On June 1, Moscow court ordered the seizure of one of the accused administrators of the darknet market Hydra’s crypto wallet. According to media sources, the individual, who was detained in Russia in mid-April, is refusing to disclose access to his alleged crypto stash to Russian law authorities.
The Russian judiciary seeks to seize what it claims is a record amount of cryptocurrency from a drug dealer’s crypto wallet, according to the business daily Kommersant, which quoted a post on the Telegram news channel Mash.
The crypto stash belonged to an accused co-founder and administrator of Hydra, perhaps the biggest online marketplace on the dark web, which was recently shut down by Germany.
Dmitry Olegovich Pavlov, a 30-year-old businessman from Cherepovets, was arrested last month on a warrant issued by Moscow’s Meshchansky District Court and charged with drug manufacturing, sale, and distribution under Russia’s Criminal Code.
His arrest happened soon after the US Department of Justice issued criminal charges for conspiracy to distribute drugs and conspiracy to conduct money laundering against a Russian citizen with the same identity.
According to the newspaper, Dmitry Pavlov is the first Hydra operator jailed in the history of the Russian-language marketplace. The platform has been in operation since at least 2015 and had about 17 million customers before being shut down in early April when German law enforcement authorities seized its server infrastructure and took down the darknet market’s website with assistance from US agencies.
