One of the men accused of helping to manage Silk Road 2.0, the successor website to online black market Silk Road, was sentenced to eight years in U.S. prison, Reuters reported late last week.
Brian Farrell, a staff member of Silk Road 2.0, pled guilty earlier this year to charges related to conspiracy to distribute heroin, cocaine and methamphetamine and was arrested back in Jan. 2015.
Much like the original website, Reuters said that Silk Road 2.0 enabled users to make anonymous transactions using bitcoin, typically for drugs, hacking tools and other illegal items.
Silk Road 2.0 made its debut in 2013, just weeks after Silk Road was shut down by authorities and its creator, Ross Ulbricht, was arrested.
During Ulbricht’s three-hour conviction sentencing hearing, Federal Judge Katherine Forrest called the Silk Road “an assault on the public health of our communities,” as it was the site that funneled through billions of dollars for selling heroin, cocaine and crystal meth.
Back in February, former Secret Service agent Shaun Bridges managed to get himself arrested again as he was trying to skip the country before turning himself in on a six-year jail sentence in connection to the Silk Road fiasco for skimming bitcoin from the case.
Bridges already confessed in August to pocketing hundreds of thousands in digital currency while working on the Silk Road case and was sentenced to 71 months in prison. He was scheduled to turn himself in on a Friday (Jan. 29) to start serving that sentence, but it seems that perhaps he had some other ideas.
He was arrested in his home after he was found in possession of a bag containing his passport, records for offshore accounts, documents for his wife’s non-U.S. citizenship and many, many bulletproof vests.
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