Justice has finally caught up with the man who made a fortune selling over a tonne of drugs online as a teenager and who was then the subject of a Netflix TV series.
Maximilian Schmidt, now 28, set up the website ‘Shiny Flakes’ at the age of 17, where he sold cannabis, LSD, ecstasy, cocaine and speed to customers all over the world. He reportedly sold all types of drugs apart from heroin.
He was jailed for seven years in Germany, but he reportedly spent very little time behind bars because he was always being called as a witness to numerous other trials connected to his online drug dealing.
And in his latest trial, the court heard that while on probationary release over the other sentence, he had set up another online drug dealing site – candylove.to. The court heard that the amounts sold were “not insignifcant” and included kilos of amphetamine, cocaine, LSD, ecstasy, haschisch and prescription medication between April 2019 and January 2021.
As a result, he has been jailed for four-and-a-half years after he was found guilty by a court in Leipzig, Germany. While he was inside, he had met another criminal jailed for drug dealing, named Friedmann G., who had persuaded Schmidt to programme a new site for him.
The young man’s second attempt was exposed after police tapped phone calls between him and the other members of the gang.
Schmidt was just 19 years old when he was first caught after becoming sloppy and making mistakes with the addresses on his packages, which allowed the authorities to catch up with him. He was sentenced to seven years in prison over his online drug empire at the age of 20.
Despite his rearrest, prosecutors decided not to keep him in custody and instead left him free, deeming that his notoriety would make it difficult for him to escape the country without being recognised.
An anonymous source from the German judiciary told the daily Bild: “An arrest warrant was not issued because of the fact that the case itself, the reason for his arrest, and the gentleman himself are already well known in the media and therefore, it was deemed that there was no risk of him absconding.”
He will, in the meantime, remain free as the verdict can still be appealed.
The Netflix TV Series ‘How to Sell Drugs Online (Fast)’, which is now in its third season after launching in 2019, is based on Schmidt’s story. A Netflix documentary called ‘Shiny_Flakes: The Teenage Drug Lord’, was also made, being released on the popular streaming platform in 2021.
