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In the 1970s, the German army (the western part of Germany, which, in contrast to the Soviet GDR, existed until the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989) built an underground bunker near the town of Traben-Trarbach near the Belgian border. Large and deep, it could withstand a nuclear strike, and the people inside could survive for a long time due to the numerous supplies of food and water. From 1978 to 2012, the bunker served as the headquarters of the military meteorological department, and about 350 people were constantly working inside. Newcomers often got lost in giant and identical corridors, and natural light never got there.
In 2012, the army redeployed the meteorological office, and the German authorities put the bunker up for sale for 350 thousand euros (more than 30 million rubles). This relatively low price was due to the costs required to maintain the operation of the bunker. The perimeter around was protected by a fence, and on the territory, in addition to the bunker, there was an office building, satellite dishes, a helipad and barracks built by the Nazis.
Authorities hoped the site would be of interest to a tech company or a themed hotel, but potential buyers weren't found until 53-year-old Dutchman Herman-Johan Xennt contacted them to buy a bunker for “a web-based business. hosting ", promising to provide jobs for hundreds of residents of the nearby city. Despite the vague wording, local authorities agreed to the deal. One way or another, there were no others. The story of an enterprising Dutchman who became a star of the darknet was told by The New Yorker.
Childhood dream, ideology of free internet and drugs
Hermann-Johan was born in 1959 in the small Dutch town of Arnhem, where fierce fighting took place during World War II. As a teenager, he became interested in historic buildings, visiting abandoned Nazi bunkers, and later watched Star Wars and converted his room into a spaceship. The strange surname Zent also came from those years - the young man invented it himself, changing his father's surname. The parents did not mind, and soon they, like all the friends of the teenager, called him simply Zent.In the early 1980s, he graduated from college and went into the computer business, immersed in it. At the same time, Zent married a Dutch woman Angelica, and the couple had two sons. However, the marriage did not last long, and the businessman again went into business. In 1995, he saved enough money to buy a former NATO bunker near the town of Gus, which the local authorities had put up for sale a year earlier.
Inside the bunker Photo of the police station in Mainz
It was a necessary investment, as Zent was already planning to open a new company - CyberBunker, which offered customers "bulletproof hosting" for any site. How is it different from conventional hosting like Amazon Web Services or the largest domain name registrar GoDaddy? For a slightly higher price, Zent guaranteed the most reliable protection of customer materials, even if they contain sensitive or prohibited content.
As a result, porn sites became the first big clients of the company. The businessman took this calmly and said that CyberBunker is ready to provide hosting to everyone, unless the client's content is related to child pornography or terrorism. According to the former owner of the porn site, who used the services of the company, the business brought him about a million euros a year, but Zent himself usually did not have a lot of money - instead he invested everything in buying new servers.
He turned the former NATO bunker into a kind of huge teenage room: computers, black leather sofas, neon lamps and artificial plants were everywhere, and relaxing electronics played in the background. And several former employees of those years claim that Zent equipped one of the halls as a "porn room", where erotic home videos with the participation of the businessman's girlfriends were sometimes broadcast.
In 1999, Sven Kamphuis joined the Zenta team and quickly became one of those close to the head of the company thanks to his programming talent. Around the same time, the head of CyberBunker leased part of the bunker to another organization. Everything was fine until the summer of 2002, when an explosion thundered in the bunker, during which Zenta burned his face and hands. Arriving police found the remains of an ecstasy laboratory in the ruins. The company was deprived of its license to operate in the region, but Zent was not charged - he justified himself by not knowing about the activities of the organization that worked with them in the same bunker.
The explosion and the risk of being in prison pushed Zenta to voice his new idea - CyberBunker will be not just a company, but an independent Republic. He himself wrote a declaration of independence, based on a 1960 UN regulation, which states that everyone has the right to self-determination. With this in mind, the company "separated" from the Netherlands, and Zent decided that dollars, euros and gold would become the currency in the Republic.
