The Public Prosecution Service in the Netherlands demanded a prison sentence of eight years for a large-scale darkweb vendor.
In 2017, a court sentenced a man from Heerhugowaard to 5.5 years in prison for selling ecstasy pills on the darkweb. The man, a 33-year-old, is now facing additional prison time after authorities discovered a USB drive that contained records of the defendant’s drug trafficking operation.
Authorities investigated the 33-year-old in 2019 in an attempt to find evidence linking him to money laundering. The investigation included a search of the man’s prison cell and a search of his girlfriend’s house in Alkmaar. The police seemingly found the USB drive while searching the girlfriend’s house or interacting with her in some way.
Police found the password for the encrypted USB written in a notebook in the defendant’s prison cell. After decrypting the drive, investigators the login information for the platform the defendant had used to sell an assortment of drugs. The USB drive contained sales records, including nearly 100,000 ecstasy pills, 22.5 kilograms of MDMA, 10 kilograms of amphetamine, 2.6 kilograms of cocaine, and more than 10,000 2-CB pills. In total, according to the prosecution, the defendant had shipped a total of 145 orders to 30 countries between August 2017 and March 2018. Combined, the drugs weighed 90 kilograms.
The Public Prosecution Service demanded 100 hours of community service for the defendant’s 30-year-old girlfriend. She had 39 ecstasy pills in her possession as well as a weapon that “resembled a firearm.” The prosecution believes that the girlfriend had been living off the money earned by her boyfriend. The girlfriend earned a living through babysitting, according to her testimony. Since she would not give prosecutors a list of the families that she had worked for, prosecutors stated that this claim was a lie to help protect her boyfriend.
The prosecution demanded a prison sentence of eight years for the 33-year-old drug dealer, citing aggravating circumstances and recidivism as factors in the enhanced sentence.
The court will rule on December 3.
