Global cybercrime crackdown: Europol shuts down over 373,000 dark web sites 

From 9 to 19 March 2026, 23 countries, including Ukraine, joined forces in ‘Operation Alice’,  a global operation led by German authorities and supported by Europol against one of the largest networks of fraudulent platforms in the dark web. 

The investigation began in mid-2021 against the dark web platform “Alice with Violence CP”. During the investigation, authorities discovered that the platform’s operator was running more than 373,000 onion domains (websites) on the dark web advertising child sexual abuse material (CSAM) and cybercrime-as-a-service (CaaS) offerings. 

An onion domain is a special type of website address that is designed to hide the identity and location of the website and the people visiting it. From February 2020 to July 2025, the suspect advertised CSAM on different platforms, which were accessible through more than 90,000 of those onion domains. 

On these platforms, the perpetrator offered CSAM that could allegedly be purchased as “packages” after providing an email address and making a payment in Bitcoin. Each package had an estimated cost of between €17 and €215, and promised data volumes ranging from a few gigabytes to several terabytes of CSAM. 

The investigation uncovered the identities of 440 customers who had used the operator’s services. Due to the nature of the purchases, additional investigations were launched against them.

Ukraine in this operation was represented by the National Police of Ukraine.

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Press release