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Silk Road 2.0 Seized By FBI, Alleged Founder Arrested In San Francisco
blottsie writes The FBI has arrested the online persona "Defcon," identified as Blake Benthall, a 26-year-old in San Francisco, who the agency claims ran the massive online black market Silk Road 2.0. Benthall's FBI arrest comes a year after that of Ross Ulbricht, also from San Francisco, who's the alleged mastermind of the original Silk Road and still awaiting trial. The largest of those reported down is Silk Road 2.0. But a host of smaller markets also seized by law enforcement include Appaca, BlueSky, Cloud9, Hydra, Onionshop, Pandora, and TheHub. Also at Ars Technica.
If money is being transferred electronically, it can be traced back to you. That's the weakness of all illegal online marketplaces.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
And there will be a third and forth and fifth... It will NEVER stop. There is absolutely nothing the government can do to stop it. Nothing. There is 8 million a month spent on something relatively complicated to use (compared to say Amazon) and carries a risk of jail time. Think about that. Obviously there's a demand and that demand will be met no matter the cost. But it's not like there are more important things to spend the time and money on.
Don't abuse the people. Clearly a large number of people want this service no matter the risk. There will be plenty of others ready to fill the void.
I think the previous AC's point was not that it would eventually stop, but rather that eventually someone would come along who was smart enough to run his criminal empire from somewhere outside the US. Then we'd get a story about the CIA, instead of merely the FBI.
"[Regarding the 'cloud,'] ownership was what made America different than Russia." -- Woz
No way, never. Who'd buy any of the overpriced, useless but patentable drugs from various Pharma Corporations if there were more potent, cheaper drugs available where the patent expired?
That's the problem when you invent the holy grail of drugs. The ultimate drug. At some point in time, your patent is gone. And then... what do you want to do when there is nothing you could invent that is "better"?
Take a look around at when something gets invented, when it gets patented and when it gets outlawed. You just MIGHT see some sort of pattern.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
You act as if that law was a natural one, imposed by nature itself. Which are by definition also the only laws you can neither break nor change.
Just because something is the law doesn't make it automatically right. Human laws don't define what is right. Only what is legal.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
These free trade sites will keep popping up as fast as they are shutdown. The government's position that unrestricted trade is dangerous is untenable.
It's completely possible.
Ulbricht was not very smart. He bought fake IDs off his own website and had them shipped to his actual home address. The IDs were intercepted in the mail. and this clued the FBI in on his activities. Then he managed his servers using a direct VPN connection. Once the FBI traced the VPN endpoint he was done. They coerced the hosting company to allow them access and they could collect all the information they needed to build a case from that point on.
I imagine this Defcon guy did something similarly dumb.
To do this right:
1. Find a VM hosting company offshore that accepts bitcoins and doesn't ask for identity. 2. Buy some bitcoins, use one of the many tumbler services to wash them, and pay for the services that way 3. Never manage or otherwise connect to your VM directly. Always use TOR. SSH works great over TOR. 4. Don't buy shit off your own website and have it shipped to your damn house.
Just finished reading the affidavit from the FBI. This guy was a dumbass. He used a gmail account to pay for the VPS service and used his home internet connection to connect to the gmail account. He used his own, hotel, and relatives internet connections to connect to the hosting provider without any sort of anonymizing service. The FBI used either an undercover agent or a confidential informant to eventually find the VPS provider. From there, he was quite easy to track. The FBI had been watching the guy for months. The affidavit suggested it was an undercover agent that was hired as a staff member on the website that lead to this case being cracked open.
After SR1.0 got shut down, there were a bunch of forum posts from people who had been fronted large amounts of drugs to sell online. The drugs had been sent out, and then the resulting bitcoins got seized by the Feds. Now they owed very unpleasant people huge amounts of money that they didn't have.
Whether in the drug market or the stock market, trading on margin has its risks.
Chuuch. Preach. Tabernacle.