Court Rejects Man’s Bid to Vacate Sentence for Offering Bitcoin Payments to Harm Women
On Wednesday, March 13, 2024, the United States District Court for the Eastern District of Washington denied a motion to vacate the sentence for Ronald Craig Ilg.
Ilg had been sentenced in 2021 after pleading guilty to two counts of making threats across state lines. He was seeking to have his sentence overturned on the grounds that his constitutional rights were violated.
The case against Ilg began in April 2021 when the BBC obtained anonymous messages Ilg had sent over the dark web. In the messages, Ilg purportedly requested that someone seriously injure two women and offered them payment in cryptocurrency. The FBI was able to corroborate details from the messages and obtained information from a separate source indicating Ilg had hired someone to harm one of the women.
Investigators also confirmed cryptocurrency transactions matching those described in the messages. They obtained a warrant to search records from Coinbase, a cryptocurrency exchange platform, to identify the owner of the account that was used to send Bitcoin. The records showed the account belonged to Ilg.
He was initially charged with seven federal crimes, including attempted kidnapping and tampering with a witness. Ilg hired private attorneys to represent him. They filed several pre-trial motions, including one to suppress evidence obtained from the Coinbase warrant. However, the motion was denied by the court.
Ilg eventually accepted a plea deal in which he pled guilty to two threat charges in exchange for the other five charges being dropped. As part of the deal, he waived his right to challenge the Coinbase evidence. He was sentenced to 96 months in prison, the high end of the agreed range between prosecutors and the defense.
In his motion to vacate the sentence, Ilg argued his constitutional rights were violated because evidence from the Coinbase warrant should have been suppressed. However, the court rejected this argument, noting that alleged Fourth Amendment violations are not a valid basis for a Section 2255 motion.
Ilg also claimed he received ineffective assistance from his attorneys, but the court did not find any issues with their representation and tactics. It noted they had made reasonable arguments in the motion to suppress and obtained a favorable plea deal. Ultimately, the court determined Ilg’s motion did not establish valid legal grounds for overturning his sentence, and so it was denied.
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