Zent himself became the supreme ruler of CyberBunker. It was not just fun, but a way to advertise the company - by declaring its "independence" to customers, the company made it clear that it adheres to "liberal ideas": everyone should have the right to use the Internet, and the government as an institution should not interfere with the Internet.
CyberBunker Data Center Mainz Police Station Photos
Years later, Zent explained that CyberBunker's declaration of independence was a "joke", and that he, while drafting the document, did not seek to get involved in politics, but only wanted to do business without the pressure of big companies and Big Brother's surveillance. The Dutchman's colleagues and friends at the time described him as a person with a deep understanding of the Internet, who would have a successful career at Apple, if he had not chosen a different path.
Shortly before the rise in popularity of PayPal, Zent came up with its analogue Bank66, but the idea fell through due to "greed and lack of business acumen" from the entrepreneur, explained his friend programmer Frank Van der Loos (Frank Van der Loos). But despite this and the fact that Zent could only code in BASIC, people around him, including Van der Loos, considered him a treasure trove of ideas and even more - a visionary.
Fighting opponents and the police "tail"
In 2013, when Sent acquired a bunker in Traben-Trarbach, he did two things at the same time: he made the company's clients understand that he was ready to continue investing in the security of their data, and interested the cybercrime department. The story of CyberBunker especially interested the prosecutor Jörg Angerer, who worked in the German city of Koblenz, near Traben-Trarbach. His office, which specializes in cybercrime, was aware of the illegal activities of some of Zenta's clients. But he had nothing for the company itself - it worked gracefully in the gray zone of activism, business and crime.Strengthened in the early 2000s, CyberBunker teamed up with clandestine Internet provider CB3ROB to mass phishing spam and host over-the-counter drug sites. In those same years, Zenta hosted Julian Assange's WikiLeaks project, which leaked classified documents, including those on US military crimes in the Middle East, to the network. Another well-known hosting client is The Pirate Bay, which remained under CyberBunker's wing until 2010, when Zenta was forced to withdraw from the pirate site by a Hamburg court decision.
As Angerer continued to dig, he found out that CyberBunker is not shy about aggression to defend its interests. In 2010, the European anti-spam volunteer organization Spamhaus Project began collecting evidence against Zenta, urging major ISPs to sever any relationship with the company. In 2013, Zenta's right-hand man, Sven Kampuis, together with a group of unknown persons calling themselves the Stophaus Collective, organized a massive DDoS attack on the Spamhaus Project, collapsing the project's website. During the investigation, Campuis was arrested on suspicion in connection with the attack, but Zent, as in the past, escaped punishment.
Old telephones and archives from the days of the German army Photo of the police station in Mainz
The investigator was also worried about another question - why did Zent actually live and work in a bunker underground. From a security point of view, this does not make much sense, since, firstly, such a decision will inevitably attract the attention of the police. Secondly, it is much more profitable to keep the servers not under the protection of walls capable of withstanding a nuclear strike, but in a country where the European authorities cannot reach - for example, in Russia. In other words, there was little rational in Zent's desire. Friends and acquaintances say that he has always adored bunkers. In the Dutch language there is even a name for such people - bunkergeil.
By 2013, Angerer knew that CyberBunker was involved in illegal activities, but his team had been collecting information for another year. It's all about the laws - in Germany it is not forbidden to host a site containing illegal materials if the hoster does not know about the prohibited content and does not actively help in its creation. Investigators were required to have both physical and digital evidence of the company's connection to criminal activity, and by 2015 the investigation had moved into an active phase.
The police were allowed to intercept all traffic emanating from the server rooms in the bunker, but only for tracking and copying, so that the Zenta team did not suspect that something was wrong. The decision quickly bore fruit - approximately 10-15% of intercepted traffic was not encrypted, and the police saw links to sites selling drugs, stolen bank cards and other fraudulent schemes. It became clear that the Zenta company provides the work of darknet sites with might and main.
