Germany Shuts Down Servers For Russian Darknet Marketplace Hydra

German authorities shut down the server infrastructure for the Russian darknet marketplace Hydra, seizing ~$25.2 million worth of Bitcoin in the process, Germany's Federal Crime Police Office (BKA) announced on Tuesday. From a report: Hydra is a large marketplace on the dark web that serves as a hub for drugs, stolen credit card information, counterfeit bills, fake documents, and other illegal goods or services. The market primarily caters to criminals in Russia and surrounding nations. "Treasuremen," or dealers connected with the site, push drugs throughout the region by hiding them in geo-tagged pickup locations. With the shutdown of the German-based server, authorities are now launching an investigation into the "unknown operators and administrators" of Hydra, whom they suspect of selling narcotics and engaging in money laundering. German authorities say they have been investigating the marketplace with the help of the US since August 2021. The BKA told The Verge that no arrests have been made as of yet.

Wouldn't do that if I were Germany

[SuperKendall]

Man when Red Skull finds out Germany took out his Hydra funding system he is gonna be PISSED.

Good luck Germany! You're gonna need it.

Surely you're not serious

[smoot123]

Are there really Hydra servers in Germany? Shouldn't this have been posted last Friday? And stop calling me "Shirley".

Re:

[kot-begemot-uk]

Yes. One or two apparently. Stuff like this used to be hosted in Holland. Some of it has been moving to Germany, because German police has started looking the other way regarding some of the activities related to Russian crime during the last 3-4 years.

Why? No idea. Statement of the fact - a lot of the phone fraud, net extortion, etc was being run through there.

why now?

[etash]

wtf? so for germany it's ok to have such a market unless putin invades ukraine? shouldn't it have been shut down earlier?

Re:

[rmdingler]

It is rather astounding how many exceptions to the rules are made for oil and gas producing nations.

Add to that, as a former Superpower wielding nuclear weapons, nobody has been willing to poke that bear until the overmatched Ukrainians stood up to them... and didn't get crushed immediately.

For what its worth, this is what widespread governmental Kleptocracy does to a country.

Resources aren't unlimited

[rsilvergun]

so you prioritize your targets. Putin changed the priority. Expect more of these. There's going to be a massive cryptocurrency / money laundering crackdown for the next, well, ever. Putin's invasion of Ukraine was a boneheaded decision by a tired old man desperate for one last "hurray!". And it's going to cost a lot.

I'll say this, it's a good thing Putin got the mob under control, or he'd be dead by now. Of course the way he did it was by taking over their line of work, but baby steps. Baby steps.

Re:

[SharpFang]

Germany was pretty famous for having some ISPs that take bitcoin in exchange for providing servers and bandwidth, and ask zero questions, including identity of the purchaser. If you run your service over TOR from such a server, the traffic "out in the wild" is very hard to trace back to the physical server, and no-one from the ISP checks what actually runs on these servers, an encrypted VM completely opaque to the provider. So all kinds of illegal content are served, and the don't ask don't tell policy mean

This...

[Virtucon]

It amazes me what lengths governments would go to just to keep the gas flowing. This is criminal activity and multiple levels.