The platform, which was used in particular for the resale of information, had already been disrupted for two months. The European police indicated on April 12 that the domain name has been permanently deactivated.
The biggest hacker forum bows out. Europol, the European criminal police agency, and the US Department of Justice announced on Tuesday April 12 the closure of RaidForums, the main cybercrime marketplace. The site, normally accessible in free access, is now offline. A solemn image appears instead stating ” the domain name has been entered “. Numerama reported that the site was already disrupted for more than two months since the connection to the forum was impossible.
The forum’s founder and chief administrator, Diego Santos Coelho, 21, from Portugal, was arrested in the UK on January 31. The US Department of Justice said he remains in custody pending extradition. The Europe site specifies that two other accomplices were also arrested. Three different domain names that pointed to the RaidForums website were seized: raidforums.com, Rf.ws and Raid.lol.
The deactivation of the platform is the result of an international collaboration. Police from the UK, US, Germany, Sweden, Portugal and Romania were all involved in taking down the platform in an operation dubbed Tourniquet.
An easy way to buy information
Europol notes in its press release that the people who ensured the operation of RaidForums are also guilty of money laundering and theft of information.
RaidForums was launched in 2015 and has gained international notoriety in the cyber world, offering very easy access to data leaks. Anyone could obtain information for a sum of money.
The compromised data could contain usernames, contact details, credit card numbers, etc. The RaidForums community had over 750,000 members.
This is the second shutdown of an online criminal marketplace in the space of a few days. On April 6, the German police announced the dismantling of Hydra Market, a platform hosted on the darknet, operating in Russian. According to the authorities, sales on the site amounted to at least 1.23 billion euros for the year 2020 alone.
