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DEA crypto investigator learned her grandmother sold drugs on Hydra
Wired reports that DEA special agent Lili Infante, who helped pioneer U.S. dark-web cryptocurrency cases, later learned her grandmother in Russia had sold marijuana on the Hydra marketplace.
- New headline Was: “She Was the DEA’s Premier Crypto Detective. The Clues Led Straight to Her Own Family”
- Our desk filed its story
Wired published a long profile Sunday of Lili Infante, a Drug Enforcement Administration special agent who helped build early U.S. cases against dark-web drug vendors paid in cryptocurrency, and who later learned her grandmother in Russia had sold marijuana on the Hydra marketplace1.
Infante, born Lilita Shabazian in Moscow in 1987, interned as a Russian-language analyst at DEA headquarters in New York as a Columbia University student in 2007, then joined the agency as a special agent in Miami in 2014 after Harvard Extension School, Wired reported1.
After discovering her then-husband, also a DEA agent, had been unfaithful during a 2014 surveillance operation, she turned to bitcoin and Tor marketplaces that had grown after the Silk Road shutdown, the magazine said1. A supervisor initially authorized $200 for a test buy; cocaine from a Blue Sky vendor arrived at a DEA post office box1.
Wired said Infante identified a fentanyl vendor known as Owlcity by tricking the seller into checking a package on USPS.com without Tor, then using postal web logs to a Miramar, Florida, apartment and arresting Chrissano Leslie1. She later assembled agents from the IRS, Postal Inspection Service, FBI and Homeland Security into what Wired called one of the first interagency cybercrime task forces1.
In Operation Tornado, targeting Dream Market, her team arrested Missouri vendor Joshua Kelly in May 2017 and, on Aug. 31, 2017, detained French administrator Gal Vallerius, known as OxyMonster, at Atlanta’s airport while he traveled to a beard competition, Wired reported1. Infante opened his bitcoin wallet by guessing a password from personal details and found about $500,000 in bitcoin, according to the magazine1.
After her grandmother Nina died, Infante’s mother, Katya, told her Nina had confessed to selling marijuana on Hydra to pay a gang after Infante’s cousin Dennis failed to repay drug debts, Wired reported1. Nina, then in her 70s, learned Tor, VPNs and bitcoin and used Dennis as a courier for Hydra “hidden treasure” drops, the magazine said, citing the family account1.
Hydra operated mainly in Russia and, Wired said, handled a large share of darknet crypto trades; Infante’s supervisors told her the DEA needed a crime against U.S. persons to take the case1. The DEA declined to comment on the record1.
