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In 2017, the Manhattan District Attorney's Office received advice: Exceptionally large sums were withdrawn from the alliance throughout the city, including a series of transactions in a special ATM machine that converted cryptography into silver coin.
The prosecutors did not really know what they had, but they sought to identify precisely who had withdrawn the money, which exceeded the million dollars.
The result was a two-year investigation that uncovered a multi-million dollar drug operation on the dark Web. A corner of the Internet can be visited anonymously by special browsers and make purchases with virtual currencies such as Bitcoin and Ethereum.
Dark drug trafficking has exploded in recent years as drug traffickers and other criminals have discovered that anonymity makes it ideal for illicit transactions using cryptocurrencies.
"We have a cybercrime crisis that is not yet fully understood," said Manhattan District Attorney Cyrus R. Vance Jr. at a news conference.
Prosecutors said three New Jersey men were behind an online store called Sinmed that was selling and shipping illegal drugs to buyers in 43 states, Puerto Rico and Washington. Their products include fentanyl containing heroin, counterfeit tablets of Xanax, ketamine, LSD, GHB, a steroid and methamphetamine.
Men – Chester Anderson, 44; Jarrette Codd, 41 years old; and Ronald MacCarty, 51, then converted at least $ 2.3 million in cryptocurrency from their sales by using it to charge prepaid debit cards and withdrawing cash from ATMs, according to an indictment unsealed published Tuesday.
The three men used Mr. MacCarty's cell phone store in Asbury Park, New Jersey – The Wireless Spot – to house a drug factory with two industrial mixers, punch dyes to print pills with the name of brand and four pill presses, each of which can produce 16,000 tablets at the hour, prosecutors said.
Sinmed announced its amazing products using two shop windows at an online shopping site called Dream Market, where, like its infamous predecessor, the Silk Road, a plethora of illegal drugs and other products can be purchased, authorities said.
Investigators from the Manhattan District Attorney's Office pretended to be Internet shoppers and bought more than 10,000 counterfeit Xanax tablets from Sinmed, as well as significant amounts of GHB and ketamine, Vance said .
Federal investigators from the United States Department of Homeland Security, the US Department of Homeland Security and the United States Postal Service also took part in the investigation, alongside the Middlesex County Attorney's Office and the South Brunswick Police.
To make their deliveries innocuous, Sinmed labeled his drug-filled envelopes with the return addresses of Manhattan's law firms, real estate brokers and talented entertainment agencies, prosecutors said.
Messrs. Anderson and MacCarty have used a screen company to buy large quantities of microcrystalline cellulose, used to make pharmaceutical pills, as well as alprazolam, the active ingredient in Xanax, from chemical companies. in China, prosecutors announced.
The materials have been used to cook huge amounts of counterfeit drugs. When the authorities searched Codd's home in Jamesburg, New Jersey this month, they found five big orange buckets filled with at least 420,000 fake Xanax tablets, worth $ 2 to $ 4 million on the street. The investigators also found a "cookbook" containing recipes for several illicit drugs, including GHB.
Anderson, MM. Codd and MacCarty were arrested on April 4 in various locations in central New Jersey and brought to trial Tuesday afternoon in the Manhattan Supreme Court on charges of conspiracy and money laundering. Mr. Anderson has also been charged with drug trafficking.
"These accused have perpetrated a drug business for years and used sophisticated technologies to reach customers across the United States," Dan said. Haier, deputy attorney, told the court.
The three men pleaded not guilty. Judge Maxwell Wiley has set $ 1 million for Mr. Anderson and $ 500,000 for Mr. Codd and Mr. MacCarty.
Prosecutors said that Mr. Anderson, whom they described as a leader, had taken many precautions to avoid being detected, renting cars to drop off his medication, sleeping in hotels and using a GPS scrambling device that was jamming a locator device placed on one of its cars.
Mr. Anderson, a software engineer, was convicted of an attempted armed robbery in New Jersey in 2014 and was diverted from prison for drug treatment. His attorney, Taylor Koss, said that Mr. Anderson had been sober for five years and had committed robbery while he was plagued by drug addiction.
Neither Mr. Codd nor Mr. MacCarty have criminal convictions.
Mr. Haier said during the court proceedings that the opacity of the cryptocurrency black network transactions had hindered prosecutors' efforts to find out how much money Sinmed was collecting and to whom he was selling drugs.
"We are still trying to locate the money and cryptocurrency that were the profits of this business," Mr. Haier I said.
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