The United States Department of Justice has sentenced Jessica Leane Sledge of Pelahatchie in Mississippi to ten years of imprisonment following her alleged attempt to hire an assassin on the dark web using Bitcoin.

According to United States Attorney Darren J. LaMarc and Special Agent in charge Jermicha Fomby of the FBI’s Jackson Field Office, Jessica has been sentenced to a statutory maximum of 120 months in prison for commissioning a murder-for-hire using interstate commerce facilities.

The Department of Justice filed that Jessica attempted to make contact with an assassin online between September and November 2021. She sent three payments totalling $10,000 in Bitcoin on the 4th, 9th and 10th of October last year.

Unknown to Jessica, the hitman she was trying to hire was an undercover FBI agent whom she eventually met on 1st November 2021 in Brandon, Mississippi. This is where she was eventually arrested for her role in the murder plot.

Jessica’s Bitcoin payments in October 2021 were made when Bitcoin’s price was $54,771. With the current crypto winter, the payment would have been worth $5,800 today. In addition to her ten year sentence, Jessica has been fined $1,000 and will spend spend three years on fully supervised release following the completion of her jail term.

The use of Bitcoin in crime has continued to be a justification for regulators to ban cryptocurrency. Last year, a Tennessee man named Nelson Replogle paid a hitman on a murder-for-hire website to kill his wife using Bitcoin from his Coinbase wallet. The FBI used a subpoena to obtain the transaction details from Coinbase before a warrant was issued for his arrest.

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