Shared business with a drug lord and support for major banned darknet sites
Under the "rule" of Zenta, the once military bunker took on a completely new atmosphere. It housed more than 20 people at the same time, including programmers and technicians from various European countries, as well as several permanent girls of the head of the company, his gardener (someone had to water the plants and take care of the territory on the surface) and a personal chef.Workers and guests were usually given separate rooms in old Nazi barracks on the surface. Zent himself slept exclusively underground in a private room with a bed with black satin sheets, an expensive sound system and a life-size figure of the Iron Patriot (a friend of Iron Man) from Marvel comics.
Photo of the police station in Mainz
The Mayor of Traben-Trarbach visited the head of CyberBunker twice, who decided to personally check the rumors that Zent was engaged in the production of marijuana in the bunker. He found nothing of the kind.
Two years after the purchase of the military bunker, Zent saw a new business perspective - the production of special phones with reliable data encryption technology. Presumably, his partner in this case was the Irish drug lord George Mitchell, nicknamed "Penguin". He fled the UK in the 1990s after suspicion of a murder in London and went into hiding in Amsterdam, where he continued to engage in drug trafficking, intermittently. Mitchell was familiar with Zenta even before CyberBunker, but the details of their relationship in the past are vague.
Together, the friends began production of phones with advanced encryption technology. According to Zent, they used BlackBerry phones for the first models, and later he developed the Exclu messenger, which works on new encryption schemes and is available for the smartphones of the British brand Wileyfox, founded in 2015. The encrypted phone business started in Ireland and soon expanded to Europe. Zent said that this area turned out to be much more profitable than the hosting business, but it is still impossible to verify these statements. According to the FBI, revenues from the telephone business were unlikely to exceed a million dollars a year.
Spare batteries in case of a power outage in the bunker Photo of the police station in Mainz
Mitchell visited CyberBunker headquarters at least several times, but later, probably suspecting surveillance (his phones were indeed tapped and movements were recorded), he left Traben-Trarbach and disappeared from police radars again. Investigators decided to return to the Zenta case, and while the sale of phones with encryption technology is not prohibited, as is the hosting of dark web sites, the police can build a case against the company if they can prove that CyberBunker is helping its clients to distribute prohibited materials.
To get what they wanted, the cybercrime department came up with a plan. With the permission of the German authorities, the police have created their own scam darknet site offering to participate in the lottery in exchange for a Bitcoin entry fee. The police deliberately created the site so that none of the random cheats could lose money, but the rest of the site looked as convincing as possible. “It was fun creating it,” one team member anonymously admitted.
Then the operatives spent several thousand dollars to buy bitcoins and contacted CyberBunker with a request to rent a server (the company accepted payment only in cryptocurrency). During a conversation with a representative of the project, the operatives received from him a confession that the Zenta company helps its clients even if they are engaged in prohibited activities. As a bonus, a CyberBunker employee invited police officers to share some tips on how to more effectively hide their identity from the authorities.
One of the kitchens in the bunker Photo of the police station in Mainz
In parallel with this, the operatives sent a "mole" to CyberBunker. Presumably (the investigators declined to comment on this), he took advantage of the company's security hole and connected a device to the servers that intercepted traffic from the server rooms. Thanks to this, as well as other methods, the police decided that they were dealing with the largest dark web hoster in Europe, and perhaps the world. In 2014, the project hosted Cannabis Road, a darknet drug site, and from 2016 to 2018, the Fraudsters forum, which deals with fraudulent passport and money scams.
From 2015 to 2018, CyberBunker's clients included the darknet marketplace Flugsvamp, which is responsible for roughly 90% of all online drug trafficking in Sweden. The largest client of the Zenta project was the Wall Street Market project - from 2016 to 2019, it sold more than 36 million euros of drugs. From each sale, the administration took about 3% for itself.
