Peter Phillip Nash, a forum moderator for the infamous darknet market is out of jail after serving 18 months of imprisonment on the charges of trafficking drugs and money laundering.

Peter Phillip Nash, 41, Australia, was arrested in Brisbane in December 2013 and transported to the US to get charged for earning $30,000 during his 10 months of working for the illegal Silk Road platform.  Unlike other actors involved, the platform moderator nicknamed SSBD (Samesamebutdifferent), Batman73, Symmetry and Anonymousasshit was sentenced to a comparatively short term, as the court deemed him only a “minor cog in the machine.”

One of Nash’s main activities included moderating a forum related to Silk Road. Though the forum had no official connection with the platform itself and its users’ illegal activities, Nash used the market to buy drugs for his own consumption and was aware that his salary came from the Silk Road team. Therefore, he could not pledge ignorance about the nature of the platform he had worked for. Moreover, he admitted buying drugs for his friends. “I deeply regret my conduct and any consequent harm I caused,” he said when speaking before the court.

Whereas the Silk Road moderator is released, the creator of the platform Ross Ulbricht is serving his life sentence after being found guilty of 7 charges, including money laundering, drug trafficking and computer hacking. 

Carl Mark Force IV, a former Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) agent who investigated the Silk Road case, is now serving his six and a half years in prison for money laundering, obstruction of justice and extortion after misusing his powers and trying to sell “law enforcement counter-intel” to Ulbricht. Another Secret Service agent Shaun W. Bridges sentenced to six years in prison for stealing bitcoins from Silk Road and laundering them at the Mt. Gox exchange, is now suspected of bitcoin theft in at least two more cases, including $700,000 worth of bitcoin from a Secret Service account.

Maria Rudina