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Bitcoin Transactions Lead To Arrest of Major Drug Dealer (techspot.com)
"Drug dealer caught because of BitCoin usage," writes Slashdot reader DogDude. TechSpot reports:
38-year-old French national Gal Vallerius stands accused of acting as an administrator, senior moderator, and vendor for dark web marketplace Dream Market, where visitors can purchase anything from heroin to stolen financial data. Upon arriving at Atlanta international airport on August 31, Vallerius was arrested and his laptop searched. U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration agents allegedly discovered $500,000 of Bitcoin and Bitcoin cash on the computer, as well a Tor installation and a PGP encryption key for someone called OxyMonster...
In addition to his role with the site, agents had identified OxyMonster as a major seller of Oxycontin and crystal meth. "OxyMonster's vendor profile featured listings for Schedule II controlled substances Oxycontin and Ritalin," testified DEA agent Austin Love. "His profile listed 60 prior sales and five-star reviews from buyers. In addition, his profile stated that he ships from France to anywhere in Europe." Investigators discovered OxyMonster's real identity by tracing outgoing Bitcoin transactions from his tip jar to wallets registered to Vallerius. Agents then checked his Twitter and Instagram accounts, where they found many writing similarities, including regular use of quotation marks, double exclamation marks, and the word "cheers," as well as intermittent French posts. The evidence led to a warrant being issued for Vallerius' arrest.
U.S. investigators had been monitoring the site for nearly two years, but got their break when Vallerius flew to the U.S. for a beard-growing competition in Austin, Texas. He now faces a life sentence for conspiracy to distribute controlled substances.
In addition to his role with the site, agents had identified OxyMonster as a major seller of Oxycontin and crystal meth. "OxyMonster's vendor profile featured listings for Schedule II controlled substances Oxycontin and Ritalin," testified DEA agent Austin Love. "His profile listed 60 prior sales and five-star reviews from buyers. In addition, his profile stated that he ships from France to anywhere in Europe." Investigators discovered OxyMonster's real identity by tracing outgoing Bitcoin transactions from his tip jar to wallets registered to Vallerius. Agents then checked his Twitter and Instagram accounts, where they found many writing similarities, including regular use of quotation marks, double exclamation marks, and the word "cheers," as well as intermittent French posts. The evidence led to a warrant being issued for Vallerius' arrest.
U.S. investigators had been monitoring the site for nearly two years, but got their break when Vallerius flew to the U.S. for a beard-growing competition in Austin, Texas. He now faces a life sentence for conspiracy to distribute controlled substances.
But blockclouds are androgynous and so this breaks the fifth amendment!
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
This was the DEA's greatest sting yet! Would he have won!? We'll never know!
Bitcoin is like a filter for this type of stupidity.
Surely the War On Drugs has been won now right??? Or we're at least really close??
What, no?? But how can that be! All other drug dealers must have seen the life sentence and were immediately deterred, no?
Look, drugs like oxycodone/heroin/opiates and cocaine are extremely dangerous and can have devastating consequences when they're abused. Nobody is denying that. But they can't be forcibly eradicated. Given that, drug policy should seek to *minimize* the harm these drugs cause; but prohibition instead *maximizes* it.
To repeat what I said last time this came up,
The real problem is our inability accept facts and logic. Eliminating drug abuse by forcefully stopping it wasn't an entirely unreasonable thing to try, especially back then when the issue wasn't well studied. But it's 100 years now since the first drug prohibition, and >40 of the modern War on Drugs. It has been demonstrated beyond any doubt that no matter how harsh the penalties, even the death penalty for drugs some countries have, prohibition does not work. Anybody can get any drug they want, even in maximum security prisons. Our 4th Amendment rights are nearly dead largely because of this. Loads of other rights are seriously damaged. Police becoming heavily armed soldiers with us as the enemy are a consequence of this. You might be able to justify all that, and the millions upon millions of lives ruined, and the hundreds and hundreds of billions of dollars spent, if it was eliminating or seriously reducing the harm drugs cause to society... but it unequivocally is not.
