Bath Township man ran service that laundered $311 million in bitcoin for darknet transac…

CLEVELAND, Ohio — A Bath Township man is charged in federal court with running a darknet operation that prosecutors said laundered more than $300 million worth of cryptocurrency often used for illegal transactions in underground marketplaces.

Larry Dean Harmon faces several charges detailed in an indictment handed up by a grand jury in Washington, D.C. Federal prosecutors say Harmon, 36, ran a service that allowed customers to send bitcoin and obscure its origin. Such services are known as “mixing” or “tumbling.”

Federal prosecutors say Harmon’s operation, called Helix, partnered with the online underground marketplace AlphaBay to provide money laundering for customers who accessed the marketplace through the darknet, which is not accessible through internet browsers used by most of the public.

AlphaBay was known as a place where customers went to buy drugs, fraudulent ID documents and other illegal items. Federal authorities shut it down in 2017 and said drugs bought on…