Dormant Crypto Wallets Don’t Stay Dormant: The Dream Market Indictment

A federal indictment in Atlanta last week shows that years of crypto inactivity don’t immunize a wallet. The moment it moves, the indictment clock can start.

On May 13, the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Northern District of Georgia announced the filing of a twelve-count federal indictment against Owe Martin Andresen, a 49-year-old German citizen alleged to be the long-unknown main administrator of Dream Market, one of the largest darknet marketplaces before its 2019 shutdown. The federal grand jury in the Northern District of Georgia actually returned the indictment four months earlier, on January 13, 2026. German authorities arrested Andresen on May 7 in a coordinated U.S.–German operation that seized roughly $1.7 million in gold bars, more than $23,000 in cash, and around $1.2 million in cryptocurrency and bank assets.

The legal mechanism here deserves attention from anyone with crypto exposure to the early-to-mid-2010s darknet economy. The conduct charged is not running Dream Market. It is moving the money seven years after Dream Market went dark.

What the indictment alleges

According to the government, Andresen operated under the alias “Speedstepper” and retained the private keys to wallets that had collected administrator commissions from sales on Dream Market between 2013 and 2019. After the marketplace voluntarily shut down in 2019, those wallets sat untouched.

Prosecutors allege that in November and December 2022, those wallets came back to life — funds were moved from the original “Dream Wallets” into newly consolidated wallets that the government says only someone with access to the original private keys could have controlled. In August 2023, Andresen allegedly used an Atlanta-based cryptocurrency service provider to convert digital assets into physical gold bars, which were then shipped to his home in Germany. The laundering window the government identifies runs from August 2023 to April 2025 and totals more than $2 million.

Andresen is charged with six counts of international concealment money laundering and six counts of concealment money laundering under the federal money laundering statute. Each count carries a statutory maximum of twenty years. The German government has filed parallel charges of its own, each carrying up to five years. Assistant U.S. Attorney Bethany L. Rupert is prosecuting the U.S. case with support from the Justice Department’s Office of International Affairs.

The government’s theory, summarized by IRS Criminal Investigation Special Agent in Charge Kareem Carter:

“Illicit actors may hide in the shadows, but their financial footprints remain.”