Drugs like cocaine, heroin, and meth have horrific consequences when they're abused; to the user, to their family, and to society. Since eliminating them is absolutely never gonna happen, we should instead pick the policy that minimizes the harm caused. Most people are simply incapable of accepting that criminal prohibition instead takes these very harmful substances, and increases their harm by orders of magnitude, and strips everyone of their civil rights.
If you want to:
-Minimize the number of addicts,
-Minimize the number of ODs,
-Minimize acquisitive crime (property crime to raise money),
-Minimize violent crimes,
-Maximize opportunities for people with abuse issues to get help,
Then you have to provide tightly regulated, but legal, access, to all drugs. There's been extensive studies on this, it's not some random idea, it's a thoroughly studied and validated fact. Use does not increase. Portugal decriminalized all drugs for personal use; use went down. Turns out there's not loads of people saying 'gee, I sure wish heroin wasn't illegal, I'd try it otherwise'; something compounded by the fact the people most likely to develop an abuse issue are the least likely to be deterred by legality. All of the money currently spent on prohibition would instead go to education, prevention, and treatment- every dollar spent on that reduces drug abuse more than a dollar spent on prohibition. The money taken away from violent criminal organizations would completely cripple them. There'd be more cooperation with police who weren't constantly breaking down doors and shooting dogs, or sexually assaulting people on the side of the road with cavity searches (seriously, google roadside cavity search). There'd be less harassment when police couldn't bump their numbers with petty drug crimes.
It's a hard fact to swallow, because you see the damage drugs can do, and desperately want that to never happen. But since that's impossible, you have to instead mitigate. However bad you think a given drug is, prohibition makes it worse. Whenever you say "Well, $x shouldn't be illegal because $y", $y is made worse, not better, by keeping it illegal.
Additionally, Portugal has gone farther down this route than any other country, decriminalizing even cocaine and heroin for personal use. The result? The number of addicts plummeted, and remains far below the rest of Europe. Violent crime went down. Drug usage didn't go up. The NYTimes just covered this.
Because some of his customers were in the USA and he was dumb enough to fly to Texas. Not that he would've likely gotten away, anyhow: selling drugs is illegal on both sides and there are extradition treaties in place.
I suggest taking a class on legal procedure if this is confusing to you. It's not the least bit surprising to me.
Why would anyone who runs a dark web market enter the United States with a laptop? How f'ing amateur is that? He shouldn't have even had a smartphone. Go to an internet cafe or buy a $300 Chromebook when you arrive.
Obviously a Libertarian, motorcycle gang member, or ham radio operator.
or a Linux sysadmin...
I'm a consultant - I convert gibberish into cash-flow.
The least believabe thing about Stargate SG1 is that the government could keep it a secret.
I'm a good cook. I'm a fantastic eater. - Steven Brust
The story sounds like a PSA for what happens if you do drugs.
So here is someone making a boatload of money from a criminal enterprise, but nonetheless decides it would be a good idea to fly to the USA carrying almost as much incriminating evidence as possible. And in a world that has an Internet with every photo app imaginable, he does it so people can look at his beard in person. In the USA.
This is your brain on drugs.
There are coin 'tumbler' services where you send in, for example, 100 BTC, which is then randomly swapped with BTC sent by other users, and then 98 BTC is send to the address you specified. If the tumbler service keeps no records, and isn't being bugged, it's effective.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
That was the first thing that entered my mind. His laptop HD wasn't encrypted?
I read at +2. If your post doesn't reach that level I will not see or respond to it.
This is why more and more darknet marketplaces are accepting Monero. It's like having a mixer built in to the protocol itself. And to make things even better, the Monero blockchain is itself encrypted. Unless you are one of the participants in a transaction, you can't see what address the coins were sent from, who they were sent to, or how much was sent. And they are in the process of integrating with i2p for even better anonymity.
