Germany’s Federal Criminal Police Office (BKA) announced that the world’s largest illegal dark web marketplace, Hydra Darknet Market, has been taken down. The BKA confiscated 543 bitcoins with a total value of around 23 million euros.
The BKA said it “secured the infrastructure in Germany of the world’s largest illegal Darknet marketplace and thus closed it.” The Darknet market, which has been in operation since 2015 via Tor, was a Russian-language darknet marketplace that opened as a competitor to the now-defunct Russian Anonymous Marketplace (aka RAMP). Around 17 million customers and more than 19,000 seller accounts were registered on the marketplace.