The United States District Court for the Northern District of California has filed an indictment against one of Hydra’s dark-net marketplace administrators.
A Russian national, Dmitry Pavlov, is charged with administering the platform, providing hosting services for it, conspiring to launder money and to distribute drugs.
According to investigators, Hydra was created around 2015 as a partnership between Russian drug-related online forums Wayaway and LegalRC. From 2013 to the present, Pavlov provided hosting services for these two platforms. Since November 2015, he also managed Hydra’s leased servers through the Russian hosting company Promservice.
Pavlov repeatedly received cryptocurrency payments from Hydra wallets.
“The defendant facilitated Hydra’s activities and enabled it to receive millions of dollars from illegal sales conducted through the site,” the indictment says.
According to the document, from January 2016 to March 2022, cryptocurrencies totaling about $5.2 billion were sent to Hydra-controlled wallets. In 2021, the platform accounted for about 80% of all crypto transactions related to the dark web.
If convicted, all of Pavlov’s assets obtained from illegal activity will be seized for the United States.
In a BBC interview, Dmitry Pavlov said that American authorities had not contacted him, and that he learned of the charges from a journalist.
“We are a hosting company and have all the necessary Roskomnadzor licensing. We do not administer any platforms at all, but only provide servers for rent as intermediaries, reselling services. We do not know what is hosted with us, since after granting access to the server clients change the password, and access becomes impossible”, he wrote.
Pavlov added that if he had known what was there, he would not have provided the equipment under any pretext.
Earlier the U.S. Treasury imposed sanctions against Hydra, and German police seized the marketplace’s servers and seized 543 BTC.
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