Cyberbunker Trial: Manager never claims to have seen drug trafficking complaints

The manager of the cyber bunker in Traben-Trarbach an der Mosel, who is responsible for complaints, claims never to have heard of any information about child pornography or drug trafficking on servers in the data center. "There have never been any complaints in this direction," said 51-year-old Dutchman Michiel R. on Monday in front of the Trier district court and added: "I have never heard of child pornography, drug trafficking or other crimes." The trial against the operators of the bunker began in mid-October. They are accused of aiding and abetting around 250,000 crimes and of forming a criminal organization.

In his interrogation, R. said that the complaints were mainly about botnets, phishing attempts and copyright infringements. During his responsibility for abuse since July 2016, he repeatedly insisted that phishing be taken. In the case of complaints about copyright violations, standardized emails were sent to the customers of the data center. There were never any answers to that: "We considered that to be done," said R.

The main defendant in the Netherlands, Herman Johan Xennt, made sure that the Cyberbunker company should never be brought into connection with its other companies, Calibur and Systems. He thought the data center was serious. "I never thought that we were there to serve the bad guys," said R. He was "still convinced that even Xennt didn't know what was going on . "

In response to the court's allegation that there had been a reference to child pornography and investigations by the Swedish police in July 2018, the manager said he could only remember that his boss himself had destroyed a hard drive.

The statements of the manager contradict media reports, according to which he should have "without hesitation" agreed in May 2019 to hand over the servers of the Darknet trading platform Wall Street Market to the investigators. According to information from Golem.de, this police action was not yet the subject of interrogation.

Four Dutch, three German and one Bulgarian between the ages of 21 and 60 are charged. They are said to have hosted illegal websites with alternating participation from June 2013 to September 2019, thereby aiding and abetting the crimes committed by their customers. Xennt has not yet commented on the proceedings that should run until the end of 2021.

According to the indictment, markets and forums such as Cannabis Road, Fraudsters, Flugsvamp and Orangechemicals were hosted. The control servers for the attacks on one million routers of Deutsche Telekom customers in 2016 were also located in the data center.

Customers were allowed "any desired content, except child pornography or anything that has to do with terrorism," as stated on the Cyberbunker.com website . In his interrogation on Monday, R. claimed that he had never looked at the website closely.

The cyberbunker is located above Traben-Trarbach on Mont Royal. (Photo: Friedhelm Greis / Golem.de)