According to Bederov, the restoration of the marketplace from the owners may take a maximum of a week

Otherwise it will mean that the police detained one of the key players.

“Administrators are shouting that they will restore the site. Indeed, they have opportunities for this — both financial and human, and the brand is quite well—known,” Bederov admitted. — It is important to understand that in the darknet sites are divided into two categories: more or less modern marketplaces, of which there are few, and this site belongs to them. Everything else is represented by some antediluvian sites or forums of the early 1990s model.”

Alternative forums, according to him, do not withstand the flow of visitors and “fall”, and also can hardly compete with a closed marketplace.

“Beautiful wrapper”

Hacker Alexander Varskoy, commenting on RT’s accusations against Dmitry Pavlov, notes that American agencies often make baseless accusations against Russians.

“The US Department of Justice is generally great masters at making public statements from some of its serious legal services in a good package. They wrap such things in a beautiful wrapper. Moreover, for some reason no one attaches log files to these documents,” Varskoy explains. — We have a similar situation with Zhenya Nikulin, who was arrested in the Czech Republic in 2016 and taken to America. He’s still sitting there. They listed a bunch of his nicknames in the official paper of the Ministry of Justice, but I’ve known the guy for many years and haven’t heard of such nicknames, and we just know each other by nicknames more than by last names.”

In turn, Bederov believes that Pavlov could have been involved in the illegal activities of the marketplace — he is charged with economic crimes in the indictment.

In addition, the expert draws attention to the fact that Internet crime should not be perceived as an organized criminal community that has some kind of strict and understandable hierarchy. Representatives of criminal structures are very segmented by areas of work: there are people who directly commit crimes, and there are those who are engaged in providing their software, providing server and other parts.

“Let him prove his innocence. US law enforcement agencies are quite clearly collecting their evidence base. It seems to me that his snout is in the gun,” Bederov says after studying the document of the US Department of Justice with accusations against Pavlov. — It is necessary to analyze the nature of the relationship, because the evidence base indicates that he received transfers in cryptocurrency, and, most likely, he was tracked using it. The fact that he didn’t know anything is a very beautiful legend, but in general, cryptocurrency turnover and payment using it are prohibited in Russia, by the way.”