Topic: SilkRoad 2 Taken down by Feds - page 5. (Read 16031 times)

Well the laws (and the sentencing process) in the Netherlands are very different then they are in the US where both Ross and Blake will be tried/sentenced. While they both carry potentially very harsh sentences, it is possible they will be offered plea deals that amount to what will seem like a slap on the wrist when compared to the life sentences they are facing

Haven't heard of anybody being sentenced yet for running an online drug market, guess we will find out end of November/December when they sentence these people http://www.morelaw.com/verdicts/case.asp?n=2:11-cr-01137-DMG&s=CA&d=71855 I'm guessing life sentence, though that Dutch guy can apply to serve his sentence back in the Netherlands, where they will likely immediately release him on parole. The Americans however aren't so lucky in that case.

People are crazy for operating these markets, not worth your whole life in jail. Leave this kind of high level criminality to Russian mafia connected to the Federation Council and bang out some Clojure apps for $120k/yr, run a side business trading coins for an extra few thousand to take a month to sit on the beach in Majorca Spain without having to sleep with one eye open worrying about police crashing your door and dragging you to a dungeon.

None of which is going to matter.  This is federal, and guidelines sentences will be a separate offense for each substance.  Then there's the amount transacted, which will be applied to him regardless of whether he personally had anything to do with it.  Then there's whether it's one of the eight 841(b)(1) substances, and I believe SR2 trafficked in all of them.  Things like cocaine and heroin.

Once drug kingpin kicks in, almost all mitigating factors go out the window.

Just drug kingpin, 20 years minimum to the statutory maximum, life.  Repeat offender, 30 years to life (apparently doesn't apply).  Large operation (e.g., gross $10 million + per year), MINIMUM sentence life.  Killing in furtherance, 20 years to life, and/or the death penalty.  The prosecutors are not playing around with this shit.  They're going for blood.

The guy who ran doxbin posted his logs showing how the Europol/FBI/everybody used a massive DOS attack to move traffic to their nodes which they then used to identify hidden servers. A lot of the 400 sites were actually duplicates, like the doxbin guy who ran a few of them. Many of them were also vendor private sites that "Defcon" had set up for sellers on SR2.0 he sold a shitty template and script that deployed a .onion store.

How would the people behind the tor mailing list know this?

I also don't think they waited until they could determine who was behind each site to take it down, they only conducted an investigation if they had information that would lead them to believe a specific person was behind sites (like a personal email address). They took down many more sites then they made arrests for.

According to tor mailing list it's because those hosts are in countries that Interpol/FBI don't have access to, such as Russia, and because they likely don't have any immediate identifying indicators (like Blake using his personal vanity email to setup and pay for hosting) and because they could be honeypot stings like when the Secret Service ran it's own hacking/fraud forum and lured fools from hackforums.net to it.

Maybe some enterprising Liberians can make an ebola protected hosting service in Monrovia :P

Now I would consider them to all be unsafe. Law enforcement was able to take down more then 400 dark market sites in the span of 24 hours and who knows how or why the remaining dark sites were not taken down

The forums were centralised and played a big part in people both disclosing too much information about themselves and behaving as though other forum users were their personal friends talking in a private room.  A lot of people made themselves far too visible on the forums and undermined some of the anonymity the platform itself was designed to allow them.  

It was kind of scary watching how quickly people were willing to trust others largely on the basis of their forum personas and how willing they were to believe that what regulars posted was the truth - even after they'd been reminded many times that it was inevitable law enforcement was not just watching but likely actively posting on the forums.

A real danger of trying to foster a sense of community around the dark markets is that it makes social engineering relatively easy.  It's much easier to be undercover online than in real life because there's no risk of someone recognising you.  You can live your normal day life and be someone else entirely online with no risk of bumping into an old high school friend or someone you've previously arrested while you're undercover.


Many people believe that DPR2 was StExo - the guy who never shut up about being a major money launderer on the SR1 forums.

The mythology is that there were mechanisms in place for new people to take the reins if people were caught.  Defcon took over when DPR found it "necessary" to disappear (from memory, this happened when the SR forum mods were arrested).  Yet it would have been really stupid to set it up in a way that someone knew who their successors were going to be, as they could obviously disclose that information to law enforcement.

There was a whole lot of stuff going on immediately after the fall of SR1, with vendors and users alike believing they should have some say in who took the reins (which is kind of like your average small drug buyer thinking they should have a say in who heads a Columbian drug syndicate).


You pretty much have to assume that any which are talked about publicly are under active investigation at the moment.  The Europol statement mentioned two which haven't been taken down yet, but which are clearly under investigation.  Any service which says it's totally secure is full of shit because none of them can guarantee that.  Nobody knows at the moment the full extent of the information law enforcement has got from this operation and how many more services it may affect.  New markets will probably spring up overnight as they did when SR1 went down, and they'll sucker in desperate users and run with the money once again.  Don't be in too much of a hurry to find a new dark market right now - see how things shake out over the next few weeks.

Which are the best black market forums into the Deep Web nowadays?

Even if someone has a lot of mitigating factors they must still serve the mandatory minimum sentence. These factors would only be an argument for Blake to serve no more then the minimum, but no to serve less

Do we know the name of the person responsible for SR2? I can't seem to find a credible article with a mentioned name/location/history and most importantly IMO their connection to the original SR.

No previous crimes. (assuming)

No gun on hand. (assuming)

Has proven he actually brings something to society by working on space shit.

In California.

It'll be interesting to see how it works out. 

He just caught a bunch of conspiracy causes (which suck), but do they carry MMS?

The problem with downvoteing in this regard is that people could potentially create a bunch of accounts and downvote their competition out of business

Yeah, there could be some sort of community voting system where listings such as CP get down-voted and eventually removed, though this could obviously be abused. It's definitely going to be interesting to see how decentralised markets will work and how they overcome the obvious problems that will naturally arise.

This is one positive behind using a somewhat centralized illegal marketplace. The marketplace can have some level of morals and some people do not want to participate in a market in which it is easy to sell things that are generally considered to be "uncool"

Well, there's no such thing as moderate censorship. You either control it or not. (not that I approve of CP and murder for hire) or

Both SR1 and SR2 used a p2p marketplace and the only part that was not p2p was the UI and the escrow

The problem with p2p marketplaces is that you won't be able to censor really nasty things like child pornography, murder for hire, and stolen goods and data. This really isn't a problem for society because all of these things can be investigated with regular detective work but does present a PR problem. The good news is you can filter (they are there but not visible based upon your preferences) out these items and we hope many legal items will be available too.

I hope that SR 3.0 will soon be launching with P2P technology.


Well... if you have the connections, then Russia can be the best place to start such a business. 

http://nakamotoinstitute.org/mempool/the-legacy-of-the-dread-pirate-roberts/


this was  a good read for all of those interested in the founder of silk road and just a quick lil article on him and bitcoin in general.... worth reading....