The owner of the Hydra servers received six years in prison as part of a plea deal

Dmitry Pavlov, 35, who was arrested in 2022 in the Hydra case, was convicted in a special order after pleading guilty and making a deal with the investigation. This became known during a court hearing in the case of his alleged accomplice, which was attended by a correspondent of Izvestia.

The US Department of Justice publicly filed charges against Dmitry Pavlov in April 2022. Federal prosecutors called him the man who for several years in a row provided the critical infrastructure of the largest drug trafficking site in history.

As Izvestia found out, Pavlov entered into a pre-trial cooperation agreement with the investigation and was convicted in a special order in November 2024. The text of the verdict was not published, but according to Izvestia sources familiar with the investigation, he was sentenced to six years in prison in a general regime colony.

At the end of 2024, many media outlets mistakenly named Stanislav Moiseev, the life—long convicted owner of one of the large stores on the site, as the co-founder of Hydra. In reality, the accused had nothing to do with the management of the marketplace itself.

Read more in the exclusive Izvestia article:

Stoglavaya Hydra: the owner of the servers of the "online drug cartel" appeared in court