How darkmarket admins get caught

[kevinovecka]

Hi,
We had this discussion in Czech Bitcoin community about getting operators of darkmarkets.

What do you know about this?
How do fbi or other government agencies get these people?

We talked about
1) Bitcoin is pseudoanonymous and some companies business is to trace transactions
2) They can get to place where they host this darkmarket and find IPs or some data that can lead to find the admins
3) There was this guy who sent some profits to KYC exchange on his mothers account
4) They have to use node for transactions so they can maybe traced by IP of node (but what if it is through TOR)

But what if they used only Monero and Zcash (or other privacy coins) or they use some mixer?
Are there other ways to get to them?

If I was wrong in something, please tell me.

[1714210712]

1714210712

[1714210712]

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[Jating]

Or maybe the Feds themselves setup their on dark market see who is buying and then make an arrest. Just like in an offline scenario wherein you talk to someone i.e. hire them to murder someone, buy some drugs, pedo and other criminals.

Or maybe the FBI and other government agencies are also hacking those dark marketplace to break the anonymity of users. Or maybe they got on the hosting site itself, get what they needed to track and indict any individual with serious crimes.

[franky1]

multiple ways

1. the government own the postal system. so they can flag up any delivery address and the postal system can get an alert at the initial postage depot before its sent across borders. narrowing down where the goods are coming from.
2. sites dont run their own servers and end up using hosted servers. spotting data travelling between a server and a proxy is childsplay. so it just becomes a game of following the hops.
not just of the clearnet host->proxy. but then of the proxy->tor bridge.

users are normally safe because a users random connection is not worthy of tracing in most cases. but when it comes to a cumulative amount of thousands of customers that hop to a certain end point. it becomes real easy to identify the end point.
even without a hosted server. ISP can show 'high traffic' usage.
yep an average user with netflix might use a few hundred gigabyte but a business/market uses soo much more. ISP may not have to know WHAT the data is. but the amount is revealing

3. social hacking. some websites recruit workers. and sometimes they let a government agent get recruited. then from inside the darkweb site. the agent then gets all the info they need

put all 3 together and wham. easy to find
just remember. this is not the 1800's where everything is logged on paper and taking months to find patterns. these days its all logged in digital form and takes milliseconds to find patterns and routes that overlap with other data sources

[yazher]

-Snip

Just like what you said, this is how to catch criminals in the outside-world as well where they hired real drug users to be an agent and in the deep web, you might not know that you are dealing with an agent from the FBI and it won't take days to convince people that you are not an agent, it takes months or sometimes years to fully learn how the admins on the dark web works and surely they will get caught when that happened.

That's why they won't just show their faces and they always hide their places because once they get caught, they will be forced to tell where their hideout and their other friends are.

[Shenzou]

Hi,
We had this discussion in Czech Bitcoin community about getting operators of darkmarkets.

What do you know about this?
How do fbi or other government agencies get these people?

We talked about
1) Bitcoin is pseudoanonymous and some companies business is to trace transactions
2) They can get to place where they host this darkmarket and find IPs or some data that can lead to find the admins
3) There was this guy who sent some profits to KYC exchange on his mothers account
4) They have to use node for transactions so they can maybe traced by IP of node (but what if it is through TOR)

But what if they used only Monero and Zcash (or other privacy coins) or they use some mixer?
Are there other ways to get to them?

If I was wrong in something, please tell me.

There are a ton of ways for these people to get caught, and even if they are careful at some point they probably did or will make a mistake that will get them to get caught, and the FBI have the tools and the rights to do any deep investigations, its why they where created in the first place, besides if you didn't know the darkweb was created by the US government so their spies could exchange information, so at the end of the day i am sure there is a way to track whoever behind the screen, and the same as the users and sellers on the darkweb are anonymous, the same that the FBI are, which means that they can set them up and track them down.

[nutildah]

How do fbi or other government agencies get these people?

The story of Alexandre Cazes, AlphaBay admin back in the day, is a pretty good one, and similar to what took Ross Ulbricht down if memory serves: both used an email "at work" that could be tied to their IRL identities early on in their careers... for Cazes it was a reply-to address in a welcome email to new users (I think).

Also, some market had a admin that was also a vendor. Law enforcement places drug orders from the vendor and slowly collects information to catch them, culminating with post office security footage showing the vendor shipping out orders. This has happened several times this year already.

