Russia sentences Hydra marketplace founder to life in prison

Russian authorities have sentenced Stanislav Moiseyev, the founding father of the prison drug platform Hydra, to life in jail after accusing him of organizing a prison drug enterprise.

Russia’s state information company reported that Moiseyev had been fined 4 million rubles (~$37,000) and convicted by a Moscow courtroom together with 15 different accomplices. These accomplices had been fined a complete of 16 million rubles (~$150,000) and sentenced to jail phrases starting from eight to 23 years.

Hydra operated from Russia and Belarus between 2015 and 2018. In 2021, Chainalysis reported that the group processed practically $3.2 billion value of crypto by means of a number of “high-risk” crypto exchanges. Crystal Blockchain has additionally found this $780 million was traded between Binance and Hydra.

Police have reportedly seized a bunch of medicine from the Hydra group. Moiseyev and his accomplices will reportedly be imprisoned in penal colonies with a particular and strict regime (overcrowded prisons which were described because the hardest in Russia).

Hydra, which was seized and closed by the US in 2022, was certainly one of Garantex’s largest counterparties and despatched $60 million for the trade between 2019 and 2021. Garantex founder Sergey Mendeleev launched a Tether company final 12 months.

Hydra, together with Binance and the Russian Ponzi scheme ‘The Finiko’, had been the three fundamental counterparties of Bitzlato, a crypto trade that dealt with greater than $700 million in illicit funds. The founding father of Bitzlato pleaded responsible a 12 months in the past to working an unlawful cash transmission firm.