Thomas White, who launched the infamous Silk Road 2.0 site shortly after the original was taken down by the Federal Bureau of Investigation in 2013, was sentenced to 64 months in prison at Liverpool Crown Court on Friday, the BBC reports.
White was known by the moniker Dread Pirate Roberts 2, a reference to the book and film The Princess Bride.
White, 24, pled guilty to charges of money laundering and drug trafficking, as well as producing 464 indecent images of children.
Like the original Silk Road, Silk Road 2.0 functioned as a marketplace for drugs and other illicit materials running on the browser Tor, which hides identifying information like IP addresses.
White was originally arrested in 2014, according to Motherboard. One element that led to his arrest, according to investigator Paul Chowles of the U.K.’s National Crime Agency (NCA), was a private PGP encryption key belonging to Dread Pirate Roberts 2 found on White’s computer. Investigators also managed to track him through Bitcoin, Motherboard reported.
According to the BBC, White had also hoarded explicit images of children to sell them to pedophiles. He apparently told a Silk Road administrator that he wanted to start a website for such activity “because there is money to be made from these people.”
White has been out on bail for the past several years, making a name for himself as an expert on security, privacy, and Tor. He also ran a website which hosted large data dumps, including data from the infamous Ashley Madison hacking case.
The creator of the original Silk Road, Ross Ulbricht, is serving a life sentence for multiple narcotics charges, as well as conspiracy to commit computer hacking and to commit money laundering, among other charges.
H/T Motherboard
