Russian investigators confiscated crypto worth around 649 million rubles ($8.2 million) from the wallets of Dmitry Pavlov, the 35-year-old self-confessed server mastermind behind the Hydra darknet portal.
The Russian newspaper Izvestia reported that documents unveiled in court this month confirmed law enforcement officers have frozen and seized coins from Pavlov’s crypto wallets.
Hydra Darknet Server Operator ‘Was Paid in Crypto’
Pavlov testified that he received the cryptoassets in the form of “a salary and bonuses” in return for maintaining Hydra servers.
A criminal ring paid Pavlov “about 15 million rubles ($189,277) a year” in crypto for his services, prosecution officials explained.
The accused said that he did not sell his coins for cash. Instead, he held on to the crypto, hoping that its price would continue to grow.
Hydra operators also paid Pavlov cash to cover maintenance costs, prosecution officials added. A branch of the Moscow District Court jailed 16 people for orchestrating Hydra in December last year.
The operation’s mastermind Stanislav Moiseev was jailed for life after the court heard that the portal facilitated over $5 billion in crypto transactions.
Prosecutors said that Russian experts agreed with Chainalysis estimates about the size of the firm’s crypto turnover.
‘Couriers Brought Pavlov Bags of Cash’
Moiseev and others handed Pavlov money to rent and maintain servers at the German company Hetzner, prosecutors explained.
These costs alone amounted to 1.5-2 million rubles ($18,928-$25,239) per month. Hydra managers “periodically” sent Pavlov couriers with bagfuls of cash, prosecutors added.
Hydra’s annual turnover at the time of closure was $1.7 billion, a Rosfinmonitoring employee testified at Pavlov’s trial. The staffer estimated that the platform took cuts of 2% to 5% from crypto transactions made on Hydra.
Rosfinmonitoring (officially the Russian Federal Financial Monitoring Service) is the nation’s top anti-money laundering agency.
Another expert testified that that the “net profit of Hydra’s co-founders alone,” taking into account-related services, amounted to “about 100 billion rubles ($1.3 billion) a year.”
Last month, Chainalysis reported that while there was a 15% decline in global crypto sales across darknet markets in 2024, Russian sites bucked the trend. The latter saw a 68% rise in crypto sales, the firm said.
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