Darknet Drug Dealer Allegedly Laundered $136M Worth Of BTC

Darknet drug dealer named Ryan Farace allegedly laundered $136 million in Bitcoin while serving his drug-dealing sentence in federal prison as we are reading more in our latest Bitcoin news.

The American authorities accused the Baltimore resident Ryan Farace of laundering $136M worth of bitcoin between 2019 and 2021 but he was sent to jail in 2018 and executed the criminal activities behind bars as it seems. According to the Baltimore Sun, the officials of Maryland state pressed charges against Ryan Farace known as the Xanaxman as his Darknet drug dealer name, for laundering 2933 BTC in a period of three years which is now worth $136 million.

The criminal and his father are serving a 57-month federal prison sentence for selling Alprazolam which is a sedative to treat anxiety and panic attacks. Farace operated on the Darknet but the police caught him in 2018 so as a part of his sentence, he had to forfeit $5.6 million that he generated out of his illicit activities. He had to also give away his crypto holdings of 4000 BTC. The investigators are not sure whether the 2933 coins are a part of the initial 4000 BTC as they noted that Farace could have possessed even more assets that the government didn’t know about in the first place. Farace sought compassionate release in 2020 citing bad health conditions during the COVID-19 pandemic but the officials denied his request and he remained in prison.

It’s worth noting that the aforementioned case is not an isolated incident. Back in April, the Federal Service in the USA arrested Roman Sterlingov who is a leader of the notorious bitcoin anonymizer Bitcoin Fog on suspicion of laundering $336 million over the past 10 years. The Russian-Swedish resident offered protection services to the users who wanted to keep the asset under maximum security and for this, he charged commissions between 2% and 2.5%. according to the IRS calculations, the scammer pocketed the funds and used them to establish Bitcoin Fog’s server and these actions raised plenty of concerns which led to an investigation and revealed his criminal operations. Sarah Meiklejohn who is a computer scientist at the University College of London, praised the “follow the money” technique that the investigators used and said:

“With blockchain analytics, the thing we say over and over is that all this activity is on this ledger forever, and if you did something bad 10 years ago you can be caught and arrested for it today.”