesis, dismantled in May.

Hegemeister, who covered his identity on the network with alias such as Yosemite Ghost Write, Big Boss Chef of Archetyp and Asnt, was not just a computer scientist. Electronic music fan (he has even composed an album on the border of rap and hip-hop) and martial arts, he explained in user forums of his own market his modest family origins, a gang youth and his entry into the world of drugs as a consumer of LSD.

In forums and in alternative media interviews he explained that with Archetyp I wanted to create an "archetype" of a utopian society, where drug use was "healthy and active" and "where values are more important than maximizing benefit." However, the drug had made him rich.

Neighbors of the Urbanization of the Paseo Garcia Faria where he lived, described as reserved and educated. The glasses and a slight overweight gave him an air of "computer mouse." He claimed to be an Internet entrepreneur, and thus justified his high train of life: duplex attic in the seafood, luxury watches and a corvette and a mercedes in the garage, although in the forums he boasted of never monetizing the cryptodivisas with which he was paid to avoid identifying him. The police seized them: 7.8 million euros, in total, and properties in Germany.

Assisted in the arrest by lawyer Jesús Becerra, Central Court 4 of the National Court sent him to Can Brians and last Tuesday he was extradited to Germany for crimes of drug trafficking, which entail a maximum penalty of 15 years. In Germany, the administrators of other markets have been condemned to life imprisonment.

In an interview published a few months ago he acknowledged that despite all his precautions he could be arrested. But he anticipated that Archetyp would be replaced "from one day to another" by another online supermarket that will be "the next head of the hydra."