German police have located and closed down the servers of Hydra, allegedly one of the world’s biggest underground online stores.

Investigators at the Bundeskriminalamt (BKA – the Federal Criminal Police Office) claim that the Russian-language Hydra darkweb site, accessible via the Tor network, had about 17 million customer accounts (many individual buyers may have had several accounts, of course) and more than 19,000 seller accounts at the time they shuttered it.

As you probably expect from a darkweb marketplace, the main products traded online were illegal drugs, but the site also apparently offered a money-laundering “coin tumbler” service aimed at creating hard-to-trace cryptocurrency transaction records, and did a brisk trade in forged identification documents.

According to a report from the BBC, locating the actual servers used to run Hydra was not an easy task (the site has been online since at least 2015), but German police said they started following up on a tip in the middle of 2021 that suggested the servers were actually hosted in Germany.

That led to the shutdown on Tuesday 2022-04-05, with the site’s main page changed to look like this:

Click on image to see it in context on the BKA’s original page.