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Brett Johnson was a US Most Wanted cybercriminal, called the Original Internet Godfather by US Secret Service for building the first organized cybercrime community called ShadowCrew, which was the precursor to today's darknet and darknet markets.

ALEXANDRIA, Va. – A Maryland Darknet vendor and a Nebraska pharmacist pleaded guilty today to charges related to a conspiracy to use explosives to firebomb and destroy a competitor pharmacy.According to court documents, from August 2019 through April 2020, Hyrum T. Wilson, 41, of Auburn, Nebraska, illegally mailed over 19,000 dosage units of prescription medications, including opioids, from his pharmacy in Nebraska to the Maryland residence of co-conspirator William Anderson Burgamy IV, 32, of Hanover. Burgamy illegally sold prescription drugs through his Darknet vendor account to customers nationwide, including here in the Eastern District of Virginia, and claimed at...

  “Helix” Laundered Bitcoin From Numerous Darknet Markets An Ohio man was arrested for his operation of Helix, a Darknet-based cryptocurrency laundering service. In the three-count indictment unsealed Feb. 11 in the District of Columbia, Larry Harmon, 36, of Akron, Ohio, was charged with money laundering conspiracy, operating an unlicensed money transmitting business and conducting money transmission without a D.C. license.According to the indictment, Harmon operated Helix from 2014 to 2017.  Helix functioned as a bitcoin “mixer” or “tumbler,” allowing customers, for a fee, to send bitcoin to designated recipients in a manner that was designed to conceal the source or...

Department of Justice Office of Public Affairs FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE Wednesday, October 16, 2019 South Korean National and Hundreds of Others Charged Worldwide in the Takedown of the Largest Darknet Child Pornography Website, Which was Funded by Bitcoin Dozens of Minor Victims Who Were Being Actively Abused by the Users of the Site Rescued Jong Woo Son, 23, a South Korean national, was indicted by a federal grand jury in the District of Columbia for his operation of Welcome To Video, the largest child sexual exploitation market by volume of content.  The nine-count indictment was unsealed today along with...

The ‘Darknet’ is dangerous. It’s also deeply democraticThe ‘Darknet’ is in the spotlight. Over the past few months, stories of paedophile rings, drug empires and terrorist organisations have set pulses racing as investigative journalists have begun dipping their toes into the network. Cue stories such as: ‘Five scary things ANYONE can buy in the Darknet’s illegal markets‘. Now, the Parliamentary Office of Science and Technology have released a briefing. The note, entitled ‘The Darknet and Online Anonymity’, centres on Tor. Tor is an easy-to-use web browser that makes tracking a user’s online activities much more difficult. It is designed to...

Silk Road 2.0 and 400 other sites believed to be selling illegal items including drugs and weapons have been shut down. The sites operated on the Tor network - a part of the internet unreachable via traditional search engines. The joint operation between 16 European countries and the US saw 17 arrests, including Blake Benthall who is said to be behind Silk Road 2.0. Experts believe the shutdown represents a breakthrough for fighting cybercrime. Six Britons were also arrested, including a 20-year-old man from Liverpool, a 19-year-old man from New Waltham, a 30 year-old-man from Cleethorpes and a man and...

According to some people who are paid lots of money to think about these sorts of things, the legal, ethical and economic questions facing the music business aren’t just about preserving the livelihoods of people who work in that industry. No, the very future of democracy is at stake.... At the heart of the debate is how to license peer-to-peer sharing of music files, widely blamed for the huge drop in sales of recorded music this decade. Sandy Pearlman, a veteran producer and McGill University professor, and entertainment lawyer Dina LaPolt raised the specter of a “darknet,” in which information...

Pirate Party Launches Commercial Darknet Today, the Swedish Pirate Party launched a new Internet service that lets anybody send and receive files and information over the Internet without fear of being monitored or logged. In technical terms, such a network is called a "darknet". The service allows people to use an untraceable address in the darknet, where they cannot be personally identified. "There are many legitimate reasons to want to be completely anonymous on the Internet," says Rickard Falkvinge, chairman of the Pirate Party. "If the government can check everything each citizen does, nobody can keep the government in check....