In June 2025, police in Europe shut down a darknet marketplace for drugs called Archetyp Market, which had more than 600,000 users, and the following month the FBI announced that Operation Grayskull had led to the sentencing of 18 offenders to a total of 300 years for offenses relating to child sexual abuse material on the darknet.
The FBI maintains a Joint Criminal Opioid and Darknet Enforcement team, and in May 2025 it announced that 270 people had been arrested globally as part of Operation RapTor and that hundreds of pounds of fentanyl had been seized as part of an operation targeting drug traffickers on darknet websites.
But experts say the darknet—sometimes known as the dark web—keeps growing and is home to millions of megabytes of personal data, which are used by cybercriminals and ransomware gangs.
“You would be amazed how much personal data is drifting around on the darknet just from breach notifications,” Bob Erdman, associate vice president of research and development at cybersecurity company Fortra, based in Eden Prairie, Minnesota, told The Epoch Times.
“It seems like every month you get a new breach notification from some company or website you’ve interacted with, and all those little pieces keep getting assembled to build a profile of you, and then get resold to someone who’s either going to try [to] attack you or try and use you to attack somebody else,” Erdman said.
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