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German police say shutting down the infamous darknet site took months of cyber investigation

"It gave us all goosebumps" says Sebastian Zwiebel, as he describes the

moment his team shut down Hydra, the world's largest darknet marketplace.

The website was a bastion of cyber-crime, surviving for more than six years
selling drugs and illegal goods.

But, a@er a tip-off, German police seized the site's servers and confiscated
€23m (£16.7m) in Bitcoin. Who is winning the war in
"We've been working on this for months and when it finally happened it felt big Ukraine?
- really big," adds Mr Zwiebel.

Police say 17 million customers and more than 19,000 seller accounts were
registered on the marketplace, which now carries a police seizure notice.

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Written in Russian, Hydra served multiple countries with same day drugs deliveries

Hydra specialised in same-day 'dead drop' services, where drug dealers

(vendors) hide packages in public places before informing customers of the
pick-up location.

Shortly a@er the German action was announced, the US Treasury issued
sanctions against Hydra "in a coordinated international effort to disrupt Hong Kong's grief for the
proliferation of malicious cybercrime services, dangerous drugs, and other Queen sends message to
illegal offerings available through the Russia-based site." Beijing

In the past six months, many high-profile darknet markets have shut down but
Hydra was seemingly impervious to police attempts to stop it.

The website launched in 2015 selling drugs, hacked materials, forged

documents and illegal digital services such as Bitcoin-mixing - which cyber-
criminals use to launder stolen or extorted digital coins.

The site was written in Russian, with sellers located in Russia, Ukraine, Belarus,
Kazakhstan and surrounding countries.

Mr Zwiebel says the operation to close it down began with a tip-off which Tracking Trump's
pointed to the possibility that the website infrastructure might be hosted in 'extraordinary' endorsement
Germany. spree

"We got some hints through monitoring darknet activity from US officials. So
we started in July or August last year to dig deeper and to investigate this
field," he says.

Hydra seizure notice

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'Energy costs will shut my 93-
Visitors to the darknet site are now greeted with a police seizure notice
year-old shop'
It took many months to locate which firm might be hosting Hydra in Germany.
Ultimately it was found to be a so-called 'bullet-proof hosting' company.

A bullet-proof hosting company is one that does not audit the websites or
content it is hosting, and will happily host criminal websites and avoid police
requests for information on customers.

Mr Zwiebel says his investigators then took their evidence to a German judge
to get permission to approach the server company and issue a takedown
notice.
Inside Indian cave which
The company was forced to comply otherwise they too could have been holds secrets to the past
arrested.

Visitors to the site are now greeted with a police poster saying "the platform
and the criminal content has been seized".
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Although celebrating their success, German authorities say they fear this
won't be the end of the Hydra cyber-crime group, unless they can find and
arrest them.

"We know they will find another way to do their business. They will probably
2 Putin and Xi, an
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try to build a new platform, and we will have to keep our eye on it. We don't
know the perpetrators, so that's the next step," says Mr Zwiebel.

The news comes during a turbulent time for darknet markets with the most
prominent sites closing down in recent months, either voluntarily or as a result
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Many of the closures have come from criminals choosing to gradually bring

4
their operations to a close, and disappear with their riches. Rapper Cardi B pleads
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In January the administrators of UniCC, a darknet site selling stolen credit
charges
card details, retired, citing health reasons.

Voluntary closures also brought to an end the White House Market in October
2021, Cannazon in November and Torrez in December.

However, BBC research earlier this year revealed the most common way for
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darknet sites to close is via so-called 'exit scams' where the administrators
voluntarily shut down the sites but steal their customer's funds in the process.

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Watch: What is the dark web? coffin?

More on this story 10 Queen's grandchildren

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Largest darknet stolen credit card site
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13 January

The darknet drug dealers who keep

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