The Federal Criminal Police Office of Germany (BKA) seized $25 million in BTC from the well-known darknet market Hydra and took it down.
Based on a report by the BKA, the German Federal Crime Unit, alongside the Prosecutor’s Office and the Cybercrime Unit, has managed to shut down one of the largest dark web markets, known as the Hydra Market.
The now-defunct online marketplace was under investigation since 2021 due to ongoing sales of illegal documents, services, and substances. The market reportedly generated the largest amount of money out of all the other illegal platforms on the deep web.
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The German Cybercrime Unit (ZIT) claims that throughout 2020, the Russian darknet marketplace generated approximately €1.23 billion (~$1.35B), with over 17M registered accounts.
While there hasn't been much public information on the Hydra Market, it was reportedly founded back in 2015, with most activities happening in St. Petersburg and Moscow.
The law enforcement had trouble tracking the people behind the marketplace as transactions were masked by bitcoin privacy mixers, also known as tumblers, like Tornado cash that breaks the on-chain link between the deposit and withdrawal, making the transaction practically untraceable.
This could have been a place for Russian elites to dodge the sanctions imposed by the United States on the digital asset environment.
