Illegal darknet marketplace
Hard blow against the international drug trade: BKA shuts down “Hydra Market”.
The Darknet is one portal poorer: The BKA and numerous other authorities have closed the “Hydra Market”.
© BeeBright / Getty Images
The world’s largest illegal Darknet marketplace “Hydra Market” is history. The BKA seized servers and confiscated bitcoins worth 23 million euros. What’s next?
The Federal Criminal Police Office and the Central Office for Combating Internet Crime (ZIT) are celebrating a major victory against digital trade in illegal goods. Yesterday, the authorities shut down the “Hydra Market”, the world’s largest illegal dark web marketplace at the time. Since 2015, on the Russian-language platform, it has been possible to buy drugs, stolen data and forged documents undisturbed, as well as to launder illegally obtained cryptocurrency and hire hackers for data theft.
The BKA managed to secure the server infrastructure in Germany through “extensive investigations” and to confiscate 543 bitcoins with a value of around 23 million euros. According to the BKA, the “Hydra Market” recently had 17 million customers and over 19,000 seller accounts. In 2020, the platform’s sales amounted to around 1.2 billion euros. Several US agencies were part of the operation.
US authorities accuse Russians
The US Department of Justice reports that the “Hydra Market” was responsible for around 80 percent of all transactions with cryptocurrencies in the dark web market last year. Since the site was founded in 2015, the operators have turned over a total of 5.2 billion US dollars. Unlike the BKA, which has not yet announced any arrests, the Americans have filed a criminal complaint against a man named Dmitry Olegovich Pavlov (30), who lives in Russia and who the authorities believe was responsible for providing the server. In the proceedings of the ZIT at the General Public Prosecutor’s Office in Frankfurt am Main, investigations are now being carried out against the operators of the platform, who have not yet been identified.
The US Treasury Department has also already imposed sanctions on the former marketplace and another website called Garantex, whose operators the Department accuses of having helped launder illegal funds. This prohibits Americans from doing business with people who work or have worked for these sites. An initial list of 100 sanctioned virtual currency accounts is attached to the report, including addresses linked to notorious Russian ransomware gangs Conti, Ryuk, and Sodinokibi.
“The platform and the criminal content have been confiscated”: This message welcomes visitors to the former black market.
© BKA
Especially for criminals in Russian-speaking countries, where the “Hydra Market” had its core business, the closure and seizure of the site is a heavy blow. Not only is the most renowned address for all sorts of illegal transactions missing to date, the anonymization of ransoms from blackmail is also made significantly more difficult at first. According to blockchain researchers, about 86 percent of the illegal bitcoin received directly by Russian virtual currency exchanges in 2019 came from Hydra.
It’s probably going on happily – but not for everyone
For former operators, customers and dealers, the great period of tremors is now beginning. Since the servers were located in Germany and are in the hands of the authorities, an extensive evaluation of the data stored on them is likely. Depending on what the “Hydra Market” has stored, further proceedings can be expected, especially against the sellers of the platform, who have made themselves punishable by offering illegal goods.
As far as the marketplaces are concerned, things are probably going on elsewhere on the dark web: As the name “Hydra” already suggests, it is probably only a matter of time before an alternative makes a name for itself on the dark web. That’s how it was in 2014 after the closure of the then top dog “Silk Road”, and that’s how it will probably happen this time too.
But probably not by the operator of the “Hydra Market”, said the Federal Criminal Police Office on Twitter. There it says: “As with any IT system, this would also be the case […] closed illegal market place “Hydra Market” the restoration is basically possible if a complete backup is available. the […] However, the comprehensive confiscation of the server structure of the marketplace in Germany and the skimming off of the financial resources should make a “reopening” very complex.”
Worse, “Furthermore, the underground economy’s confidence in the marketplace with the […] executive measures that have been taken will have been adversely affected, making profitable reopening even more difficult,” the office adds.
Swell: BKA, DOJ, DOT, BKA Twitter