Founded in 2015, the Russian-language narcotics and money-laundering market grew at a whopping 624% a year, displacing nearly all of its competitors. It also offered a delivery service, sort of pokemon go many young delivery drivers recruit from drugs.
The Frankfurt am Main prosecutor’s office, the German Central Bureau for Cybercrime (ZIT) and the Bundeskartellamt (BKA) have Announcement after they confiscated and shut down Hydra’s servers, largest illegal darknet marketplace They also seized 543 bitcoins, worth a total of about 23 million euros at the current exchange rate.
created “ around 2015 “counted Hydra” approximately 17 million customers and more than 19,000 registered merchant accounts (knowing that many of them may be inactive, or duplicates, editor’s note).
The BKA and the ZIT have been investigating him since August 2021, with the help of “ various US authorities The logos of six US agencies appear on the banner now displayed by the German authorities on the homepage of the Russian marketplace.
According to their estimates, Hydra has “ was probably the illegal market with the highest turnover in the world “. Its sale would have amounted to: at least €1.23 billion in 2020 alone †
The U.S. Treasury Department’s Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) immediately issued a: communicated confirming that this was a joint initiative involving the United States Department of Justice, the FBI, the Drug Enforcement Administration, the Internal Revenue Service Criminal Investigation, and Homeland Security Investigations:
† OFAC’s investigation identified approximately $8 million in ransomware proceeds flowing through Hydra’s virtual currency accounts, including Ryuk, Sodinokibi, and Conti ransomware variants. According to blockchain analysts, about 86% of illicit Bitcoin received directly by Russian virtual currency exchanges in 2019 came from Hydra. †
OFAC has also identified, and made public, more than 100 cryptocurrency addresses used to conduct illegal transactions. It further endorses Garantex.io, a virtual money changer founded in late 2019 and originally registered in Estonia:
† Garantex’s analysis of known transactions shows that more than $100 million in transactions are related to illegal actors and darknet markets, including nearly $6 million from the Russian RaaS gang Conti and about $2.6 million from Hydra. †