Silk Road forums
Discussion => Off topic => Topic started by: gaah on August 19, 2011, 03:40 am
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Police take over Web site to catch online drug buyers
By REID J. EPSTEIN
repstein@journalsentinel.com
Posted: Oct. 13, 2004
When Rhinelander police busted a man on suspicion of possessing cocaine he bought over the Internet, the usual course of action would have been to end the investigation after finding the source of the drugs.
But in a tactic authorities called one of the first of its kind in Wisconsin, federal investigators joined the case. They not only found what they believe was the drug source, but they adopted the accused online drug dealer's persona in order to catch his customers.
The new strategy, called sanctions-based demand reduction, was spearheaded by former Deputy Attorney General Larry D. Thompson, and it has gone into use here in the last six months, said J.B. Van Hollen, the U.S. attorney for the Western District of Wisconsin.
According to the charges against the man authorities identified as the online dealer, Thomaz W. Franzl, 27, of Chicago had a menu of 13 different substances that ranged from common prescription drugs, such as Ritalin and Percocet, to cocaine and methamphetamine.
The Rhinelander man who became an informant after he was arrested used his credit cards to purchase more than $6,000 in cocaine, OxyContin and Ketamine from Franzl between October 2003 and June 2004, according to an affidavit filed in federal court in Madison last month.
"Before, we probably would have just taken Mr. Franzl and closed down the site and not done anything further," Van Hollen said. "We wouldn't have gone down the ladder to figure out who some of his buyers are."
But in this case, the first involving Internet drug sales in the federal court's Western District - roughly the western two-thirds of the state - authorities from the federal Drug Enforcement Administration and the North Central Drug Enforcement Group, a conglomerate of several northern Wisconsin law enforcement agencies, pretended to fill Internet orders.
Prosecuting drug users has been primarily the responsibility of local and state law enforcement agencies, while federal authorities concentrated on kingpins and big-time dealers. But foreign countries that the government has been pressuring to curb their drug exports have responded that the United States is not limiting drug demand, Van Hollen said.
Because Franzl's alleged illegal operation used the Internet, federal prosecutors were able to increase the charges against his suspected customers. On Oct. 6 a federal grand jury in Madison indicted nine of Franzl's would-be customers not only on an attempted drug possession charge, which carries a sentence of up to one year, but also with one count of using the Internet to facilitate the unlawful distribution of a controlled substances. That charge has a maximum four-year sentence.
Mostly professionals
The accused customers were mostly white-collar professionals, according to Tim O'Shea, the federal prosecutor assigned to the case. Authorities said the seven men and two women included a 20-year-old female college student at Ursinus College in Pennsylvania who ordered Ritalin and Adderall; a 26-year-old public relations man in Chicago who ordered Ketamine; and a Glendale man who tried to have cocaine delivered to the house he shares with his parents.
The nine people charged have been ordered to appear in court in Madison but have not been arrested because they are not considered flight risks, O'Shea said.
They are:
Thomas Bronson, 46, of Somerville, Mass.; Steven Cornute, 21, of North Hills, Calif.; Ashley Hans, 20, of Collegeville, Pa.; Matthew Harper, 27, of Nashville, Tenn.; Jonathan Houlihan, 31, of Glendale; Brandon Jenkins, 21, of Scenery Hill, Pa.; Dane Kinchen, 20, of Richmond, Va.; Vince LaConte, 28, of Chicago; and Nicole Sears, 26, of West Sacramento, Calif.
Prosecuting Internet drug dealers' customers, Van Hollen said, sends a signal to others who order drugs on the Web or through the mail thinking it is safer than going into rough neighborhoods to purchase drugs.
No more hiding in offices
"We want to make sure that people out there know that even though they're sitting in their offices, there is a great risk of being found out," Van Hollen said. "We're trying to make sure that the Internet doesn't get used for inappropriate purposes."
But some experts on the drug war say prosecuting small-time drug users such as those ordering from Franzl won't help in the government's effort to wipe out drug sales.
"There's just no evidence at all that the government is having any significant impact on the drug market," said Tim Lynch, the director of the Cato Institute's Project on Criminal Justice. ". . . For this particular operation, it's not going to have much impact beyond those handful of customers. There's plenty more where they came from."
Lynch said that publicizing drug busts such as those of Franzl and the Internet customers might deter others from making similar purchases now, but it won't make a difference in the long run.