It was the Wall Street Market that became the main chord before the climax. While Germany was preparing a case against the Zenta company, another German unit, together with operatives from the Netherlands and the United States, was preparing to disable the Wall Street Market and arrest its founders. According to Attorney Jörg Angerer, it was imperative to wait for this before attacking CyberBunker. “Providers provide resources for real criminals. Therefore, first we need to detain them, ”he said.
Operation against CyberBunker
In April 2019, operatives arrested three Germans on charges of creating and running a fraudulent Wall Street Market website (the defendants are awaiting trial at the time of writing). Shortly thereafter, German operatives raided the Zenta bunker, took the server used by the site, and left without touching anything else. But the trap slammed - the operation against CyberBunker entered the final stage.On September 26, 2019, all the permanent residents of the bunker, including Zenta, his sons (grown up, they worked with their father), a new girlfriend and a gardener, left him to have dinner together. For the head of CyberBunker, it was an ordinary day, and he did not suspect that the operatives had deliberately planned everything and knew that on this day and at this time the bunker would be empty.
At about 6:00 pm, as Zent and the other party members were eating, several undercover operatives seized the Dutchman, and the house where the party was taking place was surrounded by police and a helicopter. At the same time, the assault on the bunker began - about a hundred police officers, including German special forces, rushed inside and, without encountering resistance, took control of the CyberBunker headquarters. For the first time in German history, the police did not detain the online merchants themselves, but those who "made their crimes possible."
The alleged owner and operator of the cyber bunkers Hermann Johan Zent Image: The Sunday World. Click to enlarge the image
Zenta and most of his team were arrested, but six suspects managed to escape. Among them is Zent's right-hand man, Sven Kampuis, who is believed to be responsible for much of the company's technical infrastructure. But the police are not interested in his capture - the investigation does not have enough evidence of his involvement in the company's criminal activities. Kampuis himself moved to the Dutch city of Middelburg, where he was found by the journalist The New Yorker. He assured that the “mole” in the company was not him, but one of the managers of the company. However, here he was probably mistaken - most likely, the undercover agent was the gardener all this time.
Since his arrest, Zent has been under arrest in Koblenz. His lawyer does not talk about the strategy for defending the Dutchman in court, but, apparently, he will insist that the head of the company was not aware of the illegal activities of CyberBunker. At the same time, in May, Der Spiegel, citing sources, reported that during interrogation the day after his arrest, Zent confessed that he was aware of the company's illegal activities. The first hearing in the Zenta case will take place only in the fall, almost a year after his arrest. The main reason is delays and quarantine measures due to the Covid-19 pandemic.
It is difficult to fully understand what Zenta's true motives were. The operative, who monitored his activities for several years, believes that the Dutchman's unscrupulousness was combined with utopian views. “Free internet, freedom of speech, nobody controls what is there, and the like. This is not a bank robbery. And it's not that he's a billionaire, ”the policeman said. According to Zenta's sister, Anna, he can hardly be called a criminal genius. On the contrary, he is a smart, but dreamy and somewhat naive person.
A relative is worried about how prison can affect his brother's psyche - now he mostly plays chess with himself and has almost no contact with the outside world. In January 2020, Anna and Zenta's father passed away, and the defendant's lawyer asked to be allowed to attend the funeral. The court refused. Then Zent asked for a laptop to watch the broadcast of the funeral, but this request was rejected. However, he was allowed to communicate by correspondence with the journalist The New Yorker, and in one of the letters the reporter touched on a particularly personal topic of Zenta - craving for bunkers.
According to the Dutchman, it all began as a child, when he visited military complexes left over from the Battle of Arnhem in April 1945. Then the joint forces of Great Britain and Canada drove the Nazi forces out of the city. That first CyberBunker bunker in Goose was the beginning of Zent's dream. He wanted to turn this place into a modern high-tech fortress, but he could not further explain his craving for bunkers. “Why does anyone like hamburgers? And for someone motorsport? I cannot answer that. I just love bunkers. That's all ".
