NOD, one of "top 1%" of SR sellers arrested

[Spekulatius]

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?

[BitAddict]

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...

[repentance]

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).

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

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.

[franky1]

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.

[repentance]

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.

[franky1]

or to put simply


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

[repentance]

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

Four men suspected of being significant users of Silk Road, the billion dollar online narcotics bazaar, have been arrested in the UK, The Daily Telegraph can disclose.

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

[favdesu]

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

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

hilarious

[crazy_rabbit]

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?

Get a lawyer. About it.

[kik1977]

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?

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!

[kik1977]

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?

Get a lawyer. About it.

...or join the Bitcoin Island in Nicaragua!

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

[crazy_rabbit]

or to put simply


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

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.

[Buffer Overflow]

or to put simply


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

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.

[Gordon Bleu]

......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.

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

[crazy_rabbit]

......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.

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.

[repentance]

Of course, that^s why the Market organised itself in 24h with alternative Marketplaces like BMR or Sheep

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.

[LouReed]

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."

[Severian]

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.

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.

[cr1776]

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.   

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.

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.

[cypherdoc]

or to put simply


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

this is really good.

get to work Mr. President.