"If they can generate some media coverage of this operation, the idea behind it is they'll get people to think twice before purchasing things online," he said. "It might have some very short-term impact, but overall, I don't see it having any sort of an impact in the black market in narcotics."
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Sounds like he was using greendot. This is why we use bitcoin people.
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Let's not delude ourselves into thinking that Bitcoin is truly anonymous.
http://arxiv.org/abs/1107.4524
Bottom line: I would never do something massively illegal - like pay hackers to hack into some government agency, or buy a nuke, etc... - and expect bitcoins to keep me anonymous.
Really, the reason this guy got busted was because the cops in his state were looking to bust users. Thankfully, most states could care less about small time buyers. It's the dealers they are after.
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With blind exchanges it is truly anonymous.
That analysis is funny because in the end they never actually traced anything. So they are still anonymous. :)
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Police take over Web site to catch online drug buyers
By REID J. EPSTEIN
repstein@journalsentinel.com
Posted: Oct. 13, 2004
When Rhinelander police busted a man on suspicion of possessing cocaine he bought over the Internet, the usual course of action would have been to end the investigation after finding the source of the drugs.
But in a tactic authorities called one of the first of its kind in Wisconsin, federal investigators joined the case. They not only found what they believe was the drug source, but they adopted the accused online drug dealer's persona in order to catch his customers.
The new strategy, called sanctions-based demand reduction, was spearheaded by former Deputy Attorney General Larry D. Thompson, and it has gone into use here in the last six months, said J.B. Van Hollen, the U.S. attorney for the Western District of Wisconsin.
According to the charges against the man authorities identified as the online dealer, Thomaz W. Franzl, 27, of Chicago had a menu of 13 different substances that ranged from common prescription drugs, such as Ritalin and Percocet, to cocaine and methamphetamine.
The Rhinelander man who became an informant after he was arrested used his credit cards to purchase more than $6,000 in cocaine, OxyContin and Ketamine from Franzl between October 2003 and June 2004, according to an affidavit filed in federal court in Madison last month.
"Before, we probably would have just taken Mr. Franzl and closed down the site and not done anything further," Van Hollen said. "We wouldn't have gone down the ladder to figure out who some of his buyers are."
But in this case, the first involving Internet drug sales in the federal court's Western District - roughly the western two-thirds of the state - authorities from the federal Drug Enforcement Administration and the North Central Drug Enforcement Group, a conglomerate of several northern Wisconsin law enforcement agencies, pretended to fill Internet orders.
Prosecuting drug users has been primarily the responsibility of local and state law enforcement agencies, while federal authorities concentrated on kingpins and big-time dealers. But foreign countries that the government has been pressuring to curb their drug exports have responded that the United States is not limiting drug demand, Van Hollen said.
Because Franzl's alleged illegal operation used the Internet, federal prosecutors were able to increase the charges against his suspected customers. On Oct. 6 a federal grand jury in Madison indicted nine of Franzl's would-be customers not only on an attempted drug possession charge, which carries a sentence of up to one year, but also with one count of using the Internet to facilitate the unlawful distribution of a controlled substances. That charge has a maximum four-year sentence.
Mostly professionals
The accused customers were mostly white-collar professionals, according to Tim O'Shea, the federal prosecutor assigned to the case. Authorities said the seven men and two women included a 20-year-old female college student at Ursinus College in Pennsylvania who ordered Ritalin and Adderall; a 26-year-old public relations man in Chicago who ordered Ketamine; and a Glendale man who tried to have cocaine delivered to the house he shares with his parents.
The nine people charged have been ordered to appear in court in Madison but have not been arrested because they are not considered flight risks, O'Shea said.
They are:
Thomas Bronson, 46, of Somerville, Mass.; Steven Cornute, 21, of North Hills, Calif.; Ashley Hans, 20, of Collegeville, Pa.; Matthew Harper, 27, of Nashville, Tenn.; Jonathan Houlihan, 31, of Glendale; Brandon Jenkins, 21, of Scenery Hill, Pa.; Dane Kinchen, 20, of Richmond, Va.; Vince LaConte, 28, of Chicago; and Nicole Sears, 26, of West Sacramento, Calif.
Prosecuting Internet drug dealers' customers, Van Hollen said, sends a signal to others who order drugs on the Web or through the mail thinking it is safer than going into rough neighborhoods to purchase drugs.
No more hiding in offices
"We want to make sure that people out there know that even though they're sitting in their offices, there is a great risk of being found out," Van Hollen said. "We're trying to make sure that the Internet doesn't get used for inappropriate purposes."
