A few years ago, bitcoin was associated with drug trading on the so-called “darknet”, but lately, drug dealers seem to have largely switched to using the cryptocurrency monero.
However, now an American man named Richard Castro is in custody for selling the drug fentanyl for big amounts of bitcoin on the darknet site Alphabay.
Money laundering with Zimbabwean dollars
Richard Castro received his payments in bitcoin and then laundered them by, among other things, exchanging them for 100 quadrillion Zimbabwean dollars (Zimbabwe is known to suffer from hyperinflation).
The drug dealer has now been sentenced to pay a fine of $4 million to US authorities.
How long Richard Castro’s prison sentence will be is not yet clear, but he will be sentenced to at least ten years behind bars, The Next Web reports.
