crime
Darknet marketplace shut down – suspected of money laundering
“Hydra Market” is said to have been the world’s largest illegal marketplace on the Darknet. Photo: Silas Stein/dpa
© dpa-infocom GmbH
The business with stolen data, documents and narcotics has flourished via the illegal “Hydra Market” for more than seven years. Now the Russian-language platform has been shut down.
The world’s largest illegal marketplace on the Darknet was shut down by German authorities this Tuesday.
The Federal Criminal Police Office (BKA) and the Frankfurt Public Prosecutor announced that servers in Germany and bitcoins with a total value of 23 million euros had been seized.
Investigations are being carried out against previously unknown operators and administrators of the platform called “Hydra Market”. Among other things, they are suspected of commercial money laundering. The investigations have been running since August 2021, and several US authorities were involved.
The Russian-language platform has been available since at least 2015, and the main trade was in illegal narcotics, but also in data spied out worldwide, forged documents and digital services. Around 17 million customer and more than 19,000 seller accounts were registered there.
In 2020, sales of at least 1.23 billion euros were achieved, which made “Hydra Market” the illegal marketplace with the highest turnover. A service for concealing digital transactions was also offered and made investigations by law enforcement agencies “immensely difficult,” the authorities said.
The operators are also being investigated for the commercial operation of criminal trading platforms on the Internet and the commercial procurement or granting of an opportunity for the unauthorized purchase or sale of narcotics. A security banner was published on the marketplace’s website on Tuesday.