But some experts on the drug war say prosecuting small-time drug users such as those ordering from Franzl won't help in the government's effort to wipe out drug sales.
"There's just no evidence at all that the government is having any significant impact on the drug market," said Tim Lynch, the director of the Cato Institute's Project on Criminal Justice. ". . . For this particular operation, it's not going to have much impact beyond those handful of customers. There's plenty more where they came from."
Lynch said that publicizing drug busts such as those of Franzl and the Internet customers might deter others from making similar purchases now, but it won't make a difference in the long run.
"If they can generate some media coverage of this operation, the idea behind it is they'll get people to think twice before purchasing things online," he said. "It might have some very short-term impact, but overall, I don't see it having any sort of an impact in the black market in narcotics."
at the end they were still anonymous, and cryptography plus Tor and tumblers didn't exist then.
today we use bitcoins, we use teh technology. your argument is invalid.
B
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Everything leaves a trail of some sort...
The bitcoin system itself leaves a massive trail, because the whole network sees where your bitcoins go. It has to, in order to confirm the transaction. And if you generate 3,4, even 10 addresses... it's easy to link up that they are all from one person. Really, it all goes into a block chain database that shows all the confirmations that have happened.
So once you see the transactions and can figure out that 3 or more addresses go to just one person, a little more digging will get you the identity you're looking for.
A Dutch study actually found...
"Anonymity is not a prominent design goal of Bitcoin. However, Bitcoin is often referred to as being anonymous. We have performed a passive analysis of anonymity in the Bitcoin system using publicly available data and tools from network analysis. The results show that the actions of many users are far from anonymous. We note that several centralized services, e.g. exchanges, mixers and wallet services, have access to even more information should they wish to piece together users' activity. We also point out that an active analysis, using say marked Bitcoins and collaborating users, could reveal even more details. The technical details are contained in a preprint on arXiv. We welcome any feedback or corrections regarding the paper."
Even one of the bitcoin developers, Jeff Garzik, says that "all bitcoin transactions are recorded in a public log".
There are ways to make your bitcoin transactions more anonymous, but they require a lot more work than just using bitcoins alone. You have to disassociate yourself from your bitcoin identities, never expose your private key in any public place, and you have to make sure that getting the bitcoins themselves doesn't leave a trace back to you somehow (credit card, check, even a bank deposit). And always stay encrypted.
Still, at the end of the day, if you are doing small time stuff... this is a lot of work for LEO to do in order to trace you. So I would stick to the small stuff. But if you're buying and selling nukes, I bet LEO will eventually find you.
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I've said this before: Silk Road should stop keeping a record of our transactions and the address we send our money to.
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I've said this before: Silk Road should stop keeping a record of our transactions and the address we send our money to.
SR just record a Transaction ID and how many coins were exchanged.
BC keeps it own record.
SR records have been very helpful - how else am I supposed to know how much the purchase was for? Esp. if shipping internationally.
And if you were in a position where that evidence was in question you would all ready be in way more trouble.
Peace,
DigtialAlch
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Just use bitcoin the right way
- ensure the network is strong and independent
- use it over TOR and make sure you use tor right (bridges and hardened software)
- mix well, i.e. don't let bitcoins be linked to funds that are linked to you.
and it's good enough for selling kilos of most drugs.
I wouldn't want to buy a nuke, still, because I mean... the NSA can probably do TEMPEST attacks and shit, where you wouldn't want to try to protect yourself with bitcoins at all but rather with some hundred guys with assault rifles, lol.
love, M
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All good things must come to an end. SR will be no different. It may take a few Months or years but LE will eventually do something and cripple or shut down this place. I'm enjoying the ride until then. Just make sure you are taking precautions to stay truly anonymous so you arnt part of a sting. PGP is your friend etc.. If scammers can compromise accounts FBI\DEA can too. They got people from anon\lulsec who are much better at security than most of us..
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I do not think that there will be serious efforts to close down SR by LE. The impact of this side, compared to the street drug business does not justify the resource needed to be spent to take this side down. Also, drugs are not stigmatized like CP so the general public does not care about us, so there is no real pressure on LE to take action.
Nonetheless, they are watching this site for sure!
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I do not think that there will be serious efforts to close down SR by LE. The impact of this side, compared to the street drug business does not justify the resource needed to be spent to take this side down. Also, drugs are not stigmatized like CP so the general public does not care about us, so there is no real pressure on LE to take action.
