The German Federal Criminal Police Office (BKA) discovered and seized operational and backup servers of 47 illegal cryptocurrency exchanges.
According to the agency’s statement, these services were used by ransomware operators, botnet owners, and darknet marketplace vendors.
During the operation, law enforcement gained access to IP addresses, registration data, and user transactions, which were stored on the servers despite the “assurances of the exchange administrators.”
The information found will be used for further investigation of illegal activities.
The BKA’s website lists 47 exchanges with data on launch dates, user numbers, and transactions.
Many of the blocked services were Russian-speaking. The oldest had been operating since 2015.
Most of the exchanges mentioned in the news were listed on the BestChange aggregator. They are now inactive. BestChange analyst Nikita Zuborev acknowledged “serious problems” with exchange services using German hosting in a comment to ForkLog.
“We can indirectly confirm the possibility of server seizures and unencrypted data being taken from them, but we do not have enough information to discuss the reliability and relevance of the information stored there.
We have also suspended their listing on our monitoring until the situation is clarified. It is unclear who and in what form gained access to the hosting of these sites, so we have additionally restricted access from our platform,” he stated.
According to Zuborev, without proper verification of the presented data and the legal force of the accusations, the BKA’s announcement represents “a release of information obtained during a pre-trial investigation.”
“It is too early to draw conclusions about the degree of guilt without a full judicial process, and the existence of compromising facts regarding the exchange services has not yet been publicly proven. It is unclear which transactions and in what context raised investigators’ suspicions, which prevents us from commenting on their legitimacy,” the analyst added.
Back in late August, the German Financial Supervisory Authority seized 13 cryptocurrency ATMs operating without the necessary permits.