Silk Road 2.0 staffer sentenced to 8 years in prison for running dark web drug market

By June 6, 2016Bitcoin Business

Brian Farrell, 27, was arrested in January 2015 after an FBI probe uncovered his IP address linked to the Silk Road 2.0 The second-in-command of Silk Road 2.0, the successor to the infamous underground drug website of the same name, has been sentenced to eight years in prison and four years of supervised release for his role in the operation.

Brian Farrell, 27, was arrested in January last year after an FBI probe uncovered his IP address linked to the dark web-hosted marketplace. In March 2015 he pleaded guilty to a charge of conspiracy to distribute heroin, cocaine and methamphetamine.

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His arrest came at the same time as the trial of Ross Ulbricht, aka Dread Pirate Roberts – founder of the original Silk Road marketplace. Roberts was eventually sentenced to life in prison after being found guilty on a wide range of drug distribution charges.

After the original operation was seized by US law enforcement, a successor quickly appeared in the form of Silk Road 2.0. Like its predecessor, it was only accessible via the Tor browser which helped to keep its customers and drug vendors mostly anonymous.

The website was shut down again following a series of raids in ‘Operation Onymous’ which targeted a number of underground marketplaces across the globe. By the time it was forced offline, the site was reportedly generating sales of about $8m (£5.5m) a month in bitcoin.

As previously reported , the FBI used a somewhat controversial technique to catch Farrell. After the arrest, it emerged the US government had funded research at Carnegie Mellon University which looked at methods to crack the anonymity provided by Tor. In February this year, court documents finally ended the speculation by confirming the US Department of Defense had not only funded the university research but also […]

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