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United States authorities arrested suspected dark web drug kingpin late last month while he was travelling from his base in France to the United States of America for this year’s annual World Beard and Mustache Championships.

Gal Vallerius, a 38-year-old French national, was travelling to Austin, Texas, for the competition but was caught by U.S. authorities on August 31 upon landing at Atlanta International Airport on a distribution complaint filed in Miami federal court, The Miami Herald reported Tuesday.

Authorities confirmed Vallerius' identity to the online moniker "OxyMonster," which was previously used to sell drugs on an illegal underground dark web marketplace called Dream Market by searching his laptop that the brown-beard contestant carried with him.

Alleged Moderator/Admin Of Dark-Web Dream Market

According to Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) affidavit filed in September, Vallerius was an administrator, senior moderator and vendor on Dream Market, an eBay-type marketplace for illegal narcotics and drug paraphernalia.

Vallerius was suspected of openly advertising and selling drugs including cocaine, LSD, methamphetamine, fentanyl and oxycodone, on Dream Market between May 2015 and August 2017.

After searching his laptop, officials confirmed Vallerius' log-in credential for Dream Market and uncovered roughly $500,000 worth of bitcoins—the currency used to complete the transactions—and a PGP encryption key entitled OxyMonster.

Vallerius' laptop also contained the Tor browser, which lets users hide their true internet protocol (IP) addresses, allowing them to operate anonymously on the network.

According to the Miami Herald, the suspect is now expected to be transferred from Atlanta to Miami, where he will be facing a fresh conspiracy indictment that carries up to life in federal prison.

U.S. authorities have been cracking down on dark web marketplaces. A few months back, Europol along with FBI, DEA (Drug Enforcement Agency) and Dutch National Police disrupted two major underground markets, AlphaBay and Hansa.

Benefitted from the shutdown of its rivals, Dream Market had a total of 94,236 listings as of 29 August 2017. Now, if Vallerius is found admin of the platform, his arrest could bring an end to Dream Market as well.

AlphaBay Market — one of the largest Dark Web marketplaces for drugs, guns, and other illegal goods — that mysteriously went dark earlier this month without any explanation from its admins has reportedly been shut down by the international authorities.

On July 4th, the dark web marketplace suddenly went down without any explanation from its admins, which left its customers who have paid large sums in panic.

Some customers even suspected that the site's admins had pulled an exit scam to steal user funds.

However, according to the Wall Street Journal, the disappearance of the AlphaBay came after authorities in the United States, Canada, and Thailand collaborated to conduct a series of raids and arrest Alexandre Cazes, who allegedly was one of the AlphaBay's operators.

Citing "people familiar with the matter," the publication claims that Cazes, a resident of Canada, was arrested in Thailand and taken into custody in Bangkok on July 5th, the same day the police executed two raids on residences in Quebec, Canada.

The 26-year-old Canadian citizen was awaiting extradition to the United States when a guard found him hanged in his jail cell on Wednesday, the Chiang Rai Times confirms. Cazes is believed to have hanged himself using a towel.
Cazes had been living in Thailand for nearly 8 years. During his arrest, authorities also seized "four Lamborghini cars and three houses worth about 400 million baht ($11.7 million) in total."

AlphaBay, also known as "the new Silk Road," also came in the news at the beginning of this year when a hacker successfully hacked the AlphaBay site and stole over 200,000 private unencrypted messages from several users.

After the disappearance of Silk Road, AlphaBay emerged in 2014 and became a leader among dark web marketplaces for selling illicit goods from drugs to stolen credit card numbers, exploits, and malware.

Unlike dark web market 'Evolution' that suddenly disappeared overnight from the Internet, stealing millions of dollars worth of Bitcoins from its customers, AlphaBay Market was shut down by the law enforcement, suffering the same fate as Silk Road.

Silk Road was shut down after the law enforcement raided its servers in 2013 and arrested its founder Ross William Ulbricht, who has been sentenced to life in prison.

The FBI also seized Bitcoins (worth about $33.6 million, at the time) from the site. Those Bitcoins were later sold in a series of auctions by the United States Marshals Service (USMS).

On Tuesday, the Dutch Police arrested a 36-year-old man, Danny Manupassa, on suspicion of money laundering and involvement in selling encrypted smartphones to criminals.

Manupassa owns a company called Ennetcom, which provides customized Blackberry Phones with the secure PGP-encrypted network.

Reportedly, Ennetcom sold nearly 19,000 encrypted cell phones at 1500 euros each in last few years.

Police have seized Ennetcom servers based in the Netherlands and Canada and pulled them offline.

The seized servers contain data of encrypted communications belong to a large number of criminals.
According to a press release, the investigation is ongoing and seized data from the servers will be analyzed soon.

Police believe this operation would result in collecting evidence required for solving numerous ongoing investigations involving drug trafficking, assassinations, and other serious crimes.

Moreover, Canadian Police is also involved in this investigation and surprisingly, it was revealed last week that the Canadian police holds a master decryption key for BlackBerry phones since 2010.

Police have also hinted that the authorities will keep a close watch on companies offering similar encrypted services those are being abused by criminals and terrorists.

Last December, German authorities seized servers of an encrypted email service that was believed to have been used to send bomb threatening emails to several school districts across the United States.

"We are disappointed that law enforcement took this extreme step. WhatsApp cannot provide information we do not have. We cooperated to the full extent of our ability in this case, and while we respect the important job of law enforcement, we strongly disagree with its decision."

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"I wish I could go back and convince myself to take a different path," Ulbricht said. "If given the chance, I would never break the law again."

"The action aimed to stop the sale, distribution and promotion of illegal and harmful items, including weapons and drugs, which were being sold on online ‘dark’ marketplaces," according to the Europol press release.

"We are not 'just' removing these services from the open Internet, said Troels Oerting, Head of Europol's EC3 (European Cybercrime Centre) cyber crime unit. "This time we have also hit services on the Darknet using Tor where, for a long time, criminals have considered themselves beyond reach. We can now show that they are neither invisible nor untouchable. The criminals can run but they can’t hide. And our work continues."

"As alleged, Blake Benthall attempted to resurrect Silk Road, a secret website that law enforcement seized last year, by running Silk Road 2.0, a nearly identical criminal enterprise," Manhattan US Attorney Preet Bharara said in a statement. "Let’s be clear—this Silk Road, in whatever form, is the road to prison. Those looking to follow in the footsteps of alleged cybercriminals should understand that we will return as many times as necessary to shut down noxious online criminal bazaars. We don’t get tired."

"The offerings on Silk Road 2.0 consisted overwhelmingly of illegal drugs, which were openly advertised as such on the site. As of October 17, 2014, Silk Road 2.0 had over 13,000 listings for controlled substances," reads the complaint.

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