Bitcoin & Silkroad in Heroin Frame Plot

[indicasteve]

I lol'd when I read this in the BBC today...so I thought I'd share.

Full Story:  http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-23502300
 30 July 2013 Last updated at 10:23 ET

"Brian Krebs says the administrator of a Russian cybercrime forum hatched a plan to order heroin, arranged for it to be delivered to his home, then tipped off the police, making it look as if the call had come from a neighbour's house."

...

"The person behind the attempted plot, according to Mr Krebs, set up a bitcoin wallet to accept donations of the digital currency from fellow forum members.

He raised about $200 (£131) worth of bitcoins and used it to buy 12 small bags of heroin using the Silk Road online black market.

The package duly arrived at Mr Krebs's house, and he handed it over to the police."

...

"This is just the latest example of a sustained smear campaign against Mr Krebs orchestrated by hackers and cybercriminals disgruntled at his exposure of their antics.

In March he was visited by a heavily armed police unit tricked into responding to a 911 call that had been made to look as if it originated from his home.

Mr Krebs says he opened the front door to find a squad of policemen pointing a battery of guns at him.

After being hand-cuffed and questioned, he managed to persuade the police they had been hoaxed by hackers."

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[whydifficult]

Here is the original blogpost by the guy.

The biggest thing I got out of the article was this:

Meiklejohn and fellow researcher Damon McCoy, an assistant professor of computer science at George Mason University, have been mapping out a network of bitcoin wallets that are used exclusively by the curators of the Silk Road. If you wish to transact with merchants on the Silk Road, you need to fund your account with bitcoins. The act of adding credits appears to be handled by a small number of bitcoin purses.

“All Silk Road purchases are handled internally by Silk Road, which means money trades hands from the Silk Road account of the buyer to the Silk Road account of the seller,”  explained Meiklejohn, author of the paper, A Fistful of Bitcoins: Characterizing Payments Among Men with No Names, to be released in October 2013 at the ACM Internet Measurement Conference in Barcelona, Spain.

I knew about Silk Road mixing all coins internally, but I didn't knew research was being done on an academic level in trying to track this kind of flow of money. The same kind of research could be used to track all other kinds of monetary flows. For example where a company offering services for bitcoin will spent those coins on again, what employee gets how much coins. Or how a kid getting pocket money decides to spent it, etc.

Not pretty sure if the current the blockchain (and in our current economical culture where almost all transactions are on the blockchain, written in stone so to say) is the kind of system I really want to have.

[GrantDe]

Pretty crazy that this guy was almost set up for drugs that weren't his.

[indicasteve]

You know, I don't like to see "shit happen" to people, but this guy has been a real stick in the mud.

Here's another BBC news report on his involvement in taking down Liberty Reserve....

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-22699871

I'm not a money laundering criminal and I don't think it's fair to say that anyone who uses out of band money transfer services is automatically doing it for nefarious purposes.

[hayek]

I'm not a money laundering criminal and I don't think it's fair to say that anyone who uses out of band money transfer services is automatically doing it for nefarious purposes.

No one is a money laundering criminal. There are just a bunch of a clowns in suits & blouses who say people are criminals.


It doesn't matter if we use it for whatever a nefarious purpose is. If some clown in a suit or a blouse says it's nefarious then it's apparently nefarious.



I use BTC because I want to beat that system. The opinions of clowns will never affect how I use my BTC

[oneinamillion]

I could never get the concept of silkroad,but thats is a pretty crazy story.

[elor70]

Pepole buy drug with dollars too.

[Zarathustra]

Pepole buy drug with dollars too.

No problem since it has been legalized recently:

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=264463.msg2838657#msg2838657

[TheFootMan]

Is it just me, or does it seem like Brian Krebs like the attention somewhat? What would prevent him from doing his business with a lower profile, and perhaps anonymous to boot? He know enough to set himself up somewhere without revealing his identity.

When you poke a wasps nest, what do you expect to happen? I think he's getting exactly what he's aiming for.