The servers of the largest Russian darknet market Hydra were confiscated in Germany. 543 bitcoins worth € 23 million were also seized
On April 5, the German Central Office for Cybercrime (ZIT), the Prosecutor General’s Office in Frankfurt am Main and the Federal Criminal Police Office (BKA) announced that they had closed the world’s largest darknet market, Hydra. Not only servers but also bitcoins from an illegal trading platform worth about 23 million euros were confiscated. This Russian platform, among other things, was involved in drug sales, money laundering, trafficking in stolen data, and forged documents.
The seizure was preceded by major investigations conducted by the BKA and ZIT since August 2021, involving several US authorities. The illegal trading platform has been a Russian-language darknet platform, accessed through the Tor network since at least 2015.
About 17 million customers and more than 19,000 sellers were registered on this darknet marketplace.
According to ZIT and BKA, Hydra was probably the illegal trading platform with the highest turnover in the world. In 2020 alone, total sales amounted to at least 1.23 billion euros. In particular, Bitcoin Bank Mixer, a service for concealing digital transactions, has greatly complicated the investigation of law enforcement agencies.
Although the main profile of Hydra is drug trafficking, at least one case is known when the murder of a man – Moscow investigator Eugenia Shishkina – was actually ordered through this site. Russian version BBC wrote about this story.
