Up to life imprisonment: a person involved in the case of the largest marketplace on the darknet was arrested in Russia

The Meshchansky District Court of Moscow granted the petition of the investigation to arrest Dmitry Pavlov as a suspect in drug trafficking on an especially large scale.

It was the 30-year-old resident of St. Petersburg that the Federal District Court for the Northern District of California in early April accused of committing a number of crimes, considering him one of the administrators of the world's largest darknet drug trading platform.

Immediately after that, Pavlov, who in the United States is associated with the Promservice company mentioned in the indictment (it owns a number of Internet domains, including those already inactive. -

), managed to declare to several Russian publications that he was not involved in the charges.

“We are just resellers.

They bought from the Germans and then sold them, ”Pavlov told Fontanka then, adding that he didn’t know who was“ hosted ”on the servers, since after granting access, clients change the password and access to the server is impossible on his part.

After several short comments in the media, Pavlov stopped communicating with journalists and, having read them in one of the messengers, did not answer RT questions.

The fact that he was arrested in Moscow became known on Thursday.

Pavlov was charged under Part 5 of Art.

228.1 of the Criminal Code of the Russian Federation (illicit trafficking in narcotic drugs on an especially large scale).

On Friday, April 15, information appeared that Pavlov's defense appealed against the decision to arrest.

It is still not known for certain how the criminal prosecution of Dmitry Pavlov in Russia and the charges brought in the United States are connected.

As RT found out, the interests of the detainee during the trial were represented by St. Petersburg lawyer Maria Mittenberg.

She flatly refused to answer questions and hung up.

A source told RT that the case of Dmitry Pavlov is being handled by one of the investigators for especially important cases of the 3rd department of the Office for the Investigation of Organized Crime in the Sphere of Illicit Drug Trafficking of the Investigation Department of the Russian Ministry of Internal Affairs.

Also on russian.rt.com “More arrests are waiting for us”: the first defendants appeared in the case of the largest drug sale platform on the darknet

Recall that, according to the indictment published on April 5 by the US Department of Justice, it is assumed that since November 2015, it was Pavlov who led the Promservice company (formally it belongs to Oleg Viktorovich Pavlov. -

), which is also known as "Full drive" and 4x4 host and which operated the largest marketplace on the dark web, allowing thousands of drug dealers and other sellers of illegal goods and services to use the site.

Thanks to this, the administrators, one of whom was Pavlov, allegedly received millions of dollars in commissions.

According to US law enforcement officials, in total, from January 2016 to March 2022, about $5.2 billion were transferred to cryptocurrency wallets controlled by the illegal platform.

The accusations leveled against the Russian by the Americans were preceded by a special operation by law enforcement agencies in Germany, thanks to which the servers of the shadow marketplace located in the country were turned off and he himself ceased to function on April 5.

In turn, the US Department of the Treasury introduced financial sanctions against the banned site, noting that efforts to stop its work were coordinated between different countries.

"The US Treasury's Office of Foreign Assets Control has imposed sanctions on the world's largest and most well-known darknet site as part of a coordinated international effort to curb the spread of malicious cybercriminal services, dangerous drugs, and other illegal offerings available through this Russian site," it said. agency message.

Former adviser to the President of the Russian Federation on the development of the Internet, owner of the Internet company LiveInternet German Klimenko previously told RT that an operation of this level was possible only within the framework of international cooperation.

He expressed confidence that Russia also participated in it, which for some reason decided not to advertise its involvement.

“This is a distributed history that is on the servers of a bunch of people.

It is not solved by one country ... It is impossible to do something like this without the assistance of the Americans, the Chinese and Russian law enforcement agencies," Klimenko said.

- If a person with average qualifications deliberately hides, it will be very difficult to find him, to put it mildly.

If a group of people buys special software and there are also their own programmers who take all actions so that they are not found, then this is a very long and complicated process, ”Klymenko noted.

Most likely, his version that Russia was also actively working to suppress the work of the marketplace turned out to be correct.

In any case, Dmitry Pavlov found himself in the hands of the Russian investigation within a matter of days after the accusations made across the ocean.

It should be noted that after the toughening of punishment for drug traffickers in 2012, he faces life imprisonment, and there is already a similar precedent in Russian judicial practice.

In December 2017, a major Tajik drug dealer, Sherali Tabarov, was sentenced to such a punishment.