The Russian judiciary wants to seize what it believes to be a record amount of cryptocurrency from a drug dealer’s crypto wallet, the business daily Kommersant reported this week.
The crypto stash is believed to belong to an alleged co-founder and administrator of arguably the largest online marketplace on the dark web, Hydra, which was recently shut down by Germany.
A 30-year-old businessman from Cherepovets, Dmitry Olegovich Pavlov, was detained last month on a warrant from the Meshchansky District Court of Moscow. He was accused of production, sale, and distribution of drugs under Russia’s Criminal Code.
He was arrested shortly after the U.S. Department of Justice announced criminal charges against a Russian citizen with the same names for conspiracy to distribute narcotics and conspiracy to commit money laundering.
Pavlov’s wallet was seized with a court order and investigators suspect it stores hundreds of millions of dollars’ worth of cryptocurrency, according to the report. Whether the state will be able to obtain the coins, however, is another question.
It is not known how much digital currency was in this wallet as the owner refused to give access to his wallet. Otherwise, aside from the crypto wallet, Pavlov has been otherwise cooperative and police already possess his computers and phones, Kommersant revealed.
In the history of the Russian-language marketplace, Dmitry Pavlov is the first Hydra operator detained, the newspaper noted. Prior to its lockdown in early April, the platform had been active since at least 2015 and had around 17 million customers. The German law enforcement has seized its server infrastructure and took down the darknet market’s website with support from U.S. agencies.
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