British Administrator Silk Road Sentenced to Lose £490,000 in Bitcoin
Administrator of Silk Road, Thomas White, was sentenced to five years and four months in jail, after pleading guilty to drug trafficking, money laundering, and making 464 Category A images of child abuse.
An jobless university dropout who was formerly a member of the highest echelon of the famed dark net bazaar Silk Road has been forced to pay over almost £490,000 in Bitcoin.
After a US law enforcement operation seized Silk Road administrator Ross Ulbricht in 2013, Thomas White, often known online as Cthulhu, took over the dark net market.
Despite the anonymizing software he used to host and access the websites, the NCA claimed it had traced packages of narcotics he had bought through the original Silk Road.
White was sentenced to five years and four months in prison in 2019 after pleading guilty to drug trafficking, money laundering, and creating 464 Category A photographs of child abuse, the most serious.
He had dropped out of Liverpool John Moores University’s accounting program after a single term to work on Silk Road, and its replacement site, Silk Road 2.0, was launched less than a month after Silk Road was shut down.
The second site, like the first, allowed users to access a hidden marketplace where they could “purchase and trade class A and B narcotics, computer hacking equipment, and other criminal products” using Bitcoin and the anonymizing browser Tor.
According to the National Crime Agency, “despite having no genuine income, White paid £10,700 in advance to rent his luxury apartment on Liverpool’s downtown water front.”
Investigators are uncertain how much money he gained, but they estimate that roughly $96 million (£73 million) worth of commodities were exchanged on Silk Road 2.0, and that White received a fee of between 1% and 5% on each sale from tens of thousands of users.
White was estimated to have generated more than £1,5 million from his illicit conduct at a court hearing last week, as the NCA continued to probe his finances even after he was imprisoned.
The National Crime Agency’s Tyrone Surgeon said: “Thomas White was a well-liked member of the Silk Road’s early leadership.
When the original site was shut down, he took advantage of this and earned handsomely from his illicit behavior.
“This case demonstrates that crime does not pay; not only has he spent the previous two years in prison, but he has also been ordered to pay approximately £500,000 in restitution.
“This has been a complicated, worldwide investigation that illustrates our commitment to using every instrument at our disposal to prevent organized criminals from benefitting from their crimes,” Mr Surgeon continued.
