The leader of the Hydra Market, once the world's largest darknet marketplace, has been sentenced to life imprisonment by a Russian court.

The Hydra Market was organized and operated by the Russian hacker Stanislav Moiseev, with the help of more than 10 accomplices who facilitated a variety of transactions on the darknet platform.

In April 2022, German police and US law enforcement agencies carried out a joint operation to shut down the servers of Hydra Market. Before its closure, Hydra Market was the largest global darknet market for drug trafficking and money laundering.

Before being taken down, this darknet marketplace was frequently used by criminals for drug trafficking and money laundering, with a turnover of $1.35 billion in 2020 alone. It had 19,000 registered seller accounts, serving at least 17 million users worldwide.

👆The image above shows the notice posted by law enforcement agencies after they took down the market's servers.

Apart from drug trafficking and money laundering, this darknet market also offered other services, including but not limited to database theft, forgery, and hacker-for-hire services. When the German police seized its servers, they also confiscated 543 bitcoins, currently valued at over $51 million.

To provide more thorough privacy and security services, Hydra Market even had its own bitcoin mixer platform, which mixed legitimate and illegal bitcoin transactions to make tracing difficult.

Russia later joined the law enforcement efforts and tracked down the operators behind Hydra Market, arresting more than 10 suspects, including Hydra Market's main founder, Stanislav Moiseev.

This week, in a prosecution initiated by the Moscow Prosecutor's Office, the court found that from 2015 to October 2018, this criminal group was active in various regions of Russia and Belarus, committing crimes. During the operation to dismantle the criminal group, law enforcement officers also discovered nearly a ton of narcotic and psychotropic drugs.

Eventually, the court sentenced Hydra Market's main founder, Stanislav Moiseev, to life imprisonment and fined him 4 million rubles. His ten or more accomplices received sentences ranging from 8 to 23 years, all of whom are required to serve their sentences in specially designated, high-security penal colonies.