AlphaBay Moderator Sentenced to 11 Years in Prison

In the summer of 2017, U.S. authorities announced that the darknet marketplace AlphaBay had been shut down as a result of law enforcement actions. At the same time, another marketplace, Hansa Market, was also taken down. This was the result of a major international operation involving the United States, Canada, Thailand, the Netherlands, the United Kingdom, France, Lithuania, as well as representatives from Europol, the FBI, and the Drug Enforcement Administration.

According to Bleeping Computer, earlier this week a verdict was reached in the case of one of AlphaBay’s former moderators, 25-year-old Bryan Connor Herrell, who moderated AlphaBay from May 2016 to July 2017 under the aliases Penissmith and Botah.

Court documents state that during his time as a moderator, Herrell resolved over 20,000 disputes between AlphaBay buyers and sellers. He was paid in Bitcoin by the marketplace’s owners. Herrell was also responsible for preventing fraud on the platform and ensuring that users did not scam each other.

Herrell was found guilty earlier this year and faced up to 20 years in prison on charges related to organized criminal activity. Although sentencing was originally scheduled for May, it was postponed due to the COVID-19 pandemic. It was only this week that it was announced Herrell had been sentenced to 11 years in prison.

The Fate of AlphaBay’s Founder

Experts from the U.S. Department of Justice note that prosecuting AlphaBay’s actual founder is impossible, as Canadian citizen Alexandre Cazes is now deceased. In 2017, Cazes was arrested in Thailand, where he had lived for several years. After his arrest, authorities confiscated four Lamborghini cars and three houses belonging to him, with a total value of $11.7 million. During the arrest, law enforcement also found and seized Cazes’s unencrypted laptop. Investigators discovered several text files on the device containing passwords and access keys for AlphaBay, its servers, and more.

Cazes was set to be extradited to the United States, but on July 12, 2017, he was found hanged in a Thai prison cell. According to official reports, he died by suicide.