Police in 17 nations around the globe Friday shut down 17 or more so-called dark web marketplaces specializing in sales of illegal goods. These underground cyber marketplaces allegedly dealt in weapons, drugs, counterfeit goods and illegal merchandise of all sorts.

The operation was called "Onymous." It also resulted in the seizure of drugs, gold, silver, bitcoin and cash. Users trying to access the closed sites instead found legal notices posted under the name of the U.S. Department of Justice, Homeland Security Investigations and European law enforcement agencies.

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Many of these dark online marketplaces displayed goods similarly to Amazon and eBay. They evaded detection from authorities by operating through The Onion Router, or TOR. That's a sub rosa computer labyrinth that routes computer communication through several separate computer systems aimed at cloaking user IP addresses. Domain names on this network all end in dot-onion.

Authorities from U.S., Canadian and European law enforcement agencies working through the Europol Holland coordination complex seized the servers hosting dark marketplaces. They took over more than 400 domains with dot-onion addresses.

Dark marketplaces shut down included Black Market, Blue Sky, SR2, Hydra, Hidden empire, RepAAA, Cloud Nine, Cannabis Road, Golden Nugget and Pandora.

Irish authorities arrested two men and seized illegal drugs, notably LSD and Ecstasy, worth almost $225,000. They also accessed accounts dealing in bitcoin and drugs that they turned over to other law enforcement agencies in Poland, Belize and Switzerland.

British police arrested six people including Silk Road 2.0 web administrators who succeeded Silk Road administrators arrested in a previous sting. Partners from the European Cybercrime Centre also took out technical infrastructures key to web hosting dark web marketplaces, the British National Crime Agency said.

Those criminal infrastructures were "supporting serious organized crime," said Troels Oerting, Europe's European Cybercrime Center assistant director. "Criminals have considered themselves beyond reach," he said. "We can now show that they are neither invisible nor untouchable."

For their part, those advocating dark web marketplaces traded concerns on DeepDotWeb, an underground marketplace Internet forum. The site administrator called the sweep "one of the darkest days in the Dark Net Markets history."

Tagsdark web, ecommerce, Silk Road, europol, homeland security, Drugs, weapons, online, cybercrime