On 11th June, Archetyp Market's administrator was arrested and it's server infrastructure seized by by German (BKA) law enforcement. In an operation named "Deep Sentinel". Archetyp was the current longest running market, operating for 5 years. The market's estimated revenue is €250 million and had approximately 612,000 users and 3,200 vendors.
The Initial, Unannounced, Seizure and Arrest
ASNT (also known as YosemiteGhostWrite or BigBossChefOfArchetyp), a 30 year old German citizen, was arrested at his residence in Barcelona by Spanish police.
- The administrator's apartments in Barcelona, Hanover, the Minden-Lübbecke district and Bucharest were searched.
- 8 mobile phones, 4 computers and 34 data storage devices were seized.
- Assets totaling approximately €7.8 million were seized.
- Law enforcement claim Archetyp's servers were hosted in the Netherlands.
- Further coordinated searches were conducted in Germany and Sweden which targeted moderators and sellers. As a result, 7 additional people were arrested in Sweden.
While the administrator was arrested on 11th June. Law enforcement didn't announce the seizure until 5 days later, on 16th June. On the same day ASNT was arrested, law enforcement put up a maintenance page on all mirrors of the market.
The maintenance message appeared abruptly with no warning from the administrator. Due to Archetyp's longstanding history, the majority of users assumed everything was fine and the market would return to normal soon.
One day later, on 12th June, there was still no update from the administrator. A number of posts were made to bring attention to the this:
Shortly after these topic started to gain traction, "ASNT" posted an update on the situation:
While this reassured users, the market would stay in maintenance from 11th to 16th June, with no further updates from the administrator.
As each day passed during this 5 day period, the majority of users would quickly lose hope of Archetyp's return.
During this period users had noticed:
- The market's clearnet domains (used for rotating mirror) had been moved to Amazon Web Services.
- ASNT had used "–" instead of his usual "-" in the title of his recent post.
The Announcement
On 16th June, the seizure banner was up and BKA announced ASNT's arrest. Law enforcement posted a signed message from ASNT's Dread account:
Law enforcement posted a short video on the takedown and a video of an arrest:
RIP YosemiteGhostWrite.
rip