Odaily News The United States has imposed sanctions on Behrouz Parsarad, the Iranian operator of the darknet market Nemesis, and his crypto addresses. Since its launch in 2021, the market has been used to sell illegal items such as drugs, fake documents and hacking resources.
The sanctioned assets include 44 Bitcoin addresses and 5 Monero addresses, which received more than $850,000, and as the price of cryptocurrencies has risen, the total has exceeded $1.6 million. After the sanctions, US citizens are prohibited from trading with Parsarad and its holding companies.
Before the servers were seized in a joint law enforcement operation by the United States, Germany, and Lithuania, Nemesis had 30,000 active users and thousands of sellers, with money laundering built into the platform. Parsarad is estimated to have made millions of dollars in profits and is still trying to rebuild operations.
Despite the increase in law enforcement actions, darknet markets still generate more than $1.7 billion in revenue in 2024. Russian-language darknet markets dominate the market due to low law enforcement risk, and several darknet markets have been shut down in early 2024.

Odaily News According to an announcement from the U.S. Treasury Department's Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC), the U.S. government has added 49 cryptocurrency addresses to the sanctions list, which are controlled by Iranian citizen Behrouz Parsarad, who is accused of being the administrator of the dark web market Nemesis. The sanctioned addresses include 44 Bitcoin and 5 Monero addresses. Nemesis had 30,000 active users before it was shut down, and facilitated nearly $30 million in drug transactions during its three years of operation. According to OFAC, Parsarad made millions of dollars in profits by charging users transaction fees and was suspected of laundering money for drug traffickers and cybercriminals. Nemesis trades a wide range of items, including drugs, personal identity data, forged documents, ransomware, and cybercrime tools (such as phishing attacks and DDoS tools).