In captivity of "Hydra", or How drug traffickers use other people's videos for their own purposes

Have you ever thought, posting videos online or letting other people take pictures of you, that this material can be used illegally? The heroine of our story also did not suspect that participation in the project of the St. Petersburg video maker could turn her life into a nightmare.

In the first days of the new year, a video began to actively spread on YouTube and Twitter, which can be confidently called an advertisement for the darkweb platform Hydra, which sells drugs. In a small video, in its format resembling a music video, the girl goes for a "bookmark", and at the beginning and end the address of the Hydra website is shown.

The journalists of the Tjournal website conducted a small investigation and found out the story of this video. As it turned out, the video was simply stolen by drug dealers, and its creator, and especially the main character, found out about it after seeing the remade version. The result is that the girl lives in fear, as she has been bullied online and is constantly being threatened.

The owner of the YouTube channel where the remade video first appeared was found. He told that the video was forwarded to him by friends, and he himself has nothing to do with its production. A video was published on January 10 under the title "Hydra 2019 Advertisement", and its description contained links to an illegal site on the darknet.

The video was picked up by Twitter users and thus spread on this social network. They signed the video, most often, as a "new Hydra advertisement". Some perceived the clip as an official advertisement of a death-dealing platform and burst into outrage, others were more restrained and simply appreciated the good play of the main character and high-quality shooting.

Presented as a drug advertisement, the video lasts only a minute and a half. It begins with the fact that the heroine visits the Hydra website and makes an order there. After that, the girl walks through the streets of St. Petersburg to the place where the "bookmark" is located and, taking the prohibited goods, goes for a walk around the city. The video ends with the inscription Never Early, Hydra Only ("Never early, only Hydra"), after which the address of the site is shown.

It turned out that the original video is called Darkness in your mind ("Darkness in your mind") and it appeared on several video hosting sites in the summer of 2018. Of course, there was no mention of the Hydra website in the video and the footage showing the computer screen with its open page.

The girl who created the video introduced herself to TJ as Anastasia. She said that she first came across a drug dealer's craft on January 10, 2019 and was very upset. She doesn't know the people who changed the video and expressed her attitude very briefly: "I don't like this situation."

If the director of Darkness in your mind is just unpleasant, then the actress who starred in the video experiences a wider range of feelings. Maya Bobrova does not hide her name and willingly talks about how she took part in Anastasia's project. The actress has been following the work of the music video maker for a long time and she really liked what the girl was doing. As a result, the actress and the director met and decided to try to work together.

In the sleeping areas of big cities, drug advertising is at every turn

The result of the collaboration (of course we are talking about the original video) was very successful. The video has gained 200 thousand views on YouTube and even flashed some memes on the network, with frames taken from it. Maya also does not know the creators and, moreover, the customers of the second, illegal version of the clip.

Bobrova said that after the appearance of the Hydra advertisement, she began to be recognized. For the first time, this happened a couple of days after Maya first stumbled upon a drug dealer's craft. In the bar, a man approached the girl and took a picture of her. After that, the stranger began to ask Bobrova about how she managed to appear in such a criminal advertisement. The actress told the annoying guy that he had confused her with someone and hurried to leave the institution.

To date, there is no information about whether the reworked video is an official advertisement for the Hydra website or it's just someone's joke. There are no discussions on this topic on the Hydra forums, and the moderator of the site answers evasively. An anonymous employee of the banned site said that if the link leads to Hydra, then most likely the video is related to the site. If the link was slightly different from the original one, then we could talk about the machinations of the phishers, but everything is true here, down to the last character.

Hydra ads on YouTube

Hydra has previously conducted promotions on social networks and video hosting sites. The first advertising attack was noted in the summer of 2017, when a short video appeared before the video with an offer to purchase "staff" and "get stoned". After that, an advertisement for "drugs" was seen on YouTube in February 2018. This time everything was more modest — users were only shown the name of the site and its address.

There is still some possibility that the video is not connected with the site, but is a fake or an unsuccessful joke. The efforts made to find out its origin were not crowned with success. Even users of the closed Telegram chat Hydra market official did not shed light on this secret, only the chat administrator hinted that the clip was the work of some enthusiast.

Advertising "staff", which focuses on the fact that laughter prolongs life

One of the first places on YouTube where the video appeared was the account of a user named Nikita. The guy said that he saw an advertisement for Hydra on Vkontakte, in one of the groups dedicated to the darknet. He copied the material and posted it on his video channel. Nikita said that at the request of the creator of the original video, that is, Anastasia, he is ready to delete the clip.

This unpleasant story, which goes against the law and common sense, is not over yet, but we hope that the author of Darkness in your mind and Maya Bobrova will not become extreme in it. Our readers would like to remind you that a person is even more vulnerable on the web than in real life and you can avoid such situations only by completely refusing to shoot yourself for social networks or YouTube channels. Or do you think otherwise?