On an October morning in , in a town on the outskirts of Moscow, senior police investigator Evgeniya Shishkina was leaving home when she was ambushed by a gunman. Lieutenant Colonel Shishkina took a swing at her assailant. He slipped, but shot her in the stomach. As she lay on the floor he got up and shot her in the neck. Russian police and an investigation by the BBC allege the shooter was hired on an illegal drug trading platform known as Hydra, by a Russian hacker who ran one of its online drug shops. As Russian police continue investigating the murder of their colleague, the sheer size and reach of Hydra, which serves up drugs to Russians and post-Soviet republics, has come under the spotlight. But it is also a dark web drug enterprise like no other. Hydra has a whopping 2. The largest Western dark web market, AlphaBay, which closed in , was thought to have , registered users at its peak. This dwarfs its dark web counterparts in the West. Hydra represents a new kind of dark web marketplace. But there are innovations. Hydra has a strict way of doing business and code of conduct overseen by a central hub. While in other markets vendors pay once to open an account, on Hydra every one of its estimated 5, shops has to pay a monthly rent. Trusted Sellers must have racked up at least 1, transactions and customer disputes should not exceed seven percent of the total number of orders per month. Hydra's admins have learned from previous dark web drug markets and know that trust is key, so the marketplace has a sophisticated quality assurance set up. Hydra has its own team of chemists and human guinea pigs to test each product and medics on standby to give safety advice. There is a subforum where these test results are posted, complete with graphs, analysis, and photos. Anyone trying to pass oregano as high-grade chronic will get kicked off the site. No fentanyl is allowed, and neither are weapons, hitmen, viruses or porn, although drugs, fake passports, dodgy SIM cards, and counterfeit cash are sold. On the whole, these rules appear to be obeyed, although the investigation into Lt. But Hydra's biggest calling card is how it's crossed the digital realm into the real world. Like a real life video game, the online stores on Hydra employ drug dealers known as kladmen 'treasuremen' or 'droppers' , whose job is to stash drugs in GPS-tagged hiding spots ready for pick up by online buyers. Dead drops from Russian drug web marketplaces were first reported in , but under the auspices of Hydra the system has proliferated. These dead drops can be anywhere from tree hollows, street bushes, round the back of apartment blocks or electrical transformer boxes, in crowded public locations, near metro stations or local forests. On completing the online transaction, buyers are sent coordinates, photos, and directions where to find the buried treasure. For example: go to the north entrance of the park and look under the third tree on your left. After going on this little quest, buyers have got 24 hours to confirm they have the goods and leave a review. And with business booming, Hydra has created a whole new profession for young Russians. They in turn get paid via the same anonymous means. Once they have hid 6, rubles worth of treasures, they can start earning. Galina was paid commission depending on the weight and type of drugs on each drop. But there were times she did 30 or At first she worked with hash, MDMA, and amphetamines, then almost exclusively with mephedrone, a drug that has become increasingly popular in Russia over the last decade. Take it home, re-pack it there. This is a very long and boring exercise, but I could decide how many drops of what weight I wanted to do and it was very convenient. Usually I would make 10 drops of one gram, 10 of two grams, and go lay them out, leaving the rest till next time. As soon as someone makes an order, they get the GPS coordinates. The second task of a dropper is taking a photo and writing a description and uploading the goods onto the shop site. Ten packages usually took her 30 minutes. But since then it has been updated and revised. The bible advises droppers to use encrypted phones so police cannot track previous drops and map-downloading tools to mark drops without having to go online. Unsurprisingly it tells grasshopper-level droppers to avoid drawing attention to themselves. It would be weird if someone sees an office manager crawling around the bushes. Bad places are near schools, cemeteries and police stations because they can draw unwanted attention , apartment block courtyards because the gates might be closed when the customer gets there , and even gutters unless packages are waterproofed. You can either go for a walk, looking for places to hide the stuff, making drops and taking photos as you go. The speed at which you do your job is not as important as efficiency. Lawyer Arseny Levinson runs the legal aid service Hand-Help. He says all sorts of people become dropmen, but most commonly it's young people. According to his analysis of Russian Ministry of Justice statistics, more than half of those convicted of drug trafficking in were years old and students. He says this is a lot to do with Hydra droppers. Yandex is a big online food order and delivery service in Russia. He decided to become a dropper after