A drug dealer ordered to forfeit millions of dollars in cryptocurrencies such as Bitcoin , Ethereum , and Monero , has been sentenced to 70 months in prison for distributing drugs including carfentanil and fentanyl.

Sky Justin Gornik previously pled guilty to the charge and also admitted that he tried to launder drug proceeds using cryptocurrencies , which he held on US-based exchanges Bittrex and Poloniex.

As part of his plea, Gornik admitted he bought and sold controlled substances on the dark web from 2014 to June 7, 2017.

To do so, he used several screen names on marketplaces including Alpha Bay, Dream Market, and Trade Route.

Specifically, Gornik bought and sold fentanyl. He also admitted to buying the especially deadly opiate carfentanil using a variety of digital currencies .

Gornik also bought and sold several other controlled substances, including thousands of vials of ketamine, oxycodone pills, dimethyltryptamine (DMT), psilocybin and psilocin, amphetamine, buprenorphine, methamphetamine , and naloxone.

After raiding his home , agents confiscated 1.7 grams of carfentanil and sheets of fentanyl gelatin tablets. The amount of carfentanil found by agents equated to “over 86,000 fatal dosages.”

“Dark Web traffickers take note : we will not allow you to lurk in murky corners of the internet , selling and delivering deadly drugs as casually as an Amazon Prime package,” said US Attorney Robert S. Brewer, Jr., who praised AUSA Sherri Hobson and the multi-agency team for “cracking through multiple levels of anonymity mazes to uncover the true nature and extent of Gornik’ s drug dealing and money laundering.”

Gornik is thought to have purchased 600-1,200 fentanyl gel tablets a week over approximately two years from another dark web dealer, identified as Steven Wallace George. George, a resident of Oklahoma, has been prosecuted by authorities in his home state for making the fentanyl tablets from pure fentanyl imported from China .

Bitcoin is the most popular cryptocurrency on Reddit, followed by Ethereum and Monero

Bitcoin is the most popular cryptocurrency on Reddit with an average of 3,600 comments about the digital currency being posted every day.

On the other hand, Ethereum and Monero are the protagonists of 500 and 380 daily comments respectively.

That’s according to a new research paper by Pacific Northwest National Laboratory, which analyzed three years worth of discussions on Reddit from January 2015 to January 2018.

As part of their study, the researchers sought to measure the speed and scale at which discussions about Bitcoin, Ethereum, and Monero spread.

The paper says cryptocurrencies “are disproportionately used by criminals and hackers, and their use has political and economic implications.”

“The way information about these novel distributive technologies spreads across online social platforms shapes online and offline discussions, and could potentially influence peoples’ beliefs and decision making. Thus, it is crucial to understand, explain, and anticipate the social behavior and communication patterns in the social environments surrounding cryptocurrencies to understand these phenomena and devise appropriate responses,” it adds.

Unsurprisingly, the researchers found that not all comments trigger a discussion, but interestingly the rate of ineffective posts – those which fail to attract additional commentary – is up to five times higher with Bitcoin and Ethereum than Monero.

“Our results demonstrate that while the largest discussions on Reddit are focused on Bitcoin, posts about Monero start discussions that are typically longer and wider. Bitcoin posts trigger subsequent discussion more immediately but Monero posts are more likely to trigger a longer lasting discussion. We find that moderately subjective posts across all three coins trigger larger, longer, and more viral discussion cascades within both focused and general communities on Reddit,” the paper reads.

Overall, the data showed that Redditors respond quicker to posts about Bitcoin. For example, it takes on average 11 minutes for someone within the Bitcoin subreddit to post a comment; 20 minutes for Monero; and 27 minutes for Ethereum. Discussions about Bitcoin also grow the fastest.

Generally speaking, discussions about Monero (a coin the paper says is largely used by criminals on the dark web) have the largest median lifetimes.

Threads about Ethereum have the largest possible lifetimes, and Bitcoin discussions have the lowest median lifetime of all three coins.

It’s not surprising that the paper touches on cryptocurrency‘s negative connotations given the ongoing rhetoric that they are popular among criminals.

In fact, in April Hard Fork reported on how m embers of a Bitcoin-fueled drug ring that used the dark web to import crystal meth into the UK have been sentenced to more than 30 years behind bars and hardly a day goes by without a similar story making headlines.

Past research has also suggested that Bitcoin‘s positive price fluctuations were due to criminals using the cryptocurrency for illegal trades.

Google distributed malicious Chrome app designed to steal your cryptocurrency

Be wary if you come across ads that promote an airdrop, distributing tokens for popular cryptocurrency exchange desk Huobi : the offer might be fake, and you might be getting swooped into an elaborate ploy designed to steal your coins.

Security researcher Harry Denley, who maintains popular anti-phishing database EtherscamDB , has unearthed a phishing campaign that tricks victims into downloading a malicious Chrome extension, programmed to get a hold of your wallet‘s private keys.

What makes the attack vector particularly sneaky is that the Chrome extension – called NoCoin – was disguised as an app to block surreptitious cryptocurrency mining (also known as crypto-jacking ). Indeed, the malicious extension looks pretty much identical to popular crypto-jacking blocker, MinerBlock .

Credit: MyCrypto

To get users to download the infected extension, the hackers built a fake ERC20 token named after Huobi. The token was distributed via a website, which despite claiming to be an airdrop platform, invited visitors to download the malicious app.

Once installed, the fake mining blocker targeted users of wallet solutions MyEtherWallet and Blockchainom.

The malicious extension had been downloaded by at least 230 users, according to screenshots provided by Denley. Fortunately, Google has since wiped it from the Chrome Web Store.

For the record, this isn’t the first time hackers have managed to sneak malware past Google’s defensive mechanisms. Last year, an investigation by Hard Fork found Google hosted a disturbing amount of cryptocurrency malware on its Android software distribution platform Google Play.

For those interested in a closer look at the elaborate phishing scam, Denley has detailed it in a Medium post here .

Did you know? Hard Fork has its own stage at TNW2019 , our tech conference in Amsterdam. Check it out .