Silk Road Admin Pleads Guilty – Could Face Up to 20 Years in Prison

Oct 6, 2018

An Irish national who helped run the now-defunct dark web
marketplace Silk Road
pleaded guilty on Friday to drug trafficking charges that carry a
maximum sentence of 20 years in prison.

Gary Davis, also known as Libertas, was one of Silk
Road’s site administrators and forum moderators for Silk Road,
then-largest underground marketplace on the Internet used by
thousands of users to sell and buy drugs and other illegal goods
and services.

Silk Road went down after the law enforcement raided its servers in
2013 and arrested its founder Ross William
Ulbricht, who has been sentenced to life
in prison after being convicted on multiple counts related to
the underground drug marketplace.

The FBI also seized Bitcoins (worth about $33.6 million, at the
time) from the website. Those Bitcoins were later sold in a series of
auctions ^[4] by the United States
Marshals Service (USMS).

According to a press release ^[5]
published by US Department of Justice, Davis helped the black
market website “run smoothly” and provided “customer support” to
Silk Road users for assisting them with their buyer or seller
accounts on the site for several months in 2013.

Davis kept Ulbricht and other site administrators informed about
any issues reported by Silk
Road ^[6] users and received a
weekly salary for this job.

Davis was arrested in Ireland in January 2014 and indicted by
U.S. federal prosecutors in 2013. He fought extradition in Irish
courts, arguing that incarceration in the U.S. could hurt his
mental health and endanger his life, violating his fundamental
rights.

However, Ireland’s Supreme Court rejected Davis’ arguments, and he
was extradited to the United States in July 2014.

“Silk Road was a secret online marketplace for illegal drugs,
hacking services, and a whole host of other criminal activity,”
Manhattan U.S. Attorney Geoffrey S. Berman said in a statement.

“As he admitted today, Gary Davis served as an administrator who
helped run the Silk Road marketplace. Davis’s arrest, extradition
from Ireland, and conviction should send a clear message: the
purported anonymity of the dark Web is not a protective shield from
prosecution.”

Prosecutors said Silk Road was
responsible for selling more than $200 million worth of illegal
drugs and other contraband.

Davis pled guilty to one count of conspiring to distribute
massive quantities of narcotics, facing a maximum of 20 years in
prison. He is expected to be sentenced on 17 January 2019 by Judge
Furman.

^[1]^[2]^[3]^[7]

References

^{^}
Silk Road
(thehackernews.com)
^{^}
Ross William Ulbricht
(thehackernews.com)
^{^}
sentenced to life in prison
(thehackernews.com)
^{^}
sold in a series of auctions
(thehackernews.com)
^{^}
press release
(www.justice.gov)
^{^}
Silk Road
(thehackernews.com)
^{^}
Silk Road
(thehackernews.com)

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Silk Road Admin Pleads Guilty – Could Face Up to 20 Years in Prison

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