Bitcoin Forum

http://krebsonsecurity.com/2013/10/feds-arrest-alleged-top-silk-road-drug-seller/

First come the big fishes, later come the smaller ones..

What would you do if you were a seller/buyer?

Wow, I think they can just try to run...

Someone in the UK was also raided while the DPR take down was happening (you can find the details on SR forums if you're interested).  No charges have been laid against him to date but the list of items SOCA seized runs to 18 pages.  According to him, the warrant SOCA had was issued on 16 September - meaning they intentionally delayed executing that warrant until the SR take down was in progress.  He also reports that while he was being interviewed, SOCA was being fed questions to ask him by phone (they asked him about "Ross Allbright", so he assumes US authorities were feeding the questions).

What's interest about the UK arrest is that it wasn't a vendor of illegal products.  It was someone who ran a head shop and supplied vendors with packaging materials - I guess the authorities were hoping that because the person was selling a legal product they might keep a list of their customers.

He recently reported that the cash seized by SOCA has already been returned to him but that the analysis of the "drugs" they seized will take a few months and that the forensic analysis of his computers will take at least 6-9 months (apparently they're back-logged).


If you're a big vendor or someone who was using SR to source drugs for distribution, then you'd have to be anxious - no matter how careful you might have been yourself, you can't know for certain that others with whom you dealt were equally cautious.  And you'd hope to hell that they don't catch up with whoever was laundering your SR income for you.

Anyone who buys into the narrative of federal agents being old guys in suits who couldn't possibly understand technology is an idiot - as is anyone who ever assumed that their communications on SR were ever "private" in any meaningful sense.

1400 reviews over 5 months since making the username..

simple maths make that less then 10 sells a day.. hmm if NOD is the top seller, then the guys on street corners selling drugs for dollars, as seen by TV shows like 'the wire' that do more then 10 sells a day must be uber international crime bosses.. but the maths does make silk road internationally on the same scale as.... detroit....

think about it. last year figures came out that silk road done 21mill dollars worth of transactions in the year 2011-2012.. at the same time blockchain.info was doing 21 million dollars worth of normal peer-to peer legetimate transactions in a day.. making bitcoin about 0.3% of all bitcoin transaction value.

i do actually like the fact that silk road has gone. but putting the numbers into prospective. media has tried to put bitcoin as being more drug tainted then all of the dollars in the USA, when infact its probably the dollars of somewhere like a 4 block radius ina town like detroit.. or amsterdam.

media has put drug dealers as being international criminals yet they do less 'deals' then a single dealer on a street corner..

lets hope bitcoin and drugs mve in their separate directions. lets get some legitimate merchants, investors into bitcoin as all of this silk road crap is just overhyped, once you put some maths against it.

It's not just the media.  People on the SR forums and reddit have been talking about DPR as if he was one of the biggest criminals in the US when in reality SR is dwarfed by the illegal drug market in particular and "organised crime" in general.  We're not talking about an enterprise which had the resources to control sectors of legitimate enterprise or to pay off whole police departments and the judiciary like the mob of the 1970s.

or to put simply
http://i40.tinypic.com/2enmide.jpg

again im not into drugs, i just hate all of this false information and hype media brings to the negative side of things. either way by christmas i hope silk road references will disappear from media and the word silk road will only be used in reference to the sexual journey between a woman's legs. and to all the virgins out there, untill you have gone up the silk road, you won't know what i mean :D

More UK arrests.  Yeah, I know it's the Telegraph but they're giving the Director of the National Crime Agency as a source.


http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/crime/10361974/First-British-Silk-Road-suspects-arrested-by-new-National-Crime-Agency.html

did anyone follow the reddit's in the article yet?

http://www.reddit.com/r/SheepMarketplace/comments/1nsmzx/a_friendly_warning_sheepmarketplacecoms_owner/

hilarious

Get a lawyer. About it.

Don't see too much of a problem for buyers, asking mutual legal assistance for a guy buying a few grams of weed doesn't make sense... but sellers, go to the closest airport. NOW!

...or join the Bitcoin Island in Nicaragua!