Disclaimer: I hold quite a bit of Monero. But that's because I honestly think it's the best and fastest-growing "privacy cryptocurrency"
Part of the Second American Revolution!
There are a number of countries where trafficking *is* a capital offense, and dozens to hundreds of traffickers are executed every year. It doesn't work; drugs remain readily available and usage rates are no lower than similar countries with lesser penalties. There's a principle in criminal justice, not just limited to drug sentences... any sentence above 20-25 years has no additional deterrent effect, because someones life is effectively over at that point anyway.
If Vallerius is guilty of the charges being made against him, then I have absolutely no problem with due legal process being used to hand down the appropriate due punishment.
However, reading the OP, a question regarding jurisdiction springs to mind. The extract quotes a DEA agent, who says (of Vallerius), "His profile listed 60 prior sales and five-star reviews from buyers. In addition, his profile stated that he ships from France to anywhere in Europe."
I ask this question because I am trying to understand how the Unites States Government believes that it has standing to prosecute in this case? The only logical answer to that question that I can see would be if the transactions conducted on the darknet actually took place on US soil - but even that seems to me to be somewhat of a vague area of international law.
Perhaps another reader can clarify this point for me: if we have three directly involved parties [a buyer, a seller and the platform-running middle-man] in a transaction, plus perhaps the network connections between them, then how would an international court of law decide the location and/or terms under which a case could be brought? Is it the law of the land for the buyer, the seller or the middleman? Does the fact that any identifiable part of an illegal transaction takes place within a nation's jurisdiction give that nation the right to prosecute a case?
I will re-iterate what I said at the beginning of this post: I have no sympathy for anyone involved in selling drugs. But in order for society at large to respect the law, we need to trust the law. We need to see that the law is applied transparently, consistently and fairly. We need to understand both the powers and the limits of the law. Without these things, then as individuals within that society, we are at risk from all sorts of different types of corruption and injustice.
Very interested to know if anyone can clarify this...
That's absolutely why the ruling class wants the War On Drugs. Alcohol and tobacco got a pass because they were the preferred substances of the rich, white, and powerful... while, as you describe, other drugs were preferred by undesirable minorities. Just look at how they justified it... running commercials about how marijuana or cocaine caused nice white girls to lose their minds and start sleeping with black people (something largely viewed as morally repugnant at the time, kind of like how we regard bestiality today).
In the 1980s, you had the same principle play out again. While they couldn't use propaganda as overtly racist, crack was preferred by poor black people, while powder cocaine was preferred by rich white people. So thinly veiled racist propaganda led to requiring 100x as much powder cocaine to trigger the same mandatory prison terms as crack.
But outside of the ruling class, that's not why prohibition is still favored by 80-90%+ of both Republicans and Democrats. Even when you exclude those who benefit financially from the massive police/prison complex, prohibition is still favored by overwhelming majorities.
That's coming from an inability or unwillingness to understand reality. People see the damage these drugs do, and desperately want it to never happen. Hard drugs are *bad*, therefore they must be banned; they're just too dangerous to be legal. That's the end of the story for most people; a fundamental axiom with a strong emotional component. It doesn't matter that everyone can still get them despite civil-rights crushing harsh laws; if it's not working, the only option is to try harder.
From there, people split into two subgroups. It takes an open mind and a significant amount of analysis to realize that prohibition will never work, and trying to enforce it creates a massive amount of harm, including destroying civil rights for *everyone*.
The first subgroup realizes the damage, but doesn't care, because drugs are evil; so punishing addicts instead of helping them is desired, and whatever damage to society arises out of that is just the price that has to be paid to fight evil. These are the sadomoralists... people like Jeff Sessions; a very popular position on the right.
Those people aren't amenable to reason, but fortunately only make up a small percent. The rest of the prohibition supporters mean well, but aren't well informed enough or open minded enough to accept that if they truly want to minimize the harm drugs cause, regulated legal access is required (not decriminalizing; that's a step in the right direction but leaves a whole host of problems as the black market is still in control and money is still spent on police and prisons instead of education, prevention, and treatment).
