AlphaBay darknet-market moderator sentenced to 11 years in prison

A U.S. court sentenced 26-year-old AlphaBay darknet-market moderator Brian Connor Herrell to 11 years in prison.

Under the handles Penissmith and Botah, Herrell helped resolve disputes between buyers and sellers of illegal goods, and identified fraudulent schemes on the marketplace. For this, he received compensation in bitcoins.

Herrell himself pleaded guilty in January.

As previously reported, U.S. law enforcement shut AlphaBay in July 2017. The market’s administrator, Canadian citizen Alexander Kazes, was arrested at around the same time. He killed himself in a Thai prison before extradition to the United States.

At the same time, Hansa Market was closed as well. The operation involved law-enforcement agencies from Thailand, the Netherlands, Lithuania, Canada, the United Kingdom and France. The drive to curb dark-net marketplaces came from U.S. President Donald Trump.

Kazes’s assets were seized in 2018 — $9 million in cryptocurrencies, as well as cars and real estate valued at $12 million.

In 2015, Silk Road founder Ross Ulbricht was sentenced to life in prison in the United States.

In 2018, U.S. and South Korean authorities shut down the largest darknet marketplace for child pornography, through which more than 1 million videos were distributed. They arrested an administrator from South Korea and 337 users from the United Kingdom (38), Brazil, Germany, Saudi Arabia, the United States and the UAE.

In 2019, authorities closed the following darknet marketplaces and ventures as part of international operations:

• Wall Street Market;
• Silkkitie;
• Deep Dot Web;
• Cannabis Road (after a raid on a decommissioned NATO bunker in Traben-Trarbach);
• Orange Chemicals.

In April 2019, Dream Market—the oldest and largest darknet marketplace at the time—also closed.

Bitcoin on Silk Road elevated the darknet economy to a new level, but in recent years marketplaces in the deep web have disappeared one after another. What is the reason for the extinction of such a profitable, though illegal, business? https://t.co/tFFrFc3wc1#darknet #bitcoin pic.twitter.com/drOIkaoeN1

— ForkLog (@ForkLog) May 1, 2019

In March 2020, the FBI arrested Kirill Firsov, the creator of the darknet marketplace Deer. He is charged with selling personal data for cryptocurrency and aiding human trafficking.

A month later, the Monopoly darknet market barred sellers from exploiting COVID-19-related panic in advertising.

In late August 2020, the major darknet market Empire Market went offline, likely due to a large-scale DDoS attack. At the time of writing, it remained inactive.

The major darknet market has gone offline. The exact reason remains undetermined

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