Crackdown on darknet drugs websites yields 17 arrests

Seventeen people have been arrested in a series of co-ordinated raids on underground websites selling illegal drugs, a top Europol official said yesterday, in one of the largest crackdowns on the so-called ‘darknet’ to date.

Dutch prosecutors said the arrests were made in the US, Ireland, and Germany.

Head of the European police agency’s cybercrimes division Troels Oerting said it co-ordinated police operations in more than a dozen countries on Thursday from its headquarters in The Hague, Netherlands.