Empire Market co‑founder gets 40 years for $430M drug sales

Hamilton, of Suffolk, Virginia, went by the online names “Sydney” and “ZeroAngel”. Before Empire Market, he sold on AlphaBay, an infamous dark web market that was shut down in 2017, using the ZeroAngel handle from June 2016 to July 2017.

He then co-owned and ran Empire Market starting in August 2017, with the site trading from 2018 until 2020. He pleaded guilty in January to a federal drug conspiracy charge. As part of that plea, he admitted the market was built to help its users dodge police and launder money.

US District Judge Steven C. Seeger handed down the sentence on Monday, October 5. The US Attorney’s Office for the Northern District of Illinois announced it two days later.

Empire Market was a hidden website reachable only through the Tor browser, software that hides a user’s location. It openly sold itself as a copy of AlphaBay.

The numbers are huge. More than 4 million transactions passed through the site. At its peak in August 2020, it had about 1.68 million registered users, with nearly 360,000 buyers and more than 5,000 vendors.

Drugs drove most of the business, with net drug sales of nearly $375 million and over 166,000 listings for controlled substances alone. Prosecutors measured the fentanyl sold in kilograms, and the cocaine in the hundreds of kilograms, alongside large amounts of heroin and methamphetamine. The site also traded in fake money, stolen logins, hacking tools and stolen personal data.

Agents bought from the site themselves. Between April 2019 and May 2020 they made several undercover purchases, including methamphetamine and heroin, and intercepted a package of methamphetamine ordered through Empire Market.

Hamilton and his partner, Thomas Pavey, required every payment on the site to be made in cryptocurrency. They urged users to run their coins through tumbling and mixing services, which blend many people’s crypto together to make payments harder to trace. They also encouraged encrypted messages on the site.

One detail stands out. Buyers could rate vendors on how well they disguised drugs sent through the mail. Hamilton also supervised about five moderators who settled disputes between buyers and sellers, and he handled some cases himself.

The end was messy. In 2020, after waves of attacks that flooded the site with traffic unless a ransom was paid, Empire Market vanished. Users couldn’t withdraw money held in escrow, the holding accounts used during a sale, which led many to suspect an exit scam. The Justice Department’s sentencing announcement doesn’t say police seized the site.

Hamilton agreed to forfeit roughly 1,230 bitcoin, 24.4 Ether and three properties in Virginia. Pavey, 41, of Ormond Beach, Florida, agreed to give up about 1,584 bitcoin, two Florida properties, three vehicles and two boxes of 25-ounce gold bars. When the pair were charged in July 2024, the government said it had already seized $75 million in crypto.

Together the two men’s bitcoin comes to 2,814 coins, worth about $234 million at mid-October prices. That’s where it gets interesting for crypto holders. Under an executive order signed by President Donald Trump on March 6, 2025, bitcoin the US government permanently forfeits in criminal cases goes into a strategic bitcoin reserve and can’t be sold, with a few exceptions such as paying back identifiable victims.

A drug market has few victims to repay, so these coins could well end up in that reserve. Authorities haven’t said whether or when that will happen, and the forfeiture can’t be final until Pavey is sentenced.

For most people, the takeaway is simple: dark web markets aren’t as anonymous as they claim. Investigators traced crypto, made undercover buys and built a case that ended in a 40-year sentence, years after the site disappeared.

It also matters if you hold bitcoin. Because the US now keeps forfeited coins rather than selling them, big seizures like this one shrink the supply that might hit the market, instead of adding to it. Reports of government wallets moving coins aren’t the same as sales.

And if you’ve ever wondered whether stolen account logins really get sold, this is your answer. Empire Market openly listed stolen credentials and personal data next to drugs, which is one more reason to use unique passwords and turn on two-step login checks.

Pavey, known online as “Dopenugget”, pleaded guilty last year to a federal drug conspiracy charge and is due to be sentenced later in October. His forfeiture and Hamilton’s will decide the final fate of the seized bitcoin.