Russian investigators confiscated crypto value round 649 million rubles ($8.2 million) from the wallets of Dmitry Pavlov, the 35-year-old self-confessed server mastermind behind the Hydra darknet portal.
The Russian newspaper Izvestia reported that paperwork unveiled in court docket this month confirmed regulation enforcement officers have frozen and seized cash from Pavlov’s crypto wallets.
Hydra Darknet Server Operator ‘Was Paid in Crypto’
Pavlov testified that he obtained the cryptoassets within the type of “a wage and bonuses” in return for sustaining Hydra servers.
A legal ring paid Pavlov “about 15 million rubles ($189,277) a yr” in crypto for his companies, prosecution officers defined.
The accused stated that he didn’t promote his cash for money. As a substitute, he held on to the crypto, hoping that its worth would proceed to develop.
Hydra operators additionally paid Pavlov money to cowl upkeep prices, prosecution officers added. A department of the Moscow District Court docket jailed 16 individuals for orchestrating Hydra in December final yr.
The operation’s mastermind Stanislav Moiseev was jailed for all times after the court docket heard that the portal facilitated over $5 billion in crypto transactions.
Prosecutors stated that Russian specialists agreed with Chainalysis estimates concerning the dimension of the agency’s crypto turnover.
Stanislav Moiseev, the mastermind behind the infamous on-line black market Hydra, has been handed a life sentence by a Russian court docket.#Hydra #Cryptohttps://t.co/9uuAfft63K
— Cryptonews.com (@cryptonews) December 4, 2024
‘Couriers Introduced Pavlov Luggage of Money’
Moiseev and others handed Pavlov cash to hire and preserve servers on the German firm Hetzner, prosecutors defined.
These prices alone amounted to 1.5-2 million rubles ($18,928-$25,239) monthly. Hydra managers “periodically” despatched Pavlov couriers with bagfuls of money, prosecutors added.
Hydra’s annual turnover on the time of closure was $1.7 billion, a Rosfinmonitoring worker testified at Pavlov’s trial. The staffer estimated that the platform took cuts of two% to five% from crypto transactions made on Hydra.
Rosfinmonitoring (formally the Russian Federal Monetary Monitoring Service) is the nation’s prime anti-money laundering company.
One other knowledgeable testified that that the “internet revenue of Hydra’s co-founders alone,” taking into account-related companies, amounted to “about 100 billion rubles ($1.3 billion) a yr.”
Final month, Chainalysis reported that whereas there was a 15% decline in international crypto gross sales throughout darknet markets in 2024, Russian websites bucked the development. The latter noticed a 68% rise in crypto gross sales, the agency stated.
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