If that second subgroup woke up, they'd have a loud enough voice to push through changes in the law. It's happening, but very slowly. Marijuana is a promising first step, and more and more there's pushback in other areas. We'll see where the next few decades take us, but it's a near certainty that far future history text books will speak of drug prohibition as a massive human rights abuse, and its supporters no better than those who fought to preserve slavery, deny women the vote, and enforce Jim Crow era segregation- people who masqueraded as championing traditional values or preventing society from falling apart, but were either just sadists or people who didn't comprehend how much damage they were really causing instead of preventing.
He sold at some point to US customers. The thing is, it's his own damn fault that he was caught. He brought a completely unencrypted computer with all the evidence needed to convict his stupid ass to US soil. Methinks he had been partaking of his own stash too often.
Alcohol.
sadly it isn't possible to just let people be as many of the drugs being taken affect MANY others when those people take them, sometimes in life threatening ways.
But that's what's happening now. They *are* taking those drugs, they *are* hurting other people. Prohibition isn't stopping them. And the evidence is clear, taking the money spent on prohibition and instead spending it on education, prevention, and treatment, and not saddling abusers with a criminal record and unemployment, giving them little to lose, and forcing them to spend all their time in a violent black market, will result in *fewer* instances of them 'beat, stab, assault anyone they see with incredible rage'. Prohibition creates the most instances of that happening.
And Portugal also has far less drug addiction than the US and the UK, despite personal use possession of *all* drugs (including cocaine and heroin) being legal.
Iran executes hundreds and hundreds of drug traffickers every year. Even their own authorities admit it hasn't done anything to reduce the drug problem in the country. Malaysia will execute you for as little as 200g of pot; the death penalty is the only permissible sentence for many drug crimes. Drug abuse is rampant.
Are you going to seriously suggest that changing the penalty from a life sentence (current penalty for top traffickers), or 20-25 to life (major traffickers), to the death penalty, would have *any* effect on drug abuse in the US? Especially given the existing evidence that there's no additional deterrent effect beyond 25 years to begin with? The penalties for drugs are already grossly disproportionate to their harm at all levels, and you'd have to increase the penalties on the lowest levels by a *huge* amount to really have an effect. Unfortunately for you we've kinda got this thing here about excessively sadistic punishments. Not to mention the collateral consequences to everybody from laying waste to the rest of the constitution as police power explodes.
This requires that the government recognize bitcoin as being a currency, something most governments arent willing to do.
"His name was James Damore."
Don't apologize, everything you said is correct but reading more than 100 words is a struggle for some people. Remember those things we had in the old days? Some of them had many thousands of words and no pictures. Books! That's what they were called. Give one of those to a young person and they start crying.
With tumblers you exchange dirty money for dirty money - not much of an improvement really - also it can be a honeypot.
Has nobody heard of the world-wide network known as "The Internet"? Why would you take any incriminating data past a border crossing if you can just download it once you are in the country? Using steganography would mean one would have to think ahead, and if you're thinking ahead you wouldn't physically bring your incriminating data past the border anyway. The exception would be authoritarian countries that have the entire country firewalled off, but even in that case it is easier to get around the firewall than it is to bring data past the border.
Enigma
On the other hand neither will copying Portugal.
And you base that on what? A deep abiding belief that one day our prohibitionist policies will magically start working when they haven't for the past 40 years? Other countries do things like heroin maintenance- giving addicts pharmaceutical heroin- it's been a huge success in every country that's tried it. There's every reason to believe these programs would help the situation in the US and no reason to believe they wouldn't. And given the unmitigated disaster that is our current policy, and the complete lack of evidence to suggest doubling down on it would change anything, there's even less of a reason not to pursue it.
Proving once again, as many cops say, most crooks are stupid.
Cops are stupid too, the difference is they get be wrong as many times as they like, whereas the crooks only have to get it wrong once and they are taken out of circulation. So the game is biased in favour of the cops, it has nothing to do with smarts.