Raheim Hamilton: Empire Market Co-Founder Gets 40 Years Over a $430M Dark Web Bazaar

On Monday 5 October 2026, in a federal courtroom in Chicago, Judge Steven C. Seeger sentenced Raheim Hamilton to 40 years in prison. Hamilton, 30, from Suffolk, Virginia, was also fined $5 million. Six years earlier he had been one of the two people running Empire Market, for a time the biggest drug bazaar on the internet.

Empire Market ran from February 2018 to August 2020. In that time, according to the US Attorney's Office for the Northern District of Illinois, it handled more than four million sales worth more than $430 million. Nearly $375 million of that was drugs: at least 13.3 kilograms of fentanyl, about 447 kilograms of cocaine, 72 kilograms of methamphetamine and 103 kilograms of heroin. The rest was stolen bank card numbers, stolen logins and personal details, fake US banknotes and hacking tools.

Hamilton pleaded guilty in January 2026 to a single drug conspiracy charge, which carries at least 10 years and up to life. He agreed to give up about 1,230 bitcoin, worth roughly $101 million at October 2026 prices according to CoinDesk, plus 24.4 ether and three properties in Virginia. His partner, Thomas Pavey, 41, of Ormond Beach, Florida, pleaded guilty to the same kind of charge in 2025 and is due to be sentenced by the same judge later in October 2026.

©CMZ chart. Data: US Attorney's Office, N.D. Illinois

Two counterfeiters and a website

The dark web is the part of the internet that ordinary browsers cannot reach. Sites there are opened with special software called Tor, which bounces traffic around the world so that neither the visitor nor the website can easily be located. A darknet market is a shop built on top of that: think of an eBay for illegal goods, with thousands of independent sellers, star ratings and a search bar, except the address cannot be traced to a building.

Hamilton and Pavey did not arrive as beginners. Prosecutors say both men had sold counterfeit US currency on AlphaBay, the largest darknet market of its day, until the FBI and police in Thailand and the Netherlands shut it down in July 2017. Online, Pavey went by "Dopenugget". Hamilton used "Sydney" and "Zero Angel". On 1 February 2018 they opened Empire Market, and blockchain analytics firm TRM Labs describes it as the site that soon led the Western darknet market world after AlphaBay's fall.

The shop was laid out like any online store, with menus marked "Fraud", "Drugs & Chemicals", "Counterfeit Items" and "Software & Malware". Buyers could rate sellers, including on how well they disguised drugs sent through the post. In the fake money section, the indictment says, the two men told customers about features designed to beat the pens and scanners that shops use to spot forged notes. At least one counterfeit sale went directly to an undercover officer.

Paid only in crypto

Every purchase on Empire had to be paid in cryptocurrency. Bitcoin is digital money that moves directly between users over the internet without a bank in the middle. Every payment is written into a public ledger, a shared record anyone can read, but the ledger shows only strings of letters and numbers, not names. That is why drug markets liked it: it works like cash sent by post, with a receipt nobody can easily match to a person. Empire also accepted Litecoin, a close copy of bitcoin, and Monero, a coin built so that even the ledger hides who paid whom, closer to a sealed envelope than a postcard.

To make tracing harder still, the operators encouraged customers to run their coins through mixers, also called tumblers. A mixer takes coins from many people, stirs them together and pays each person back from the pile, the way a casino swaps cash for chips and back again. Hamilton admitted in his plea agreement that he and Pavey designed Empire to help users avoid law enforcement and to help them launder the proceeds.

Payments did not go straight to sellers. Like most darknet markets, Empire held the buyer's money in escrow, meaning the site kept it until the buyer confirmed the parcel had arrived. It is the same idea as a solicitor holding the deposit on a house sale. It also meant that, at any given moment, the people running the site were sitting on a large pile of other people's money. That pile is where the story turned.

The night the shop disappeared

In the week of 21 August 2020, Empire slowed to a crawl under what the tracking site Dark.fail called a large DDoS attack, which floods a website with junk traffic until real customers cannot get in. By 23 August it was gone, with buyers' and sellers' money still in escrow. A member of Empire's staff estimated the trapped funds at about $30 million, around 2,638 bitcoin, across more than a million user accounts. Empire's head moderator, using the name "Se7en", insisted it was not a planned exit and blamed exhausted administrators and extortion demands. Users called it what darknet markets often end with: an exit scam, where the operators shut the doors and walk off with whatever is in the till. The site never came back and its owners never explained. That $30 million figure is an estimate from 2020; it has not been set out in court.

Caught, four years later

The trail took four years. In June 2024 a federal indictment in Chicago charged Pavey, then 38, and Hamilton, then 28, with drug trafficking, computer fraud, access device fraud (dealing in stolen card numbers), counterfeiting and money laundering. Both were taken into custody. The Justice Department said investigators had seized about $75 million in cryptocurrency, along with cash and precious metals. The case was worked by the FBI, the US Postal Inspection Service, whose inspectors chase drugs sent through the mail, and Homeland Security Investigations.

Pavey pleaded guilty first, in 2025. He agreed to forfeit about 1,584 bitcoin, two boxes of 25-ounce gold bars, three cars and two properties in Florida. Hamilton followed in January 2026. Between them the two men have agreed to hand over roughly 2,814 bitcoin, slightly more than the 2,638 bitcoin that Empire's staff said was stuck in escrow when the site went dark in 2020. Hamilton was originally due to be sentenced on 17 June 2026; the hearing was pushed back to October.

Forty years in context

The sentence puts Hamilton among the most heavily punished darknet operators in the United States. Ross Ulbricht, who ran Silk Road, the first big darknet drug market, got life without parole in 2015 and was pardoned by President Donald Trump in January 2025. In February 2026 Rui-Siang Lin, who ran Incognito Market, was sentenced to 30 years over a site that handled more than $105 million in drug sales. Empire's drug sales alone were more than three times that.

Pavey's sentencing will show whether Judge Seeger treats the two founders the same. Until then, one half of Empire Market is a convicted drug conspirator facing four decades in federal prison, and the other is a convicted drug conspirator waiting to hear his number.