DeepDotWeb News Site Operator Sentenced to 8 Years for Money Laundering

An Israeli national was sentenced to 97 months in prison in
connection with operating the DeepDotWeb (DDW^[1]) clearnet website,
nearly a year after the individual pleaded guilty to the
charges.

Tal Prihar, 37, an Israeli citizen residing in Brazil, is said
to have played the role of an administrator of DDW since the
website became functional in October 2013. He pleaded guilty^[2]
to money laundering charges in March 2021 and agreed to forfeit the
illegally amassed profits.

DDW, until its seizure in May 2019, ostensibly served^[3] as a “news” website that
connected internet users with underground marketplaces on the dark
web that operate via darknets such as Tor, enabling the purchase of
illegal firearms, malware and hacking tools, stolen financial data,
heroin, fentanyl, and other illicit materials.

Prihar, acting in cohorts with co-defendant Michael Phan, 34, of
Israel, provided direct links to illegal marketplaces and in return
for advertising these links, reaped substantial profits by
receiving kickbacks from the operators of the marketplaces in the
form of virtual currency amounting to 8,155 bitcoins (worth $8.4
million at the time of the transactions).

“To conceal the nature and source of these illegal kickback
payments, Prihar transferred the payments from his DDW bitcoin
wallet to other bitcoin accounts and to bank accounts he controlled
in the names of shell companies,” the U.S. Department of Justice
(DoJ) said^[4]
in a release last week.

Separately, the DoJ also publicized the sentencing of an
associate of the Dark Overlord hacking group for his role in
possessing and selling more than 1,700 stolen identities, including
social security numbers, on the dark web marketplace AlphaBay.

Slava Dmitriev, a 29-year-old Canadian citizen who was
apprehended in Greece in September 2020 and extradited to the U.S.
in January 2021, was awarded a jail term of three years after he
pleaded guilty in August 2021 to fraud charges.

“From May 2016 through July 2017, Dmitriev sold 1,764 items on
AlphaBay for approximately $100,000,” the DoJ said^[5]
in a press statement. “The vast majority of these items were stolen
identities, including names, dates of birth, social security
numbers, and other personally identifiable information.”

In related news, law enforcement authorities in Canada seized and shut down^[6]
Canadian HeadQuarters (aka CanadianHQ), a darknet marketplace that
specialized in the purchase and sale of spam services, phishing
kits, stolen credential data dumps, and access to compromised
machines, which were used by purchasers to engage in a variety of
malicious activities.

The development also follows the Europol-led takedown of VPNLab.net^[7], a VPN provider that was
used by malicious actors to deploy ransomware against more than 100
businesses and facilitate other cybercrimes, earlier this
month.