Within the end result of a two-year authorized course of, the previous operator of darkish internet index web site DeepDotWeb was handed a sentence of 97 months in prison for cash laundering on Tuesday.
The sentence was issued to Tal Prihar, an Israeli nationwide, by a choose of the District Courtroom for the Western District of Pennsylvania. The judgment from the court docket ordered Prihar to forfeit $8.4 million in money, together with an ASUS laptop computer, a black iPhone, and his accounts at cryptocurrency exchanges Binance, Kraken and OKCoin.
The DeepDotWeb web site began working in 2013, operated by Prihar and one other Israeli citizen Michael Phan, who’s a co-defendant within the case. The positioning was hosted on the open web however supplied hyperlinks to the .onion domains of darkish internet marketplaces and posted information updates from darkish internet providers.
The DeepDotWeb area was seized by the FBI in Might 2019 as a part of a coordinated operation with police in France, Germany, the Netherlands, Brazil, and Israel that noticed a number of arrests of market operators.
After his arrest in Brazil, Prihar pled guilty to money laundering, admitting to receiving kickbacks within the type of cryptocurrency from darkish internet providers featured on his web site. These funds have been reportedly transformed to fiat forex and despatched to financial institution accounts he managed within the title of shell firms set as much as launder the funds.
Prihar’s co-defendant Michael Phan stays in Israel and is at the moment present process extradition proceedings, in accordance with the Justice Division.
