Tal Prihar, an Israeli citizen, who owned DeepDotWeb (DDW), a news site dedicated to events in and surrounding the dark web, pleaded guilty to receiving over $8 million in kickbacks from purchases of fentanyl, firearms, and other contraband, iHodl Russia reports. Prihar was arrested with his co-defendant Michael Phan.
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Besides information about the Darknet, DDW also provided users with links to illegal Darknet marketplaces. For providing these links, Prihar and Phan received over $8 million from the marketplaces in the form of cryptocurrencies, including approximately 8,155 BTC (EXANTE: Bitcoin). Prihar has already agreed to forfeit $8,414,173.
As iHodl earlier reported, Elliptic, a blockchain analysis firm, found a new cash-out services for bitcoins on a darknet market called Hydra. According to Tom Robinson, Elliptic's Co-Founder and Chief Scientist, new services offer large volumes of physical cash at a specified location, where it can be retrieved by the customer.
Robinson claims the technique "has long been used for the delivery of drugs," and now is being used to hide traces for the exchange of cryptocurrency for fiat currency.
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