Silk Road forums
Discussion => Silk Road discussion => Topic started by: OzFreelancer on January 24, 2013, 09:40 pm
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http://blogs.telegraph.co.uk/technology/willardfoxton2/100008731/crisis-on-the-silk-road-if-you-cant-trust-britains-biggest-online-drug-dealer-who-can-you-trust/
It claims that SR refunded all the early finalisers who lost money to Tony76. Not sure where they got that from...
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I'd never thought Finalizing Early would interest the readers of the Telegraph. :D
And I wasn't aware that
Over the weekend, Britain's biggest seller of marijuana on the illegal but very successful online drug-dealing website Silk Road (SR, to those in the know) seems to have cut and run, disappearing from SR with a huge amount of his customer's money.
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Looks like some one at the Telegraph finalized early haha!
Not a bad read actually.
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Disclosure: We're north of fifty. Not what you 'assume' might be the demographic of an SR user. It makes us smirk when we read all the befuddled commentary that follows this article as the harrumphing 'dinosaurs' my age wrestle with the streets being 'awash' with drugs and, eh! what's this BITCOIN! why 'carnt' the GOVERNMENT DO SOMETHING! More Army... More Police... More Prisons... How can a bunch of ' druggies' get away without paying VAT and on -yawn- and on...
They are the Maginot Line thinkers of the 21st Century they haven't got a clue that they even haven't got a clue!
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Crisis on the Silk Road: If you can't trust Britain's biggest online drug dealer, who can you trust?
By Willard Foxton
Dated today!?!
[A screen grab of the notorious Silk Road website (Opiates main page)]
Over the weekend, Britain's biggest seller of marijuana on the illegal but very successful online drug-dealing website Silk Road (SR, to those in the know) seems to have cut and run, disappearing from SR with a huge amount of his customer's money. Alarm bells were raised when the seller, known for his reliability, began asking for people to buy his product "FE" – Finalising Early.
This process – which bypasses SR's protection mechanisms – releases the buyer's funds from escrow into the seller's hands before they ship anything. Hardened users of the SR website see this as a huge warning sign, but this seller had one of the best track records on the site. The seller seems to have absconded with several weeks' worth of money; certainly, the administrators of the site have suspended his account.
As one user said: "This has played out like a typical cut-and-run scam. SR would not suspend an account without serious reason for concern, so its suggests that something dodgy was going on. I could speculate as to what happened but the simplest explanation is usually right: scam."
Of course, online scammers are nothing new in the world of online drug buying. Last year, a massive scam by the site's biggest heroin dealer left the owners of the site with a six-figure bill in terms of replacing angry buyer's cash – but with their reported profit at $100,000 a month, I'm sure it was painful, but not fatal to them. Still, they did refund the money – SR has developed its reputation by being the most above-board black market in the world, allowing access to stats, allowing users to see, for example, what proportion of buyers' orders that have been refunded. This works both ways: many sellers refuse to do business with anyone with more than zero refunds or with no buying history.
Getting to SR and indeed the rest of the "darknet", as it's known, requires a certain technical nous. However, as Jack Rivlin reported this week in the Telegraph, there are plenty of other sites the less technical can use – household names like Craigslist, eBay and Gumtree. Online drug dealing is becoming bigger and bigger – and the customers are becoming more affluent. One dealer I spoke to when I was investigating this subject in July last year said simply: “They are no trouble. No begging. No stealing. No promises. If the money not in the PayPal account, you don’t send the goods.”
UK law enforcement has no real answer to this kind of drug dealing, carried out across national borders, with no real names to track the dealers down with, no middlemen or small-time clockers to lean on. Local cops think in terms of local dealers; we're sleepwalking into a situation where many forces don't even know it is going on. Organisations like SOCA (soon to be folded into the National Crime Agency) are aware of the capability gap they have, but with budgets being slashed all round, there is no money for the kind of heavy-grade data analysis that would be needed to track people down.
Of course, with more wide-eyed university students buying online instead of taking a trip into a dodgy part of town, there are far more scammers looking to prey on the unwary. Especially when buying harder drugs, or other illegal commodities like firearms, scammers outnumber real sellers probably ten to one, in my experience. Of course, if you lose your money online trying to buy heroin or a pistol, you have to be pretty stupid to call the police.
Perhaps, scammers undermining trust in the big-name, supposedly safe sites like Silk Road is one of the only things stopping online drug dealing from exploding into the mainstream. On the other hand, the professionalism of SR's owners will keep it going for a while. Watch this space.
Read all Willard Foxton's Telegraph Blog posts here
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Alas!
it's only a matter of time before the forces that be move against us
too many people who shouldn't know about sites like this unfortunately do (ime)
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Love the Statists lame attempt at propagandizing against The Road... idiots!
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Out of all the newspaper reports I have read about SR this is the only one that actually admits there is nothing that can be done about the situation rather than blowing a load of hot air sure it would be great if SR had no media attention at all and it was still underground but the fact is its out there if you look at the Daily mails articles in the past they absolutely torture SR saying its evil etc where as this article was a pretty neutral piece of writing.
I think eventually 2 things will happen A the media will just stop reporting it because lets face it no one really cares or B they will go in all guns blazing and try some sort of campaign to shut down the road maybe employ undercover journalists to fuck over vendors.
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Well that article sucked more balls than I thought it was going to.
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Knowing the greed of the uk government I would imagine the lost taxes will be the deciding factor in legalising any drug despite the faux epihany on seeing the light theyl broadcast all over tv. If they knew some future sr was turning over several billion it would suddenly become of interest to the treasury I think.
Who knows im sure mi6 need untraceable funding for black ops and its an open secret that governments around the world have used drugs to fund these ops. Maybe sr has been operated from the start by a rogue tech savvy department of the intelligence services looking to have some funding outside of possible discovery by some future enquiry etc?
Before im karma'd to absolute zero id just like to say im joking I dont seriously believe dpr is a member of the government...
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Would rather read "The Sun", at least I would get to see some boobs. :o
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Refreshing to read a SR article that didn't have such a judgmental narrative. He tried to report what he felt was the truth.
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Not a bad article really.
Many journalists use drugs, and as younger journalists are employed their articles will be more kind towards drug use as they will have friends who use drugs in a responsible manner!
;D
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You crazy Brits. Yu make anything lol classy.
That same article in Canada would say , " website that corrupts children gives money back to buy more drugs ."
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tony selling the story ??
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Well that article sucked more balls than I thought it was going to.
I second this. :D
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Bump