Tag: pleaded-guilty

Feds in California are aggressively going after Silk Road, AlphaBay vendors

Enlarge / A stack of bitcoins sits among twisted copper wiring inside a communications room at an office in this arranged photograph in London on Tuesday, September 5, 2017. (credit: Bloomberg / Getty Images News ) Next month, a California drug dealer who recently pleaded guilty to selling on Silk Road, AlphaBay, and other sites is scheduled to be sentenced. According to federal authorities, David Ryan Burchard was one of the largest online merchants of marijuana and cocaine—he sold over $1.4 million worth of narcotics. Burchard was prosecuted in federal court in the Eastern District of California, which has quietly become a hub of cases against dealers from those notorious and now-shuttered Dark Web marketplaces. According to Lauren Horwood, a spokeswoman for the US Attorney’s Office in Sacramento, one of the primary hubs of this federal judicial district, there are currently 11 Silk Road and AlphaBay-related prosecutions underway. Four of the defendants have pleaded guilty, and, of those, two have already been sentenced, while the others’ cases are still ongoing. Read 21 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Feds in California are aggressively going after Silk Road, AlphaBay vendors

Prenda Law’s John Steele pleads guilty to fraud, money laundering

(credit: Steele Law Firm ) One of the attorneys behind the Prenda Law “copyright trolling” scheme has pleaded guilty to federal charges of fraud and money laundering. After years of denial, John Steele admitted Monday that he and co-defendant Paul Hansmeier made more than $6 million by threatening Internet users with copyright lawsuits. It’s perfectly legal to sue Internet pirates—but not the way Steele did it. Steele and Hansmeier set up “sham entities” to get copyrights to pornographic movies, “some of which they filmed themselves,” according to the Department of Justice’s statement on the plea. Steele and Hansmeier then uploaded those movies to file-sharing websites such as The Pirate Bay, and then sued the people who downloaded the content. Read 5 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Prenda Law’s John Steele pleads guilty to fraud, money laundering