Current How the FBI found Silk Road

[CAS79]

I’ve only ever heard mention of the existance of Silk Road or sites like it in bits and pieces before the announcement that the head of it had been apprehended. Though I am assured by a friend of mine that in terms of online drug trafficking this is a big fish get. This is certainly an interesting read on how they apprehended their man.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-24371894

Some of you will know a lot more about this than I but having a had a read of a couple of articles today this seems like one very amateur mistake to use his own email address linked to the project. Though a lot of big crime operations are brought down by one lazy error.

For those in the know is this the big fish the western countries will want for an online drugs black market or is it a little player been spun as a big catch.

What defences does he have, he was set up with and an ID takeover employed?

 

[MaddAdam]

If i were a betting man, I'd suggest SR will be back up very quickly and there'd be DRead Pirate Roberts there again like nothing ever happened.

 

[CLUBMEDhurst]

If i were a betting man, I'd suggest SR will be back up very quickly and there'd be DRead Pirate Roberts there again like nothing ever happened.

Why the confidence DOP?

 

[MaddAdam]

Why the confidence DOP?

Way the world works. That thing will have had back up plans for servers being comprised. The dude arrested won't have been the only one who knew the password to the DRead whatever acct.

Did coke stop leaving Colombia when Pablo Escobar was whacked?

 

[CLUBMEDhurst]

supply and demand, eh

 

[knife]

Did coke stop leaving Colombia when Pablo Escobar was whacked?

This, Regardless if this is the end of Silk Road or not I imagine there are people already preparing to launch their own similar sites right now. They've been chasing Silk Road for over 2 1/2 years with the enormous resources of the US intelliegence and law enforcement agencies and only caught him because of some really silly if not outrageously stupid mistakes he made (See http://www.slate.com/blogs/crime/20...ictment_the_alleged_silk_road_mastermind.html ). While I reckon the claims of the actual website making $80m in commisions is exaggerated along with the facilitating ~$1.2b of sales, It does show that it was a hugely lucrative enterprise that others can copy knowing if they are smart about it they'll at the very least frustrate authorities for a very very long time and in all likelihood make an almost untraceable killing financially.

 

[woopedazz]

They found out about TSR because it was the worst kept "secret" on the internet. They found out who was running the show because he was a narcissist who couldn't keep his mouth shut and wanted to be Internet famous. They found out the real person connected to the persona because the guy was an idiot.

 

[Sterge]

This, Regardless if this is the end of Silk Road or not I imagine there are people already preparing to launch their own similar sites right now. They've been chasing Silk Road for over 2 1/2 years with the enormous resources of the US intelliegence and law enforcement agencies and only caught him because of some really silly if not outrageously stupid mistakes he made (See http://www.slate.com/blogs/crime/20...ictment_the_alleged_silk_road_mastermind.html ). While I reckon the claims of the actual website making $80m in commisions is exaggerated along with the facilitating ~$1.2b of sales, It does show that it was a hugely lucrative enterprise that others can copy knowing if they are smart about it they'll at the very least frustrate authorities for a very very long time and in all likelihood make an almost untraceable killing financially.

From what I have read there are records of bitcoin coming and goings but not exactly what they were spent on.

If there is megabucks to be made on commission for running a SR type site surely all the authorities have to do is check these logs and see who is suddenly cashing huge amounts of bitcoins into real money?

 

[vast]

He is probably lucky the FBI got to him first.

Its crazy how this bitcoin thing works and people trust it. Who runs or comtrols bitcoin anyway and how on earth do you convert to real money?

What a world we live in ay.

Also buying the drugs online would mean they have to be delivered somewhere, christ it seems risky having them delivered to your house or something. If they even turned up or maybe the "sellers" had ratings like on ebay lol.

 

[lewigie]

Bitcoins fluctuate in price. They could be worth 40c one day and $40 the next.

I'm interested in what this guy put on his tax deceleration with his 80m income from this site.

 

[Silent Alarm]

They found out about TSR because it was the worst kept "secret" on the internet. They found out who was running the show because he was a narcissist who couldn't keep his mouth shut and wanted to be Internet famous. They found out the real person connected to the persona because the guy was an idiot.

I tried proposing this in another thread, on another board, and apparently needed to realise "money and ego isn't everything." Sure. He might've believed in drug liberation like lots of people, but the money and power was always going to attract a certain person – no one risks s**t this huge for some personal, heroic crusade against drug prohibition.

