US Government Lurked On Silk Road For Over a Year

angry tapir writes "In order to build a case against the notorious Silk Road underground marketplace, a team of U.S. law enforcement agencies spent well over a year casing the site: buying drugs, exchanging Bitcoins, visiting forums and even posing as a vendor, although they did stop short of selling any illicit goods. From March 2012 until September 2013, Federal agents closely tracked the site, making over 50 drug purchases, according to Jared DerYeghiayan, an agent with the Department of Homeland Security who was part of a special investigation unit looking into the site.

Comments

Go get em...

[wbr1]

Good job boys. Stop those dopers! They would be raping your grandma and selling acid to your 5 year old if we didn't do this! Look how violently they fight over the black market we created!

Now, kindly pay your taxes, drink a case of beast and watch the football game. Thank you!

Who dat on Silk Road

[dotslashdot]

Turns out, the government was just buying and selling to itself the whole time and no one else is actually on Silk Road!

Re:the thing i never understood was

[Anonymous Coward]

The thing i never understood was

how your post didn't end with

Burma shave

And that's just one agency!

[ron_ivi]

Assuming most countries have many law enforcement agences; and there are many countries --- it makes me wonder if most of the traffic on Silk Road was just a bunch of undercover operations trolling each other.

For example, in the US, I could imagine there were buyers from DEA, FBI, some DHS agencies, some DoD agencies, maybe even NYPD (heck, NYPD even has a branch in London, Israel, and Hamburg ) -- and that's just one country. Multiply by a couple hundred countries, and that really might have been a significant fraction of the market.