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Criminal services available via internet platform (symbolic image)
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Silas Stein/dpa
According to their own statements, the police have succeeded in an important blow against a large German-speaking criminal trading platform on the Internet.
Investigators took action against the operators of the “Crimemarket” platform on Thursday evening in a concerted operation throughout Germany and abroad, as the police in Düsseldorf announced.
Criminal services as well as detailed instructions on serious crimes or drugs are available on the platform.
A total of almost a hundred objects in almost all federal states were searched, said a police spokesman in Düsseldorf on Thursday evening.
There were also arrests.
He did not provide any information about how many people were arrested.
North Rhine-Westphalia was a focus of the campaign.
The investigators in Düsseldorf want to report further details of the operation on Friday afternoon.
The police spokesman emphasized that there will be no further information until then.
The investigations are not only directed against the operators of “Crimemarket”, but also against the providers and users of the platform, which is structured similarly to normal legal marketplaces on the Internet, the police said.
The access was preceded by intensive investigations led by the cybercrime central and contact point in North Rhine-Westphalia.
An investigative commission at the Düsseldorf Police Headquarters has been collecting evidence of crimes involving the criminal platform for years.
kub/dpa