 

[lemon chicken]

Its crazy how this bitcoin thing works and people trust it. Who runs or comtrols bitcoin anyway and how on earth do you convert to real money?

I've googled it, seen some segment on TT or ACA the other night with people buying beers at some pub in Melb with it, yet still have no idea and cant figure out how it actually works. If someone here can explain it in simplified terms, that would be great thanks.

 

[stralia]

Darknet market places have been around long before SR and will be around long after.

 

[Bunk Moreland]

I've googled it, seen some segment on TT or ACA the other night with people buying beers at some pub in Melb with it, yet still have no idea and cant figure out how it actually works. If someone here can explain it in simplified terms, that would be great thanks.

As far as I can tell you purchase like any other currency, from a trader or a dealer. You set up an account, pay for your bitcoins with normal currency, and it gets deposited. You then use them as tender for a purchase.

Probably the biggest point I've read about them is the instability. The exchange rate varies massively from day to day, so you obviously take the risk there. Supply and demand I guess.

 

[PHX]

He is probably lucky the FBI got to him first.

Its crazy how this bitcoin thing works and people trust it. Who runs or comtrols bitcoin anyway and how on earth do you convert to real money?

What a world we live in ay.

Also buying the drugs online would mean they have to be delivered somewhere, christ it seems risky having them delivered to your house or something. If they even turned up or maybe the "sellers" had ratings like on ebay lol.

I guess with Bitcoin you could use paypal as a simple example where if when you transferred money into paypal it converted the dollars you put in into BitCoins. You then used those BitCoins as currency to buy goods and services instead of using national currencies. The only problem Bitcoin doesn't function like a floating exchange very well so the fluctuations can be ridiculously volatile.

And with Silk Road, from what I understand the sellers did indeed get feedback like eBay, which made people much more confident in the product they were buying than getting it from a local dealer.

But yeah the postage thing, especially if the dealer was overseas, would result in massive paranoia for me waiting for someone to kick in the door!

 

[Bunk Moreland]

Postage is a risk but it's substantially lessened in that I assume most purchases of this nature are small, consumable orders as opposed to large commercial quantities that customs etc are looking for.

I think a very small, nondescript package would be unlikely to be picked up.

 

[bkozican]

The police tried this with the mexico cartels. They catch the big fish for what..................................Another 2-3 cartels to rise through the ranks. That is exactly what will happen with this online drug selling

 

[stralia]

Silk Road was never the only anonymous market, just the most famous. Things are business as usual everywhere else.

 

[CAS79]

Interesting piece,

http://www.granta.com/New-Writing/After-Silk-Road

suggesting that the FBI by publicising their success with silk road they just grew the market for the "Dark Web" drug sellers and other activities by alerting the world to their presence when it was largely hidden even to large criminal networks.

 

[The Passenger]

Its crazy how this bitcoin thing works and people trust it. Who runs or comtrols bitcoin anyway and how on earth do you convert to real money?

No one runs bitcoin. It's decentralised and that is the point of it.

In a strange way bitcoin transaction is anonymous but transaction is also public in that it is put on the blockchain (www.blockchain.com) - but the public part is only your bitcoin address, which is a 20 (?) digit long random alphanumeric string. If you can keep your identity separate from your bitcoin address than your account is anonymous.

Bitcoins are "created" by mining. The blockchain has every single transaction ever made on it, and to ensure the integrity of the blockchain computers perform a series of algorithms and every 10-15 minutes 25 bitcoins are released to the computer (or computers) that solved the algorithms. Every few years the amount of bitcoins released is halved so that eventually the amount of bitcoins in circulation will finish at about 22 million. There are currently around 11 or 12 million.

How do you get bitcoins? Well you trade them for cash using a site like mtgox.com or localbitcoins.com - there are plenty of bitcoin traders out there, some dodgy and some legit.

Who decides the value of bitcoins? Supply and demand decides the value. People need to get over the idea that something needs to be physical to have value. Anything can have value. The bitcoin to cash conversion rate fluctuates wildly, and can change (and days quite regularly) as much as 20-30% in a single day.

The only way to truly understand the first concepts of bitcoin is to accept that anything can have value. Anyone that continues to think that to have value something needs to be physically held or seen, then it's not possible to grasp how bitcoin works.

 

[The Passenger]

Interesting piece,

http://www.granta.com/New-Writing/After-Silk-Road

suggesting that the FBI by publicising their success with silk road they just grew the market for the "Dark Web" drug sellers and other activities by alerting the world to their presence when it was largely hidden even to large criminal networks.

very very good article