leaving the army and spotted the advert to be a kladman while buying drugs online. At one point he said he was doing 70 drops a day, using the money to fit out his apartment with brand new furniture. Namely adrenaline. That feeling when you balance all the time on the verge of being caught. Because of his love of forests and parks, he used those to bury his drug stashes at night when it was quiet. But all the evidence points to something of an online takeover. Shortis said Hydra is a more multifaceted and harder to contain beast than other online drug market sites. This means that whilst vendors in the West are often thought of as one person or a small group, vendors we see listed on Hydra are much more likely to be representative of a larger network of actors. Shortis said that Hydra is a lot more visible to police, but that does not make it easier to investigate. Yet when they are, they may know little about anyone else in the vendor network and consequently, the law enforcement investigation may end with them,' he added. Petersburg delivering or collecting packages makes the Russian online drug trade much more visible than its western counterpart. This is very different from western cryptomarkets where the privacy of the delivery method mitigates public awareness of online drug markets. With every new shift in the criminal world comes a new bunch of parasites. For droppers who either get tracked by seekers as they make drops around town or whose hiding places are easily found by someone on the lookout for stashes, seekers can mean the sack. Seekers love the long Russian winters, when the snow reveals a myriad of hiding places across towns, cities, parks, and forests. Over the years the group has been accused of kidnapping addicts, chaining them up to make them go cold turkey, mob ties, and racism and xenophobia towards immigrants. But now CWD is refocusing its aim. Before when we were dealing with heroin, of course it was mainly gypsies and Tajiks, and every drug user was a seller as well. Now it can be Russians, anyone. A November police operation which netted nearly half a ton of various substances failed to catch even one store proprietor—just seven couriers. That brings us to another interesting question. Given what we know about Russian hackers and the Russian mafia , not to mention corruption within the DEA in the Silk Road case, could it be Hydra has friends in high places? But such cases are rare. We keep hearing cases about this, for example in Khakassia. After allegedly uncovering the scheme, year-old Yuri Zaitsev was himself charged with taking payoffs from drug dealers. When one of their dealers was caught, they personally intervened to have the charges dropped. For example, last July it was reported that two police chiefs were arrested for running an online drug ring in Moscow. And those are just a few such cases we know about. Russia now has more prisoners serving time for drugs than any other crime , a slot formerly occupied by murder. He got caught, as usual, by one stupid mistake: one day, he forgot to turn on the equivalent of a VPN or Tor on his laptop, so they traced his IP address and slapped handcuffs on him as he was boarding a flight to Kazakhstan. Still, quite enterprising for a year-old. There are two reasons Russia keeps spawning top cybercrooks like Misha. The first is that Russia has a lot of very smart, educated people. Russian universities produce great scientists, engineers, programmers, and mathematicians. The second is that the government actually uses hackers as privateers to do its bidding, which is why the same names pop up in cybercrime and national security investigations. Go, steal for Mother Russia! RAMP the Russian Anonymous Marketplace arrived on the scene in , building a platform where instead of messaging users back and forth you could simply browse the catalogue and press buy. Unlike the libertarian rhetoric bandied around on Silk Road, RAMP refused to support any agenda, knowing what happens to such outspoken parties in Russia. And unlike Silk Road, instead of taking commissions from each sale it charged every prospective drug merchant a flat tax for doing business on its platform. Hydra was born in as a merger of two smaller forums, Legal RC and Way Away, both specializing in synthetics. According to an investigation last year by Moscow-based online newspaper Lenta. Legal RC and Way Away were the last ones standing, and they had to stick together if they wanted to survive. But RAMP had major weaknesses from the outset. One, its refusal to commit to anything political extended to a ban on advertising. Hydra meanwhile had chemists working for its shops cooking up these novel substances, and a direct line to precursor suppliers in China, allowing it to corner the market in poorer areas where synthetics are more popular. Hydra struck back, shutting down the site with a string of DDoS attacks. A classic turf war broke out in cyberspace, except instead of car explosions and drive-bys it was a bunch of nerds hurling botnets at each other. One disloyal store was sold out to the feds as an example to others. Either way, with its main competitor out of the way, Hydra moved to consolidate its gains. It embarked on an aggressive publicity campaign, posting videos on YouTube, buying databases of phone