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=82060.0

The point is that the government wants to make is that the online version of drug markets COULD TURN INTO a billion dollar industry. I'm sure major drug kingpins were watching the silkroad carefully to see how it played out. They of course would love to work in a similar manner. The FBI cracking down hard sends a message that this is not the new frontier for drug marketing, and most likely the established drug kingpins probably got the message, for now.

Defiantly. I expect nothing less than the full force of the law coming down on this baby.

Centralised marketplaces will always be found. Tor isn't fool proof.
Decentralised marketplaces will be the next natural progression. Hopefully later rather than sooner.

Of course, that^s why the Market organised itself in 24h with alternative Marketplaces like BMR or Sheep
Yeah im sure the bad Drugdealers got the Message... tstststs

Um, obviously you're not actually aware of the size of the drug industry. It dwarfs any and all online marketplaces.

Both of which are currently down (and BMR existed prior to the shut down of SR).  It's seriously not possible to throw together a secure illegal marketplace which can handle a large amount of traffic at short notice -  BMR already existed and it still couldn't cope with the extra traffic.

NOD's arrest had absolutely nothing at all to do with DPR's arrest. It doesn't say it in that article, but he actually used a return address that tied him to a rental P.O. box. See this article.

http://www.komonews.com/news/local/Federal-drug-charges-for-Bellevue-man-involved-in-Silk-Road-226387671.html?mobile=y&clmob=y&c=n

"Investigators say they used a return address on some of the boxes to track down Sadler, and installed tracking devices on Sadler and his co-defendant's vehicles. During surveillance, the cars traveled to at least 38 Post Offices in the Seattle area."

The message that the "kingpins" got was probably more along the lines of "we have to be more careful than he was". This just means that the next Silk Road will be harder for the self-appointed Guardians of Holy and Sacred Legal Writ to track down and bust.

I agree. And the most important one is to choose a jurisdiction that is friendlier to you. Plus use a longer trail of encryption, help support Tor upgrades etc.

I don't care about drugs myself, but I don't believe it is my right to force other people to do what I say either.   :)

this is really good.

get to work Mr. President.

Four “significant users” of Silk Road arrested in UK

Four men in the UK have been arrested over their alleged roles in the online marketplace Silk Road.

http://www.coindesk.com/four-men-arrested-uk-roles-silk-road/

Reports of Swedish arrests, too.

Sorry about the translation.


http://unvis.it/www.aftonbladet.se/senastenytt/ttnyheter/inrikes/article17617871.ab

Interesting that this arrest is for cannabis rather than the harder drugs which have featured on other arrests.

That's hard to know.  If weakness or timing analysis of TOR were used in the take-down (and what appears to have been basically a honey-pot for some time) then one could expect that that detail would be guarded.  These are still the days of 'intelligence laundering' you know.

It was reported somewhere that a VM of 'the system' was imaged, but it was not reported whether it was a running memory dump or what.  One way or another, that this happened at all in any form is certainly indicative of a 'weak link in the system' as I see it.

its not hard to know, read the warrent request.
 time of events..

early on (maybe spring 2013) investigators found by searching the history of bitcointalk the username altoid advertising SR, he had RossU's email in the profile. also on a website for coding support a person asking for code to secure a onion site that sounded like SR also had the same Gmail.

investigators got the IP addresses from google and traced it to san fransisco, which is where i presume they blacklisted him with airports, mail couriers etc..

they then, using IP addresses and RossU's computer domain (login) 'frosty' to get into SR. and then clone the server data.

at same point the courier (mail company) came across a package addressed to RossU which as part of standard security, opened and found fake ID's.. homeland security then went and asked him about the ID's, to which he replied along the lines of 'anyone that knows me could have made these ID's to implicate me as a silkroad user'

then later july-september investigators went through all of the server data, starting with members numbers and transaction data and later on began reading private messages. thats when they came across the hitman messages. and decided it was time to bring him in for questioning..

there.. that saves u a few pages of reading..(check dates, it all flows perfectly in this manner)

You seem unfamiliar with the concept of 'parallel construction'.  The whole point of doing one is to provide a convincing chain of evidence which leaves out the assistance of certain helper systems which are desired to remain secret.

