Drug dealers traded on the dark web

Two university friends have been jailed for importing and selling hundreds of thousands of pounds worth of drugs on the dark web in what police said was the first case of its kind in Britain.

Ross Brennan, 28, and Aarron Gledhill, 30, admitted conspiring to import and supply class A drugs and money laundering.

Brennan was jailed for 13 years and eight months and Gledhill for three years and nine months at York crown court.

The court was told that Brennan used a dark web site called AlphaBay, which has since been shut down, to sell drugs, including the potentially lethal fentanyl. He received bitcoins worth between £275,000 and £1.5 million, depending on fluctuations in the currency’s value, some of which were converted to real money and spent on watches, gold, drugs and prostitutes.

In the past nine months at least 70 people have died in Britain after taking fentanyl, often when it was mixed with heroin. The court was told that some of Brennan’s customers died, although there was no evidence to suggest that his drugs were to blame, and that he continued dealing despite knowing the risks. Judge Andrew Stubbs, QC, told Brennan, of Huntington, North Yorkshire, that he was “a 21st-century criminal — sophisticated, arrogant and sure in the belief you were untouchable”.

He said that Gledhill, from Dewsbury, West Yorkshire, was “vulnerable and naive” after a motorcycle accident when he was younger and that he had been exploited by Brennan, whom he met at the University of Huddersfield.

Detective Inspector Nicholas Holden said: “In what we believe to be the first case of its kind in the UK, Brennan and Gledhill made life-changing sums of money through a sophisticated drugs supermarket on the dark web.”