Largest Dark Web Marketplace Dismantled

Read Time:52 Second

Hydra Market, believed to be the largest sales platform on the dark web worldwide, has been dismantled, and bitcoins worth €23 million have been seized.

The German Bundeskriminalamt announced this on Tuesday. According to the judiciary, it is not yet known who the administrators are.

The site was in Russian and had existed since 2015 on the dark web, a protected part of the internet that can only be reached with special software. The platform had more than 19,000 sellers and approximately 17 million customers. They mainly dealt with drugs, stolen data and forged documents.

In 2020 alone, more than 1.2 billion euros would have been traded via the network. Hydra dominates the market because Ukraine and Russia are the largest users of cryptocurrencies in the world, an expert told the US news agency Bloomberg.

A banner announcing the decommissioning was seen on the Hydra site on Tuesday, authorities say. In recent years, such underground marketplaces have been rolled up more often, such as Silk Road, AlphaBay and Hansa Market.