“We’re just resellers”

According to the Spark database, Promservice LLC does not belong to Dmitry Olegovich, but to Oleg Viktorovich Pavlov. The company was registered in Cherepovets as a travel agency. Promservice owns a number of domains, including the non-functioning website mentioned in the indictment 4x4host.ru .

Dmitry Pavlov himself told Fontanka that he has not been working under the brands listed in the document for more than five years. Pavlov does not know who is hosted on these servers, since after granting access, clients change their password. “We are just resellers – resellers. They bought it from the Germans and then sold it,” Pavlov said. Pavlov left the publication’s question about the consequences of the charges without comment.

RT also tried to get explanations from Dmitry Pavlov.

He read the message in one of the messengers, but did not respond to it, after which he blocked the sender.

Also on April 5, the day of the publication of the charges against Pavlov, another American agency — the Ministry of Finance — imposed sanctions against the drug marketplace.

“The Office of Foreign Assets Control of the US Treasury has imposed sanctions against the world’s largest and most famous darknet platform… as part of coordinated international efforts to curb the spread of malicious cybercrime services, dangerous drugs and other illegal offers available through this Russian website,” the agency’s message quotes TASS.

The statement of the US Treasury followed a special operation by German law enforcement agencies, as a result of which the site stopped working.

“The Central Directorate for Combating Cybercrime of the Frankfurt Prosecutor’s Office and the Federal Criminal Police Department of Germany have disabled the server infrastructure of the world’s largest illegal darknet market located in the country. Thus, its activity is terminated. Bitcoins worth the equivalent of about €23 million were also confiscated,” the press service of the criminal police reported.

It was clarified that the termination of the site was the result of an investigation that the German authorities began in August 2021 and in which a number of American structures took part.