Nonetheless, they are watching this site for sure!
Sure it may getting time at any time but I agree with streetpharmacy.
Also who's to say there aren't servers waiting to replace SR as soon as it's shutdown...:D
nomad bloodbath
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I do not think that there will be serious efforts to close down SR by LE. The impact of this side, compared to the street drug business does not justify the resource needed to be spent to take this side down. Also, drugs are not stigmatized like CP so the general public does not care about us, so there is no real pressure on LE to take action.
Nonetheless, they are watching this site for sure!
If we start seeing shit about drugs being sold on webistes we have reason to fear (as the DEA may decide they could get more funding by creating a scare related to this site). But outside of that were good. Too international, too small-scale.
Peace,
DigitalAlch
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yeah i think what we need to keep in mind is, while no we dont appear to be in any immediate L.E. trouble, police certainly do not always do things because it is "logical" or "for the good of the public". thusly, we cannot expect s.r. to be treated rationally as it is: a relatively small, clean operation happening amidst (and really as an intelligent response to) some pretty horrible street activity. who was that guy um, jared loughner? or something? he shot the random politician and they spun the incident to attack the zeitgeist (like it or not) documentary because some friend briefly mentioned jared liked it, AND used it to reopen the topic for gun control legislation. when the london riots that just happened occured, they spun it to try to pass an urgent law that would disallow blackberry's private messaging system. since cops cant access the texts, they had no way of spying and stopping the london riots (cuz they all used blackberrys??). anyway, my point is, all it will take is ONE person who does something horrible, and then they find "silk road rulz" in his binder, and this fucking site will be responsible for.... fuckin... the murder of the olsen twins, or whatever. s.r. as a concept is a beautiful genius, and also the perfect patsy. we should all keep that in mind ALL the time. peacenlove ~smod
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The day I see CP images being offered for trade or sale here, is the last day here for me! Sorry folks, but I ain't down with that shit!
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The day I see CP images being offered for trade or sale here, is the last day here for me! Sorry folks, but I ain't down with that shit!
I agree. I would not want to be apart of anything like that, and hopefully everyone else feels the same so that that kind of behaviour would not be tolerated.
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yes CP sellers should be ratted out to LE so they can be raped in prison. only thing lower than slavery is child slavery.
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Wait... the point of the article seems to have been missed:
The cops waited until they busted one vendor on the site, then continued taking orders before busting a bunch of his customers.
TOR & Bitcoin aren't part of it once you give your address to someone. Even with the plausable deniability that it provides, posession is 9/10th of the law... they wait until you have it in your hands, then bust you... that's all the evidence they need.
I'd suspect that if one of the vendors on SR gets popped, that the Feds would definitely do something like this, if nothing more than to go back to the senator with some good numbers on what's been done.
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Wait... the point of the article seems to have been missed:
The cops waited until they busted one vendor on the site, then continued taking orders before busting a bunch of his customers.
TOR & Bitcoin aren't part of it once you give your address to someone. Even with the plausable deniability that it provides, posession is 9/10th of the law... they wait until you have it in your hands, then bust you... that's all the evidence they need.
I'd suspect that if one of the vendors on SR gets popped, that the Feds would definitely do something like this, if nothing more than to go back to the senator with some good numbers on what's been done.
You are right and even with encryption, the seller would probably give up his password for some time off his sentence.
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There is no need to concern about LE trying something against us, we are 2 small, 2 worldwide, 2 expensive to close. But i still vote for an SR hacker army, just in case.
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There are ways to make your bitcoin transactions more anonymous, but they require a lot more work than just using bitcoins alone. You have to disassociate yourself from your bitcoin identities, never expose your private key in any public place, and you have to make sure that getting the bitcoins themselves doesn't leave a trace back to you somehow (credit card, check, even a bank deposit). And always stay encrypted.
Still, at the end of the day, if you are doing small time stuff... this is a lot of work for LEO to do in order to trace you. So I would stick to the small stuff. But if you're buying and selling nukes, I bet LEO will eventually find you.
I've been wondering about this... I get all of my bitcoins off of Silk Road. First time I purchased them and sent the seller bills in the mail. After that I just use bitcoins I get from sales. Does this give me any anonymity or can the btc still be traced to me somehow?
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yes CP sellers should be ratted out to LE so they can be raped in prison. only thing lower than slavery is child slavery.
Uh, no. Not ratted out. Just simply removed. I hope the mods are active enough to quickly identify/locate such material and neutralize the seller and his or her listings. Ratting them out puts the entire community in danger; see below.