Obviously I do not know if parallel construction was a factor in the (ongoing) SR take-down, but I am quite confident that if any exploitation of TOR or data from xkeyscore or anything else NSA related were employed it would not be evident in the material released for public consumption.

If parallel construction were employed in this case, it certainly worked like a charm on the Frankster.

I would take Tor's anonymity with a large pinch of salt. I certainly would not trust it with my life. (ie, running an illegal drug marketplace hidden service.)

There is a timeline of events available, but it's taken from the court documents which are public.

One thing we don't know at the moment is what was in the - as yet unsealed - original documents filed in Maryland (the first documents relating to the case were filed in May).  

Likewise, the criminal complaint from Maryland specifically states that the information supplied is purely to establish probable cause - they certainly have more information than is supplied in that complaint.  

Enough mistakes were made that DPR could have been caught through the human errors he made and the technological measures outlined in the complaint and the indictment.  It is highly likely that some operational information will not be made public until the trial, if at all, but some of it can be inferred.  

For example, in order for DPR to be convinced that the former employee had been killed that employee had to co-operate with law enforcement in staging the photos sent to DPR and in remaining out of sight afterwards (he essentially had to abandon his old life).  I'd co-operate with them too if confronted with evidence that my former employer was trying to have me killed, but his co-operation isn't explicitly mentioned as a source of any of the information provided to the grand jury.

And yeah, it's really, really stupid to assume that Tor and PGP are magical invisibility cloaks.  They might be great for hiding your penchant for porn or messages to your mistress from your wife, but if maintaining secrecy is absolutely critical then assuming that they're impenetrable is kind of stupid.  Just as we can solve cold cases because advances in processing physical evidence mean we can make decades old physical evidence speak to use, we need to assume that technological evidence collected now can be made to disgorge its secrets sooner rather than later.

+1

From what I've heard this new sheep marketplace replacing SR was up and running within 24 hours.

LOL  :D

24 hours? I can guarantee there's 'holes' all over place with that one. You can be sure the authorities have been all over that one already.

Can't wait for the sob stories when everyones coins go missing.  AGAIN.  :D

I know BMR existed before Silk Road went down and I think sheep may have as well.  Nonetheless, SR down should have prompted a massive security review by any similar sites.

The "official" SR 2 is due to launch and that strikes me as ridiculous.  It's not enough to simply say "we won't make the same human mistakes".  You really need to do a full technical evaluation as well and nobody will convince me that you can adequately review SR's vulnerabilities and address them in a week or two.

People are already "outing" the new DPR.  It's really not smart as the person they're pointing to claims to be a major money launderer.  So much for flying under the radar.

I think the real damage the FBI arrest has caused is that users should think twice before trusting someone who CLAIMS to have done all the right things to keep you safe. As far as anyone knows, (Except for sheeps market place which they already outed the guy who runs it) these Silk Road Reloaded things could just be law enforcement honeypots from other agencies looking to score easy media medals for taking a bite out of crime.

If you don't control it, you're trusting someone you've never met, and don't know. Good luck with that. Especially now that the Silk Road arrests have started: http://www.coindesk.com/four-men-arrested-uk-roles-silk-road/ (http://www.coindesk.com/four-men-arrested-uk-roles-silk-road/)

You'd think so, wouldn't you?  But people have been queuing up to be part of "the new Silk Road" since the site first went down.  It's not unlike how people ignore common sense and queue up to be part of the next "big thing" here, even when it has the hallmarks of previous scams.

I don't know whether to be amused or saddened by the number of posts I've seen on the various onion forums from people saying that they have no real life contacts for obtaining drugs.  Hell, I even saw on thread posted by a vendor asking how to go about selling drugs in real life because he "didn't know anyone".  In it's own way, it's quite tragic.

Desperation is what's driving many users to demand an immediate replacement for Silk road and opportunism is what's driving others to provide it (and let's be honest, the thought of getting commissions off the sales of other vendors has to be appealing to the group of vendors which seems to be behind one of the replacements).

Detailed information on how they caught NOD is contained in the criminal complaint against him.


http://ia801000.us.archive.org/32/items/gov.uscourts.wawd.196181/gov.uscourts.wawd.196181.1.0.pdf