Magnificent red beard trips up ‘dark web drug dealer’, arrested on trip to world facial hair contest

Reading Time:3 minutes

Gal Vallerius shows off his beard in a photo posted to social media. Photo: Instagram

Published: 2:30pm, 29 Sep 2017Updated: 2:48pm, 29 Sep 2017

United States authorities arrested a suspected dark web drug dealer as he travelled into the country from his home in France to attend the World Beard and Moustache Championships.

Gal Vallerius, a French 38-year-old with a magnificent red beard, is accused of being a drug kingpin on the dark web, acting as an administrator for Dream Market, a marketplace for illegal narcotics including cocaine, heroin and methamphetamines, counterfeit consumer goods and stolen data.

Vallerius was arrested as he landed at Atlanta international airport on August 31, and during a border search of his laptop confirmed his identity as “OxyMonster”, the username for a Dream Market account that was not only listed as an administrator for the site but also listed prescription drugs including OxyContin and Ritalin for sale. Officials also discovered about US$500,000 in bitcoin, the currency used for anonymously trading on the marketplace.

Gal Vallerius shows off his beard in a photo posted to social media. Photo: Twitter

The arrest, first reported by The Miami Herald, was the culmination a multi-agency investigation that started in February 2016. As part of the investigation, Drug Enforcement Administration agents made undercover purchases of crystal meth, LSD and hydrocodone from a range of vendors on Dream Market and trawled the site to identify the usernames associated with the organising team.

“OxyMonster knowingly participated in the Dream Market conspiracy not only as a vendor, but also in a leadership and organizational role as a senior moderator and administrator,” court documents state.

I don’t know anything about what other stuff he did, but as far as his beard goes, it’s really awesome, long and bright red

MJ Johnson, on rival competitive beard grower Gal Vallerius

Investigators tied the username to Vallerius’s real identity through his bitcoin transactions, some of which went to bitcoin wallets associated with his name. They then tracked down his Instagram and Twitter accounts to compare the writing style with that of OxyMonster and discovered “many similarities” including the use of the word “cheers”, frequent quotation marks and intermittent French posts, according to court documents filed in Florida.