Wait... the point of the article seems to have been missed:
The cops waited until they busted one vendor on the site, then continued taking orders before busting a bunch of his customers.
TOR & Bitcoin aren't part of it once you give your address to someone. Even with the plausable deniability that it provides, posession is 9/10th of the law... they wait until you have it in your hands, then bust you... that's all the evidence they need.
I'd suspect that if one of the vendors on SR gets popped, that the Feds would definitely do something like this, if nothing more than to go back to the senator with some good numbers on what's been done.
You are right and even with encryption, the seller would probably give up his password for some time off his sentence.
So true.
There is no need to concern about LE trying something against us, we are 2 small, 2 worldwide, 2 expensive to close. But i still vote for an SR hacker army, just in case.
I think you are forgetting that government is very very frequently irrational. They would spend millions, billions, or trillions on a whim! Hmmm... one example is the War on Drugs which is being openly flamed as a failure; yet the war rages on.
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This argument of the potential "busts" LE will/or are trying to make on SR continues to humor me.
I'm not a lawyer, but come on. First, if they "caught" a seller, and retrieved mailing addresses of buyers off of here, they would then have to prove, beyond reasonable doubt, that indeed, those people were the very same person doing the buying. How do you prove that? Hopefully the BTC trace alone would go through multiple hoops, with so much "doubt" or intangibility, along the way.
How do you prove that on Tor, which keeps no trace of your visits, no caches, no deleted histories, nada, that you are tied to even ONE username? Unless you're stupid, and you use it on other, non-Tor sites.
Further, could not someone not easily argue that the supposed buyer's name/address was used without his/her permission? Or for vengeful (child custody, hate-crime) type reasons? Identity theft?! It's a bitch these days.
As someone just posted, possession is 9/10 of the law. Don't be stupid. Don't order kilos or "bulk" weight off this place and store it at the address you use. I actually read that the other day. Someone wanting to order in "bulk". And posted it in the forum. Don't be stupid. Sorry, but if you want to be a seller and get your bulk weight, do it on the streets, and make sure it's quality, and THEN bring it here. lol.
If you are buying personal amounts, by the time you could/would ever be arrested, where's the illicit product you ordered? Hopefully, ingested and you don't have heeps of it sitting around) If they can barely convict a murderer without a body, how the FUCK do you think they're going to bust you for ordering a gram of anything. Shit, look at OJ!
Selling on the other hand. That's a different story altogether; inherently more risks, more needed precautions, and needed securities. So, I'll leave that to the sellers. :)
Thanks for flying our friendly skies.
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I think this hole Discussion is a little "USA" Dominated ^-^
im not scared by any "3 letter group" but by local agencys.
All i want to say with this is, there is "threads" besides the
3LetterGroups on a more international level.
Even with the fancy USA laws since 9/11 providing suffisticated
evidence is pretty hard.
Ofc if someone manages to get busted while opening his sr package
and is logged into sr while having his pg on a non encrypted partition
and so on and so forth it might be easy case.
But for anyone with half a brain, that situation wont be the case.
There is plenty more "easy fish to catch" out there.
If the Police could take down 5-10 real live Dealers
in the local community in the time it takes them to somehow
trace a "small scale vendor" that might just end up beeing stated
in a country where they dotn have an durestiction anyway i would highly
estimate that the guys who manage the money would want
more solid shit done ( This is speakign for drugs ).
There is enoth Stupid ppl in the interwebs who sell drugs
on non tor sites and think using ucash and havign a ".to" adress is
sufficiant security .) the more these thigns pop up the mroe security i see for SR.
Illegal VS Legal Transaactions Ratio could also play a role.
The more you increase the Legal transactions for random stuff
that you could as well sell on ebay the less it looks
purely for illegal content.
In the End i think SR will be able to keep a semi low profile
by sticking to its rules, NO CP and so on.
Weapons is a thing thas harder to judge,
as most Countrys wont give a shit if SR has
some hunting rifles, some lwo caliber handguns,
commoun ammunition, etc.
BUT if you start Selling Assault Rifles, internationally Banned ammuniton types,
high caliber maschne guns, REAL military grade hardware equickment, etc,
a lot of the 3LetterGroups as well as other Countrys would put a lot
more Fokus on SR.
tw
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With blind exchanges it is truly anonymous.
That analysis is funny because in the end they never actually traced anything. So they are still anonymous. :)
bing!