FALL RIVER — A 27-year-old Fall River man who turned the Telegram app into a one-stop shop for fentanyl, ghost guns and 3D-printed machinegun switches will spend the next 23 years in federal prison — after one of his teenage customers wound up dead.

He ran the operation from his phone.

From at least 2022 through 2024, prosecutors say, Hunt operated what amounted to a digital pharmacy and gun shop on Telegram — advertising fentanyl, cocaine, LSD, MDMA, ketamine, counterfeit oxycodone pills, ghost guns, silencers and machinegun conversion devices to customers across the country. Payment was in Bitcoin, occasionally CashApp. Shipping was the U.S. Postal Service.

Some of the merchandise he made himself. According to the DOJ, Hunt used 3-D printers to manufacture privately made firearms and machinegun 'switches' — the small devices that convert a semiautomatic Glock into a fully automatic weapon — right at his residence.

In May 2023, investigators in Massachusetts learned that a 17-year-old in another state had died of an acute mixed drug intoxication. Messages on Telegram showed the teen had been buying drugs from Hunt. When the minor told Hunt he did not have Bitcoin, Hunt agreed to take payment through CashApp instead, then dropped the drugs in the mail.

The messages investigators recovered include exchanges from the hours just before the teen's death — Hunt and the minor discussing the drugs he had supplied. The fentanyl, MDMA, MDA, ketamine and LSD in the kid's system were the but-for cause of death, federal prosecutors found. Hunt admitted as much when he pleaded out.

Long before the death investigation closed, agents had been buying from him. Between February and June 2024, an undercover officer purchased counterfeit oxycodone pills laced with fentanyl from Hunt — including quantities exceeding the 40-gram threshold that triggers federal mandatory minimums. During one buy Hunt threw in a privately made Glock-style pistol, multiple machinegun switches, an extended magazine and a set of 3D-printed brass knuckles.

In August 2024, Hunt mailed approximately 1,600 fentanyl-laced pills to undercover agents in exchange for cryptocurrency. Postal inspectors intercepted other packages tied to him along the way — one outbound parcel contained a smoke grenade; another inbound package held 13 machinegun conversion devices.

That same month, agents raided his Fall River home. What they found read like a small-arms catalog.

The seizure included approximately 95 firearms and related items: dozens of privately made firearms, machinegun conversion devices, silencers, extended magazines, 'large quantities' of ammunition, and the 3-D printers Hunt was using to manufacture the gun parts. Investigators also pulled significant quantities of fentanyl, cocaine, methamphetamine, MDMA and ketamine out of the residence.

'This case is a stark reminder that drug dealers are no longer just on street corners,' United States Attorney Leah B. Foley said in the announcement. 'They are online preying on our children via phones and computers and pushing highly addictive and deadly drugs.'

DEA Special Agent in Charge Jarod Forget called Hunt's conduct part of 'a public safety crisis in communities across Massachusetts and the nation.' ATF Special Agent in Charge Thomas Greco singled out the combination at the heart of the case: 'Independently, each has the potential to ruin lives and endanger the public. Taken together, Benjamin Hunt's conduct could only lead to harm, and in this case a seventeen-year-old was killed as a result.'

Hunt will be in his fifties by the time he gets out.