Not So Anonymous - Authorities Track Bitcoin Transactions of Dark Web Drug Dealer, Arrested
A 36-year-old French national plead guilty this week in U.S. courts for selling narcotics for Bitcoin on the dark web. Guy Vallerius, who operated under the monkier ‘OxyMonster,’ was arrested by authorities at the Atalanta airport last September. U.S. authorities were able to identify Vallerius as OxyMonster after they discovered one of his Bitcoin accounts. They got to his Bitcoin account through Vallerius’ ‘tip jar’ on the Dream Market dark web marketplace. The purpose of the tip jar was to allow buyers on Dream Market to tip Vallerius for his services — selling the opiate painkiller Oxycodone and the ADHD drug Ritalin. The problem for Vallerius was, unlike most vendors on the Dream Market, he did not configure his tips to go through the marketplace’s internal payment systems, which passed transactions through a tumbler/mixer. Instead, he set the tip jar to receive funds at a Bitcoin address he set up. After observing the bitcoin ‘tip jar’ advertised by OxyMonsyter, agents conducted an analysis of the incoming and outgoing transactions from that bitcoin address and learned that 15 out of 17 outgoing transactions from the OxyMonster tip jar went to multiple wallets controlled by French national Gal VALLERIUS on localbitcoins.com.
