Germany has shut down a Russian-language drug marketplace called the Hydra Market run on the so-called “dark web,” seizing more than $24 million in cryptocurrency, Bloomberg reports.
Law enforcement officials shut down the servers that were operating in Germany that supported the Hydra platform, which has been called the largest marketplace for illegal goods on the web. They also confiscated 543 bitcoin. The US Treasury Department is also taking action against Hydra organizers.
German prosecutors say the platform has been operating since 2015 and garnered 1.23 billion euro in sales in 2020. There were 17 million registered users and 19,000 registered sellers on the platform, selling everything from drugs to forged identification to stolen material.