The co-creator of Empire Market, one of the largest dark web marketplaces before its shutdown, has been sentenced to 40 years in prison for facilitating $430 million in illegal transactions from 2018 to 2020.
30-year-old Raheim Hamilton (also known online as "Sydney" and "ZeroAngel") owned and operated Empire Market from August 2017 until its abrupt shutdown in 2020 amid persistent extortion-based DDoS waves, which prompted exit-scam claims after users weren't given time to withdraw funds from their escrow accounts.
Between June 2016 and July 2017, Hamilton also sold on AlphaBay (a notorious dark web marketplace that shut down in 2017) under the "ZeroAngel" username.
Empire Market operated as a hidden service on the dark web accessible only via TOR browsers and was modeled and advertised as an AlphaBay clone.
Together with co-defendant Thomas Pavey (aka "Dopenugget"), who also pleaded guilty last year to a federal drug conspiracy charge, Hamilton facilitated more than 4 million transactions between vendors and buyers.
While the cybercrime market also sold counterfeit currency, stolen account credentials, computer hacking tools, and personally identifiable information, drug sales represented the most prevalent activity, totaling nearly $375 million over the site's lifespan with over 166,000 listings for controlled substances alone.
At its peak in August 2020, the marketplace had roughly 1.68 million unique registered users, including more than 5,000 vendors and nearly 360,000 buyers.