Forty years and 1,230 bitcoins. Raheim Hamilton co-founded Empire Market, one of the largest black markets ever hosted on the dark web. A federal judge in Chicago has just sentenced him to four decades in prison and a $5 million fine.
The thirty-year-old must also relinquish 1,230 bitcoins seized from his wallets to the US Treasury. The sum far exceeds one hundred million dollars at current prices, or twenty times the amount of the fine.
Key Points
A Chicago federal court imposes forty years in prison and a five million dollar fine on the co-founder of the black market Empire Market
The platform processed approximately 4 million transactions for at least $430 million between February 2018 and its sudden disappearance in August 2020
The 1,230 BTC seized join the American strategic reserve rather than the auction rooms
Ross Ulbricht, creator of a market three times larger, was pardoned by Donald Trump in January 2025
Empire Market, $430 million in drugs and counterfeit bills
The marketplace opened in February 2018, seven months after AlphaBay was taken down by the FBI and Europol. Raheim Hamilton then operated under the pseudonyms “Sydney” and “Zero Angel”. His associate Thomas Pavey, charged in the same case, called himself “Dopenugget” online. The two men had met on AlphaBay, where they sold fake American dollars.
According to the US Department of Justice, Empire Market hosted nearly 4 million transactions for at least $430 million in bitcoin, Monero and litecoin between February 2018 and August 2020. It contained heroin, fentanyl, methamphetamine, counterfeit bills, stolen bank card data and malware. The directors took a commission on each sale concluded.
The site evaporated overnight in August 2020, taking around thirty million dollars in customer deposits. A formal exit scam, the administrators keeping the funds placed in escrow by the buyers. It took four years for investigators to trace the two men and file an indictment in Chicago federal court for drug trafficking, money laundering, counterfeiting currency and distribution of controlled substances.
Crypto: Empire Market’s 1,230 bitcoins go to the US Treasury
The 1,230 confiscated bitcoins will not go to auction like in the heyday of Silk Road. Since the presidential decree of March 2025 establishing a strategic bitcoin reserve, Washington has kept cryptocurrencies resulting from judicial seizures rather than liquidating them on the market. The federal state is therefore enriched by a little more than a thousand BTC on the back of Empire Market.
Raheim Hamilton, however, also cashed in Monero (which it will be recalled that it hides amounts and addresses by default, unlike Bitcoin). The investigators still followed the trail. The transparency of the Bitcoin register, long brandished by its detractors as a defect, provided here the account book against it: each movement of Empire Market remains engraved and time-stamped, consultable by any analyst eight years after the fact.
Forty years is finally the sentence that Ross Ulbricht will never have served. The founder of Silk Road was sentenced to two irreducible life sentences of forty years in 2015, before Donald Trump pardoned him in January 2025, after eleven years of detention. The FBI estimated Silk Road's sales at around $1.2 billion, nearly three times the volume of Empire Market. The creator of the biggest black market in bitcoin history has been free for eighteen months; the one who took up the torch six years later will be released from prison in 2066.
