A Russian court has issued a life sentence to a man found guilty of being the kingpin of a dark web drug marketplace that supplied more than a metric ton of narcotics and psychotropic substances to customers around the world.

On Monday, the court found that Stanislav Moiseyev oversaw Hydra, a Russian-language market that operated an anonymous website that matched sellers of drugs and other illicit wares with buyers. Hydra was dismantled in 2022 after authorities in Germany seized servers and other infrastructure used by the sprawling billion-dollar enterprise and a stash of bitcoin worth millions of dollars. At the time, Hydra was the largest crime forum, having facilitated $5 billion in transactions for 17 million customers. The market had been in operation since 2015.

One-stop cybercrime shop

“The court established that from 2015 to October 2018, the criminal community operated in various regions of the Russian Federation and the Republic of Belarus,” the state prosecutor’s office of the Moscow Region said. “The well-covered activities of the organized criminal group were aimed at systematically committing serious and especially serious crimes related to the illegal trafficking of drugs and psychotropic substances.”

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