German police roll up ‘largest underground marketplace’

Hydra Market’s servers have been seized and the forum has been closed, Germany’s Bundeskriminalamt announced today.

543 bitcoins were also seized. They are worth a total of more than 23 million euros. According to the German justice, it is not yet known who the administrators are.

Lucrative trading on the dark web

Hydra Market was founded in 2015 and was on the dark web, a part of the internet that cannot be found immediately. The platform had more than 19,000 sellers and approximately 17 million customers. They mainly dealt in drugs, stolen data and forged documents.

In 2020 alone, more than 1.2 billion euros would have been traded via the network. The site was in Russian.

In recent years, these types of underground marketplaces have been rolled up more often, such as Silk Road, AlphaBay and Hansa Market.

Last year, the Dutch police took down dozens of websites on the dark web. Visitors could anonymously buy counterfeit money on the sites.