The 22-year-old student had been arrested on October 25. It is said that the student was involved in running a darknet market place specialized for the German speaking countries. The darknet marketplace under the name "Deutschland im Deep Web 3" with a self-given motto "No control, everything permitted", was no news to the authorities, because prior to this, a market that used the same name was seized in 2017.

This was one of its attempted successor. It is suspected that the 22-year-old student began administrating the marketplace since its opening in 2018. That would make him only 18 years old at the time.

The Federal Criminal Police Office of Germany (BKA) says:

The platform, which had not been accessible to users since March 2022, had around 16,000 registered users, including a total of 72 active traders. This made "Germany on the Deep Web" one of the largest German-language darknet platforms.

One of the Admins of the marketplace, Sudo which probably is also the 22-year-old student, announced at the Dread Forum that a fire in DiDW's data center was responsible for the outage in March 2022. However, the story was met with a disbelief and it was rumored that this was an attempted exit scam. The forums seems to have never recovered since then.

The arrested individual is accused of operating a criminal trading forum, which as per Section 127 of the Criminal Code, involves a sentence of 1 to 10 years. The operator of the previous market, seized in 2017, is said to be sentenced for 6 years in prison by the Federal Court of Justice in Germany (BGH). It's worth noting that the case of previous market was a bit more sophisticated, as the operator was also charged and sentenced with an involuntarily manslaughter.