It was created by Renukanth Subramaniam in London, and was shut down in 2008 after FBI agent J. Keith Mularski infiltrated it using the alias Master Splyntr, leading to more than 60 arrests worldwide.
[3] However, German prosecutors in the cities of Koblenz and Oldenburg said 12 January 2021 that they had shut down what was "probably the largest illegal marketplace on the Darknet" called DarkMarket and physically arrested the man believed to operate it near Germany's border with Denmark.
[4][5] The website allowed buyers and sellers of stolen identities and credit card data to meet and conduct criminal enterprise in an entrepreneurial, peer-reviewed environment.
[7] According to supervisory special agent Mularski of the FBI's Cyber Initiative & Resource Fusion Unit, their undercover operation was "very successful in getting to the upper echelons of the Dark Market group and we were actually able to run the server and host all the communications that were going on there to make our cases.
Working with our international partners in the United Kingdom, Germany, and Turkey, the FBI conducted a two-year undercover operation to penetrate the organization and bring it to its knees.
Multi-agency and multi-national coordination with our law enforcement partners led to over 60 arrests worldwide, as well as the prevention of $70 million in economic loss that otherwise would have occurred from compromised victim accounts.