numbers and spamming them with texts, and absorbing existing drug rings, inviting them to join the party. Hydra now has thousands of online drug bazaars catering to every corner of the Russian Federation, from Vladivostok in the Far East to the freshly-annexed Crimea. There are even a few branches and shops operating in Ukraine, Belarus, Kazakhstan and other former Soviet territories. Cocaine has been coming in through St. Petersburg, allegedly protected by powerful figures , since at least the 90s, although its high price has put it out of reach of most Russians. Meanwhile, a heroin pipeline was set up from the poppy fields of Afghanistan through the ex-Soviet republic of Tajikistan: kilos of heroin were hidden onboard military planes, then distributed through the Tajik diaspora. Now, the rise of new synthetic drugs and online drug markets such as Hydra has meant just about anyone can set up shop as a drug dealer. Three years ago Galina decided to progress from dropper to shop owner. But where do the shops get their supplies? Cathinones and other synthetics are now massive in Russia, and Hydra sells do-it-yourself spice and mephedrone making kits, along with the raw ingredients imported from China. The chemists find what they need through their own channels; I only allocate them funds. According to Galina, vendors on Hydra are more likely to collaborate than compete with each other. But people choose not only on the basis of price, but also take into account the convenience of drops, the reputation of the stores and their specific wares. Shops try to occupy their own specific niches. In Moscow for instance, there are quite a few shops that deal with cocaine and expensive mephedrone, and there are shops that basically only sell marijuana. Like any business, the shops have a division of labour: someone runs the stash house, someone does accounting, someone tends to the ganja plants, and so on. But the life of a dark web vendor is a busy one and she rarely gets to unwind. She now employs a team of six young couriers. This is the main problem when finding workers. You can teach anyone how to make good drops over time. I ask Galina about her life outside Hydra. She says she has very little free time. But of course I need to relax. I visit bars and cafes, watch TV shows and documentaries. Sometimes I go visit friends in another city. She may have little spare time, but at least Galina has managed to stay out of jail, unlike the droppers who make up some of the 19, people who were convicted for drug dealing in Russia in He loves writing poetry, music. It all began when Sergey wanted a new iPhone. Turns out Sergey was doing a little more than flunking biology class. On the 26th June he was picked up with two friends trying to make a drop. It was just a day before his high school graduation, and Sergey managed to call his dad to say he wouldn't be making it. Dropmen are charged under article of the Russian criminal code drug trafficking and can get slapped with jail terms of up to 20 years, even for relatively small amounts. Sergey was first hit with a seven year sentence, then another court raised it to 13 years. His 18 year old friend also got 13 years and the third teenager, aged 17, got five years. Finally in January of this year, after nearly two years of appeals and taking her case to the media, Oxana and her family managed to bring it back down to six. Life in 'the Zone' slang for prison takes its toll on its young inmates. Like in America, convicts are used for cheap manual labour. Overpacked cells and non-existent healthcare is a great way to catch tuberculosis. Torture is common. Oxana showed me a recent photo where Sergey looks skinny and pale. He works six days a week sewing backpacks. So much grief and tears! New recruits can always be found. In January the MVD announced that a special unit would be formed to fight online drug trafficking. Last year, the government also passed a new 'sovereign internet' law to theoretically cut Russia off from the global web in case of cyber-attack. Did taking out Pablo Escobar lead to a drug-free Colombia? Hell no. Could Hydra be the future of drug dealing? Customers must go out into a city or countryside and search for their purchase whilst avoiding raising the suspicions of the police or other members of the public. Some customers may also have to travel great distances just to find their delivery has been stolen by people who are savvy to where their local dropper is making deliveries, or that the police are actively patrolling the area where the drop has been made. While Hydra is very popular in Russia, it is rarely discussed in western cryptomarket forums. In the Middle Ages in Russia, ordinary people brought to despair went to the woods and became outlaws. Now, they are hiding on the dark web to become drug dealers. Sign In Create Account. Most Russian drug dealers don't hand off drugs anymore—they stash them in geotagged hiding spots ready for pickup by online buyers. March 27, , am. Drug buyers are given locations of stashes via maps, instructions and photos. Instructions for droppers on how to waterproof drugs for hiding. The Orlov family with Sergey \\\\\\[center\\\\\\] in Kirov. Photo provided by the Orlov family. Sergey Orlov in prison. Tagged: dark web russia drug-dealing News. Your Email:.