Raheim Hamilton, co-founder of the dark web marketplace Empire Market, has been sentenced to 40 years in federal prison for helping run a platform that handled more than $430 million in transactions involving illegal goods and services.

Hamilton, 30, from Suffolk, Virginia, was also fined $5 million. He agreed to forfeit about 1,230 bitcoin (BTC), worth approximately $101 million at the reported valuation, along with 24.4 ether (ETH) and three properties in Virginia.

His co-founder, Pavey, 41, of Ormond Beach, Florida, pleaded guilty to a federal drug conspiracy charge last year. He admitted his role in creating and operating Empire Market.

Pavey agreed to forfeit approximately 1,584 BTC, “two boxes containing 25-ounce gold bars,” three cars and two properties in Florida. He is expected to be sentenced later this month, according to the reports.

Together, the two men's bitcoin forfeitures total approximately 2,814 BTC

The sentence was handed down by US District Judge Steven C. Seeger in Chicago and announced by the US Attorney’s Office for the Northern District of Illinois.

According to prosecutors, Empire Market operated from 2018 to 2020 and allowed users to buy and sell illegal drugs, stolen account details, personal information, counterfeit money and hacking tools.

The case shows how authorities continue to track down the people behind major criminal marketplaces, even when they use digital assets and encryption to hide their activities.

Hamilton ran Empire Market with his co-founder, Thomas Pavey, between 2018 and 2020. During that time, the site handled more than four million transactions worth over $430 million.

Drug sales accounted for nearly $375 million of the total, according to prosecutors.
The drugs sold through the platform included fentanyl, cocaine, methamphetamine and heroin. The marketplace also offered stolen login details, personal information, counterfeit currency and computer-hacking tools.

Hamilton and Pavey had previously been involved in selling counterfeit US currency through AlphaBay, another dark web marketplace that was shut down in 2017. They later established Empire Market, which became a major platform for illegal online trade.

Empire Market went offline in August 2020. Some users suspected that its operators had carried out an exit scam, disappearing with money held in users' accounts. One report estimated that around $30 million in bitcoin may have been lost in the shutdown.

Empire Market required users to pay with digital assets. Hamilton and Pavey also encouraged customers to use mixing services, often called mixers or tumblers, to make transactions harder to trace.

Mixers combine or redistribute digital asset funds to make it more difficult to connect payments with their original sources. However, using these services does not guarantee anonymity or prevent investigators from tracing transactions.

The operators also conducted business on the dark web, where encryption is used to hide where the website is hosted and to protect communications between buyers and sellers.

According to the US Department of Justice, the marketplace included a feature that allowed buyers to rate sellers based on how well they concealed drugs in packages sent through the mail.

These features helped users conduct illegal business while trying to avoid law enforcement attention. Despite these measures, investigators identified the operators and built a case against them.