Oh, getting turned on by a caught co-admin who agrees to help the feds in exchange for a lesser sentence. That also sped Cazes' downfall.

[20kevin20]

I honestly think that the FBI doesn't really always do legal stuff to catch darknet admins. There are definitely some cases in which they did, but for example Ross Ulbricht's situation is kind of sketchy if you read about it. It's almost like Ross was so stupid that he was thinking he had anonymity while his information was sitting out there in the wild waiting for it to be found and used. It's almost like they found him too easily, but perhaps all the intel said was legit...  although there is something that doesn't add up. One would argue the effort of doing not-so-legal procedures to catch a criminal is worth it and makes sense, but then how does catching someone doing illegal stuff to punish him through illegal procedures make sense.

My gut feeling says they sometimes make use of much more invasive ways of finding someone when the said person becomes a high-profile target. I think Ross for example was doing something that put the dominance of eBay and other such marketplaces under risk and the reason of catching the owner of Silk Road and punishing it was about this, and not about him creating a free market for everyone to use. The sentence Ross received further proves this imo.

The intel of US at least has so many ways of finding you, some of which are more or less intrusive/legal. The key point here is, they do have the resources, the procedures, the technology. They probably do have enough resources to find you even if you are only using Tor, Monero and mixers. If they think catching you is worth any effort, you can mark their job as done.

[NotATether]

3. social hacking. some websites recruit workers. and sometimes they let a government agent get recruited. then from inside the darkweb site. the agent then gets all the info they need

They really only need 3. Actually their needs are even simpler than that, all they have to do is "poison" a staff member of the operation into becoming a mole, and from there they can bust the rest of the members.

[GamblersArea]

Unless they make a mistake when tryna cash out through an exchange like in your 3rd example, it's pretty hard to catch someone like that. In order to bring down a whole dark market operation, you really would need a whole orchestra. It's really difficult to locate someone and overall prove anything.

[mocacinno]

The most prominent was the silk road, IIRC the operator was caught because he posted on the clearnet asking questions/telling stuff that could be related to setting up dark net markets, aswell as promoting the silk road on the clearnet... Afterwards he used the same handle to post his e-mail.... And IIRC, his linked in also had vague links to the silk road (or darknet markets in general).

I don't remember all the details, but i do remember that in the end he got caught because of bad opsec... Posting the wrong things on the clearnet...

[DeathAngel]

It’s too risky, I’m sure they earn great money but it should be a get in, make a load of money & get out fast scheme. The worry & paranoia you’d have, constantly looking over your shoulder isn’t worth it. Feds employ clever people to hack & catch these guys. Even using XMR, I’d be in constant worry about getting caught.

[Ucy]

Tried to understand exactly what the darkmarket is (whether they're purely Tor based markets), the definition I got on the internet wasn't very helpful.
I think it's better to avoid such markets if they actually sell dangerous goods and services. Such markets may have been allowed to trap people , blackmail or put people into problems. I guess the most dangerous people thrive there while the ordinary people are easily caught.

You could instead set up a transparent decentralized marketplaces with crypto as currency, encourage Safe Anonymous transactions and allow only things that are moral

[Sethrey]

Hi,
We had this discussion in Czech Bitcoin community about getting operators of darkmarkets.

What do you know about this?
How do fbi or other government agencies get these people?

We talked about
1) Bitcoin is pseudoanonymous and some companies business is to trace transactions
2) They can get to place where they host this darkmarket and find IPs or some data that can lead to find the admins
3) There was this guy who sent some profits to KYC exchange on his mothers account
4) They have to use node for transactions so they can maybe traced by IP of node (but what if it is through TOR)

But what if they used only Monero and Zcash (or other privacy coins) or they use some mixer?
Are there other ways to get to them?

If I was wrong in something, please tell me.

Exactly, you don't have to share anything with anyone, even govs. I've chosen Crypton from UtopiaP2P https://u.is/en/currencies.html and was shocked when it added 50% to its value after the last listing. Moreover, it has its own decentralized exchange

Aside from Monero, most privacy coin is traceable because it's optional to use the privacy feature (such as Zcash) or the privacy feature isn't good enough (such as Dash coinjoin)

I like privacy coins exactly for the fact that none of my operations can be tracked. And I've chosen Crypton from Utopia P2P for that. It's rate gained 50% during 24 hours on the inner exchange https://u.is/en/currencies.html That's pretty nice!

[moderator's note: consecutive posts merged]