Right-wing radicals courted

As the SPIEGEL reports in its latest issue and its cover story today, the so-called cyber-bunker in Traben-Trarbach operated by the Dutch  Sven Olaf Kamphuis was an "El Dorado" for the right-wing extremist groups. 

Right-wing radicals were particularly favoured and courted here. Countless discounts were granted for the right-wing members of the Identitarian Movement.

 
Apparently, Nazi groups felt at home in the concrete walls and accessed the services of the Dutch.

The question now is, did the right-wing rabble finance itself through the countless crimes committed through the cyber-bunker in Traben-Trarbach? Was the cyber-bunker just a hoster or the cooking pot of the digital and political underground?

Traben-Trarbach by Steffen Zahn/flickr

The subculture that formed in the cyber-bunker over time became more and more threatening. The actual background of the bunker has not been clarified until today. Countless drug deals, which ran via so-called marketplaces, similar to eBay or Amazon, have been handled by the Darknet hoster. One of the Dutch operators, Hermann Xennt, denied that he had child porn, weapons and terror on his servers. This fact has already been refuted. It was the proverbial paradise for the illegal shop operators, who for many years did not have to fear any state evil. 
 

The question may be allowed whether the right-wing rabble financed itself from the crimes that thus found their basis in the cyber-bunker, or whether even illegal party financing was sponsored by the services offered by the cyber-bunker from narcotics shops and human trafficking.

 
This gap in the market was certainly of interest to the right-wing. It was an exciting offer for the Identitarian Movement, as they could supply themselves with false papers and countless other illegal gadgets offered in the Darknet shops.  Reality is passing by Hermann Xennt, the operator of the bunker, who denies the fact and who, according to NDR, describes his sheltershelter only as a kind of "safe deposit box" where the employees would have assessed the data.   

And the head of the entire operation - Sven Olaf Kamphuis?

He and his comrades-in-arms dilute the police findings to legal action and compare their hosting activities with the work of Wikileaks. In doing so, they don't tire of spreading trivialising conspiracy theories, allegedly they only came into the sights of the authorities because they once hosted data from Wikileaks. 

The original bunker once stood in Zeeland. After a fire in a rented part of the bunker in 2002, a drug lab was found. The Dutch bunker was then shut down.  

There is also increasing evidence of other such installations in Germany. 

The amount of data from the Traben-Trarbach bunker does not yet seem to have been evaluated enough to give the right-wing scene the ideological "ping of death".

Crime subculture organized in the bunker

A press conference was held yesterday as part of the charges brought by the General Prosecutor's Office in Koblenz against the operators and managers of the bunker in Traben-Trarbach. The shelter had been taken up last September. In the process, 403 servers, 57 mobile phones, 412 individual hard disks, 61 computers or laptops, 65 USB storage media, 16 SD cards and various CDs and floppy disks with a total data stock of more than two petabytes (over 2 million gigabytes) were seized. The operation was carried out by GSG 9 (Special unit) and mobile task forces, as well as hundreds of police officers.

Documents available to the editors speak their own language. Profit at any price and the ruthless pursuit of those who wanted to dry up the "bulletproof host" system. Besides, the collaboration with other groups of perpetrators who were not mentioned in the context of the current indictment, such as the operators of the so-called "southern cocaine route", as well as the many small "water carriers" of the "Bulletproof-Host" system, who nested in the slipstream of the bunker on the Moselle, which was procured by a Dutchman in 2013.

It has to be said that some of the servers could not be evaluated so far because the data is encrypted. 

Now, eight accused persons have been charged by the Landeszentralstelle Cybercrime (LZC) of the General Prosecutor's Office in Koblenz at the Regional Court in Trier, including the Juvenile Criminal Court, as some of the accused still fall under juvenile criminal law.  For reasons of procedural economy, only a few offences were charged. 

Pseudo E-Bay for darknet cave newts

The explanations were very detailed for the fact that the judiciary in Koblenz is entering uncharted legal territory by accusing the accused in the sense of a criminal association, and by mutually attributing the acts to the participants, which made it possible for the perpetrators to commit the acts at all. Drug trafficking, counterfeit money deals, data theft, child porn, computer sabotage, murder orders, bodily injury, cyber-attacks, extortion and money laundering were the business model of the heroes of the digital underground.

Everything was contained in the "colourful bouquet of products" of the men from the bunker.

Like cave newts, they formed the interface to all darkness dealers of the internet. The aggressive advertising caught not only the eye of the knowledgeable observer but also the "Trojanisation" of legal products on the internet, which were then also traded in the legal part of the internet, partly via mailboxes, by affiliated dealers. However, entire shops were also hosted, which, like "Cannabis Road", only existed for a few months and then disappeared from the market, as is usual in the industry. But the cut was made. One example was the Darknet marketplace "Wall Street Market", an invariably profitable market where drugs were traded in the kg range. Other business areas were not limited to drug trafficking from China, but also included fraudulent Bitcoin lotteries, Darknet marketplaces for weapons, counterfeit money, murder orders and child pornography, and identity theft.  This operation was carried out via, according to the LKA and the public prosecutor's office, 6,581(!) Darknet websites. Own distribution rings, organized through the "Bulletproof Host", were directed out of the bunker.  Serious assault on order and an interface to scammers, such as drug and medicine dealers of self-sufficient dealers, were also coordinated from here. 

Not to mention the countless people-smugglers and money launderers, blackmailers. Everything illegal was allowed. The bunker was run according to the latest management and market profitability criteria. Investigators still erroneously assume that "only" drug markets were formed in the darknet or botnets in the digital underground. To reach further groups of buyers, the operators, mainly from the Netherlands, decided early on to enter the Clearnet. Parts of the Clearnet of the network should still exist. 

Data was also collected here against possible opponents of the "bulletproof host" and affiliated shops, for which orders were then placed to silence the people concerned.

Since 2016 there were various hints on the bunker, but they were not seen in context.