An Israeli national was sentenced to 97 months in prison in connection with operating the DeepDotWeb (DDW), a website that connected internet users with darknet marketplaces.
From 2013, Prihar (37) and co-defendant Michael Phan (34), started operating DeepDotWeb and provided a platform for Dark Web news and links to marketplaces, redirecting visitors to their .onion addresses -- websites that are not available via standard search engines in the clear web.
The conviction of Tal Prihar, 37, was announced last week by the U.S. Department of Justice and U.S. Attorney Cindy K. Chung for the Western District of Pennsylvania for money laundering and was ordered to forfeit $8,414,173, ASUS laptop, iPhone, and accounts at various cryptocurrency exchanges such as Kraken, Binance and OKCoin.
Prihar had pleaded guilty to conspiracy to commit money laundering in March 2021, almost two years after his arrest and the site's seizure, while Phan remains in Israel and is currently undergoing extradition proceedings.
For linking users with the illegal darknet marketplaces, Prihar received a total of 8,155 bitcoins from his affiliate marketing deals with marketplace operators. To conceal the sources of these payments, Prihar converted them to fiat currency and laundered it through other Bitcoin and bank accounts he controlled in the name of shell companies.
"To conceal the nature and source of these illegal kickback payments, Prihar transferred the payments from his DDW bitcoin wallet to other bitcoin accounts and to bank accounts he controlled in the names of shell companies." explains the DoJ announcement.
The investigation into DDW involved the FBI's Pittsburgh Field Office, French authorities, Europol, the IRS, German law enforcement, the Israeli National Police, and the UK's National Crime Agency (NCA), among other organizations.
Additionally, the DoJ also announced the sentencing of an associate of the Dark Overlord hacking group for his role in possessing and selling more than 1,700 stolen identities, including social security numbers, on the dark web marketplace AlphaBay.
Slava Dmitriev, a 29-year-old Canadian citizen who was arrested in Greece in September 2020 and extradited to the U.S. in January 2021, was sentenced to a jail term of three years after he pleaded guilty in August 2021 to fraud charges.
