The authorities confiscated 543 Bitcoins worth around 23 million euros ($25 million) at the time of the seizure. As per the Central Office for Combating Cybercrime (ZIT) and BKA: The following banner was published today on the website of the marketplace:
What is Hydra?
Hydra began operating in 2015, offering illegal narcotics as well as stolen credit card data, counterfeit money, and forged identification papers, all while concealing the names of people engaged via the use of the Tor encryption network. According to a case study by CipherTrace: It’s worth mentioning that the marketplace had over 17 million user accounts and more than 19,000 vendor accounts. Suspects are being investigated for “operating criminal trading platforms on the internet on a commercial basis,” the BKA also added. Investigators do not know if Hydra has servers in other countries, but they “assume” that this was the “main hub” of the network’s architecture, according to a representative for the Frankfurt prosecution service’s online crime unit ZIT. Furthermore, investigations into the illegal marketplace began in August 2021 and included a number of US agencies as well as numerous other countries.
