US District Attorney Indicts Three for Laundering Millions With Bitcoin

The Manhattan district attorney has indicted a group of individuals with allegedly selling drugs and laundering millions of dollars with bitcoin (BTC). The development was announced in a press release published on April 16.

Manhattan District Attorney Cyrus R. Vance, Jr., the United States Secret Service, the U.S. Postal Inspection Service (USPIS), and U.S. Homeland Security Investigations (HSI) have indicted Chester Anderson and his criminal accomplices Jarrette Codd and Ronald Maccarty. The defendants allegedly operated stores on the dark web that sold and shipped “hundreds of thousands” of tablets of counterfeit drugs.

Authorities seized 420,000 to 620,000 alprazolam tablets, 500 glassines of fentanyl-laced heroin and quantities of methamphetamine, ketamine and gamma hydroxybutyric acid (GHB), among others. This was purportedly the largest such seizure by authorities in New Jersey state history.

As the release states, the alleged criminals reportedly managed to sell the drugs to buyers in 43 states and launder $2.3 million in bitcoin by using preloaded debit cards and withdrawing cash at automated teller machines (ATMs). The individuals reportedly withdrew more than $1 million. The defendants ertr charged in a New York State Supreme Court with Conspiracy in the Fourth and Fifth Degrees, as well as Money Laundering in the First Degree.

Just recently, a federal jury convicted two alleged cybercriminals of spreading malware to steal credit card credentials and illicitly mine cryptocurrency. The infected computers also reportedly registered over 100,000 AOL email accounts that were used to spread the malware further with millions of emails sent to the stolen addresses.

Earlier this month, Cointelegraph reported that LocalBitcoins trader, Jacob Burrell, who sold bitcoin to more than 1,000 people in the U.S., will serve two years in federal jail. Burrell Campos, a Mexican citizen, amassed more than $820,000 from bitcoin sales on the P2P platform between 2015 and 2018.