Sheep Marketplace was a darknet market that launched in March 2013 and was one of the lesser known sites to gain popularity with the well publicized closure of the Silk Road marketplace later that year. It ceased operation in December 2013, when it announced it was shutting down after a vendor stole $6 million worth of users' bitcoins. In March 2015 Czech police arrested a man suspected to be the Sheep Marketplace thief when he paid for an expensive house entirely in bitcoins. A nine-month investigation showed that he had made $800,000 of sudden purchases. In October 2017 Tomáš Jiříkovský, the creator of Sheep Marketplace, was sentenced to serve nine years in prison for stealing bitcoins from the market's users. In May 2016 two men from Florida, then 21-year-old students Sean Mackert and Nathan Gibson, were arrested after tracing Bitcoin transactions via Coinbase. Subsequently, the pair pled guilty to the crime of Bitcoin wire fraud on Sheep Marketplace in 2018 and are now facing a maximum prison time of up to twenty years. About $4 million worth of Bitcoin stolen by Mackert and Gibson has since been seized by the United States federal government.
Sheep Marketplace was a darknet market that launched in March 2013 and was one of the lesser known sites to gain popularity with the well publicized closure of the Silk Road marketplace later that year. It ceased operation in December 2013, when it announced it was shutting down after a vendor stole $6 million worth of users' bitcoins. In March 2015 Czech police arrested a man suspected to be the Sheep Marketplace thief when he paid for an expensive house entirely in bitcoins. A nine-month investigation showed that he had made $800,000 of sudden purchases. In October 2017 Tomáš Jiříkovský, th...