FRESNO, Calif. — Bryan Connor Herrell, 25, pleaded guilty on
Monday to conspiring to engage in a racketeer influenced corrupt organization,
U.S. Attorney McGregor W. Scott announced.
According to court documents, Herrell was a moderator on the
AlphaBay marketplace, an illegal website that operated on the so-called
darknet. On AlphaBay, vendors and purchasers engaged in hundreds of thousands
of illicit transactions for guns, drugs, stolen identity information, credit
card numbers and other illegal items. At the time, AlphaBay was considered to
be the world’s largest online drug marketplace.
As a moderator on AlphaBay, Herrell settled disputes between
vendors and purchasers and settled over 20,000 disputes. He is also accused of
serving as a scam watcher — providing a service dedicated to monitor attempts
to defraud AlphaBay users. Herrell went by the monikers “Penissmith” and
“Botah” and was paid in bitcoin for his participation.
On June 1, 2017, a Fresno grand jury indicted the alleged
founder of AlphaBay, Alexandre Cazes, and four days later the Royal Thai
Police, with assistance from the FBI and DEA, arrested him at his residence in
Bangkok, in connection with his alleged involvement with AlphaBay. At the time
of his arrest, law enforcement discovered Cazes’s laptop open and in an
unencrypted state. Agents and officers found several text files that identified
the passwords/passkeys for the AlphaBay website, the AlphaBay servers, and
other online identities associated with AlphaBay. The indictment against Cazes
was dismissed as a result of his death. The investigation of AlphaBay and its
former administrators continues.
This case is the product of an investigation by the Federal
Bureau of Investigation. Assistant U.S. Attorneys Paul Hemesath and Grant B.
Rabenn, and Senior Counsel Louisa K. Marion of the Department of Justice’s
Computer Crime and Intellectual Property Section are prosecuting the case.
Herrell is scheduled to be sentenced on May 18. He faces a maximum
statutory penalty of 20 years in prison. The actual sentence, however, will be
determined at the discretion of the court after consideration of any applicable
statutory factors and the Federal Sentencing Guidelines, which take into
account a number of variables.
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