Berlin Couple Standing Trial For Dark Net Drug Trafficking

A wife and a husband from Berlin, Germany were standing trial on May 3 for selling narcotics on the dark web.

The 30-year-old Daniel B. and his 35-year-old wife Juliana B. are accused of selling various illicit substances, including cocaine and amphetamine as well as prescription drugs illegally on darknet marketplaces since 2014. According to the court documents, the accused persons used the national postal service to send the narcotics in parcels to their customers. Since investigators did not find any fingerprints on the parcels, law enforcement authorities suspect that the defendants used gloves to avoid placing fingerprints on the packaging, which could result in providing incriminating evidence to the police. Investigators stated that the couple used their apartment in the district of Hohenschönhausen as their base of operations. According to the police, the couple made over 320,000 euros with their dark net scheme and recorded 1,205 individual sales on dark net marketplaces.

Law enforcement authorities did not provide any information on the arrests of the suspects, and how investigators had gathered information on the transactions and sales of the couple. It could be possible, as we had seen in many cases (in Germany too) that the defendants kept a list or some kind of bookkeeping in their home when the police searched the apartment, where they detailed the transactions they had conducted on the dark web. Another way for investigators to find out the sales of a darknet vendor is when law enforcement authorities are able to log into the account of the seller on a darknet marketplace, where officers can see all the details of the illicit operation. This way, investigators can determine what products did the vendor sell, how many orders he or she had, the quantity of drugs offered, and the number of transactions on the seller’s profile.

“The whole criminal energy came from me,” the 30-year-old husband said. Daniel B., who works as a toolmaker, also told the court about his addiction to narcotics. However, the prosecution claimed that with his statement, the husband only tried to clean his wife of guilt. According to the husband, the woman had only gone to the post office with the packages containing the narcotics to send them to their customers. The prosecutor, however, assumed that Juliana B. was an accomplice.

According to police information, the woman had set up an account under her (or her birth name) to conduct price negotiations, order packaging material and stamps, and to accept goods from suppliers. During the court trial, both defendants announced statements for the next trial day. In the case of confessions, the husband could be sentenced to a maximum of six years in prison, while the wife could face a maximum of four years and four months imprisonment for her crimes. The prosecution charged both suspects with drug trafficking on the internet.

The process will continue on May 9.