Brian McDonald, 23, of Van Nuys, pleaded guilty to two criminal charges: conspiracy to distribute fentanyl and cocaine nationwide, and possession of firearms in the commission of a drug trafficking crime, according to the U.S. Attorney’s Office.
If convicted as charged, McDonald faces a mandatory minimum sentence of 10 years and up to a statutory maximum sentence of life in federal prison.
U.S. District Judge Michael W. Fitzgerald set a sentencing hearing for Oct. 21.
McDonald, nicknamed “Malachai Johnson,” “SouthSideOxy” and “JefeDeMichoacan,” and an accomplice, Ciara Clutario, a 22-year-old from Burbank, conspired to sell fentanyl, cocaine and other illegal narcotics not on the streets but through dark web marketplaces such as White House Market, ToRReZ and AlphaBay.
Their sales took place from at least April 2021 to May 2023, creating supplier profiles on hidden markets to traffic drugs in exchange for Monero cryptocurrency.
They tracked online orders
Both McDonald and Clutario are charged with one count of conspiracy to distribute fentanyl and cocaine, five counts of distribution of fentanyl and one count of distribution of cocaine. McDonald also faces one count of possession of firearms to commit a drug trafficking crime.
McDonald, a resident of Van Nuys in the San Fernando Valley, has been in federal custody since his arrest in this case on May 4, 2023.
In carrying out their illicit business, McDonald and Clutario allegedly monitored and maintained the profiles of darknet vendors, including updating drug listings and shipping options.
The two criminals tracked drug orders received online and downloaded payments from cryptocurrency transactions controlled by McDonald’s, according to the indictment being prosecuted by Assistant U.S. Attorneys Ian Vincent Yanniello and Declan T. Conroy of the General Crimes Section in the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Central District of California in Los Angeles.
According to the indictment, McDonald recruited and hired others to assist with the packaging and shipping of narcotics sold on online black market marketplaces. He also taught his co-conspirators how to package and ship the narcotics.
The indictment in federal court in Los Angeles alleges that in May 2021, a week after McDonald created a dark web seller profile for the purpose of selling illegal drugs, he sent a text message to one of his co-conspirators bragging about his sales.
Toward the end of that month, McDonald sent a message to an accomplice, telling him he had just sold 20,000 pills, court documents show.
“Our office prosecutes crimes involving the sale of fentanyl online: When a law enforcement agency files a request for prosecution related to the sale of fentanyl, online or in person, we prosecute the offender,” a spokesperson for the office of George Gascón, district attorney for Los Angeles County, told La Opinión.
“Since many of the online sellers are based overseas, federal authorities are the primary agency charged with policing illegal drug sales online,” he added.
They sold the drugs to undercover agents
Additionally, in texts about the conspiracy’s goals, McDonald stated, “I’m really trying to make like 5 million,” states the indictment signed on May 4, 2023 by Jaclyn N. Casaceli, a special agent with the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA), assigned to St. Louis, Missouri.
In June 2021, McDonald sent another text message to an accomplice telling him he had 34 drug orders.
Two years later, in July 2023, McDonald wrote a text message to an accomplice, who, in the previous 30 days, he told her, the drug trafficking operation had generated $297,000 in revenue and a profit of $160,000.
That same month, McDonald told his accomplice that he would give him $10,000 a month to be his “right-hand man.”
In a summary of the probable cause against the Van Nuys youth, Agent Casaceli stated in the complaint that McDonald “is indeed the leader of a dark drug network that has been involved in a years-long trafficking conspiracy to package and distribute large quantities of illegal drugs, including fentanyl and cocaine.”
The DEA agent details that the nicknames used on the dark internet network, including “Southsideoxy,” “Realsouthsideoxy” and “Jefedemichoacan” sold hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of pills and cocaine laced with fentanyl.
The buyers, however, were federal drug enforcement authorities, who, when they obtained a search warrant for McDonald’s residence, found, among other things, approximately 287 grams of suspected counterfeit M30 oxycodone pills, two firearms with fully loaded magazines, several hundred rounds of ammunition, and other evidence linking him to the dark web drug trafficking scheme.
Entering the hidden network is easy
“Entering the hidden network of the Internet is easy, but there are many risks,” says Jorge Becerra, a technology and computer expert.
According to Becerra, the user who accesses prohibited pages should have a VPN (virtual private network), to establish a digital connection between the computer and a remote server owned by a VPN provider, creating a point-to-point tunnel that encrypts your personal data, hides your IP (internet protocol) address and allows you to bypass website blocks and firewalls on the Internet. An IP is the set of rules that govern the format of data sent over the Internet or local network.
In addition to the VPN, a file called a torrent is required, which is used to download or share a file through the BitTorrent protocol.
“If the user logs into the network with his own passwords, he can be easily hacked,” Becerra said. “If normal people don’t have computer skills, it’s better not to go there because it’s very risky to connect to a dark web website. And if someone decides to do it, they will do it only to disguise themselves.” [ocultar] your IP address.”
The expert described to La Opinión that local, state and federal law enforcement authorities have highly trained personnel to track criminals who try to hide their identity on the dark web.
“If someone knows what they are doing, they can mask their IP address very easily and it is very difficult for law enforcement to track where they are,” said Jorge Becerra.
“But if the person doesn’t know this and their settings are fake, then law enforcement, the FBI or DEA, can trace the IP address,” he said. “The routes the hidden network user takes take some time to discover, but law enforcement professionals who are familiar with the user’s network settings can catch them when they try to access it to do something illicit.”
How did Brian McDonald and his accomplices act?
According to the complaint against McDonald, he received payments for drug trafficking transactions in the cryptocurrency Monero, which is described as a privacy coin, adding layers of anonymity by using a suite of technology to obscure transactions, making it difficult for authorities to track. Monero is widely used by dark web marketplaces and vendors as a form of payment for illicit goods due to its anonymity.
The Pretty Good Privacy (PGP) keys that I used are a mechanism for encrypting, decrypting, and signing messages or files using a public-private key pair to ensure data confidentiality and integrity. PGP keys enable secure communication between vendors and customers. Public keys are always unique and contain important metadata that can be extracted, such as names and emails of the user of the PGP public key.
The extracted names and emails are typically associated with vendor aliases, nicknames, or spoofs rather than actual identities, but since vendors typically use the same public key across different sites, their PGP public key provides the strongest automatically detected indicator when linking multiple aliases to a single vendor.
Other platforms
ProtonMail is another platform that criminals used to sell drugs. It is an encrypted email platform based in Switzerland. Darknet drug dealers often use ProtonMail and other communication platforms outside the United States to hide their illegal activities from law enforcement authorities in the United States.
In fact, on April 26, 2022, an undercover DEA agent digitally captured the dark web vendor profile for “JEFEDEMICHOACAN” on Versus Market. The profile was created on March 16, 2022, and as of April 26, 2022, showed 49 completed drug sales totaling approximately 2,689 counterfeit oxycodone pills.
McDonald’s also used, in Xleet.to, a marketplace that can be accessed via the regular Internet (also known as the clear web).
To access the site, people must register with a username and password. The site sells illicit digital goods, such as financial and sensitive credentials, which hackers can exploit to carry out other crimes such as identity theft, credit card fraud, account takeovers, and more.
The site also sells hacked victim account information for buyers to use and exploit, allowing criminals to impersonate the victim for financial or informational gain.