Silk Road forums
Discussion => Newbie discussion => Topic started by: MoonGoddess on January 29, 2013, 10:59 am
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I have been on SR for over a month now, not long, but I have done massive reading. Something happened here a while back that spooked me, caused big RED flags and caused me to change everything- I deleted my account, got a new tormail address, changed all names,pins and passwords. You all MUST be AWARE that surely LE has infiltrated now that this site has been so well publized. This is what happened: For a few weeks now I had been posting regular, mostly questions about Bitcoins and gpg, etc, about 25+ posts now. I was finally able to nail it and posted my public key and signature successfully. I had asked a Hero member via PM a simple question, he kindly replied. The in a span of the next 12 minutes, 3 minutes in between, I suddenly recieved detailed information in 4 private messages on how to do encrypting, blah blah blah. The REALLY strange thing was that I never solicited this stranger for help, never heard of them before then and these came out of the blue. They went as far as to verify my signature and offered to practice and help me as much as I needed. Now I went to this persons profile and learned they had only joined 3 days before, had only posted 7 times (and 4 to me) and they knew of Full and Hero members, Global Moderators, they named Scout,Nightcrawler and Astor and our administrator, DPR. Something else that struck me was that they were WAY too polished, WAY WAY too helpful, and too slick. Another odd thing that happened- I had a couple PM's out, to 2 people who still belong and they both PM's disappeared from my sent box. Now I am not a paranoid person, I am retired from the HealthCare field, therefore I have spent lots of time with patients and families, so I can read people pretty well and have spot on intuition. MY whole point is: newcomers and oldtimers too must be very discerning with who they choose to converse with- the enemy is all around. This is certainly NOT meant to scare anyone, just to share with you what happened and to be extra extra careful especially with personal info, no real name, no real email address, no location,(which I never did) be anonymous as possible to stay safe and protect others- WE are responsible. Any experiences others might share? This did freak me out a little since I am just now getting set up to make my first small purchase. Thoughts or opinions? and damn, I lost almost 30 posts! >:(
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Maybe the seller has a seperate account for dealing with customers' requests?
I dunno, you could be right about LE being in here in some form, but like you say, use your common sense and don't give out any personal info. IF they were in here, I think phishing would be their primary method of intelligence gathering.
Deal with the vendor only, ignore all other communications, and always use PGP.
That is all we can do.
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Unless you are buying Kilos, surely LE won't be interested in you anyway.
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1. Did your other username similarly identify you as female? There are about 8 of us here. Boys send us helpful PMs. That's what boys do. ::)
2. Do you realise that PMs are not saved to your sent items unless you specifically tell it to?
3. Many people get new accounts for one reason or another. He may been here a lot longer than his 'join date' would suggest.
You may be right, but I smell a whole lot of easily-explained stuff in your post :)
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thanks for your response. to address the points you made,
1. yes, it did id me as female
2. i forgot about that send feature, which is a really good safety feature
3. I'm sure it was a female, her ID was the name of a flower and she talked about feminine things naming subjects she would practice
gpg with me. (she has it down perfectly as shown by her 4 named examples)
Thank-you for your objective points
It was just a weird feeling. I had posted in the past 3/4 different requests for specific help, and nobody would help, then I suddenly get "help"
out of the blue without asking for it. thanks again, MG
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Hey folks!
It is very good indeed that someone always posts stuff like this. It is needed just as much for beginners as it is for old timers. See it as a kind of checklist, it is often the simplest things that get overlooked. I am confident that there are LE in this forum AND in SR itself. But, as long as you do everything as you are supposed to be doing it, the chances that you will get caught in any way will be minimal if not infinitesimally small.
Entity
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post22
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Boogie men everywhere apparently
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paranoia??
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good post and thanks for looking out.
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keep looking over your shoulder...but remember to stretch
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I have to basically agree with Ozfreelancer... except it was a woman messaging you.
I'm guessing the hero you PM'd just switched to an alt... maybe she just didn't want to lose your messages within a bunch of buyers messages or something. Who knows.
Doubt LE would be teaching you how to avoid them. But I'm sure they're here, at the very least watching.
Would I delete my accounts because somebody PM's me unsolicited, no. Too much fear, could be as bad and detrimental, as not enough.
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fuck the man
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defiantly easy to spot the ones that are posting all the newb threads ive seen a few and i am fairly new here. think twice before you go and send stuff and learn from people and also look at there profile
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I definitely agree that Le are everywhere, It does not take a fucking genius to access SR.
They have people that it is their job to catch SR members and vendors.
If you encrypt everything and use no real info, Plus at the same time your not ordering major amounts, You should be ok, Not a guarantee it never is, But if you were the LE intelligence, and there's a site which you cant fully infiltrate or shut down, what would you do?
I certainly would make as many fake members as i could and get them recognized as part of the community, The whole anonymity thing helps that go a mile, Then at the same time i would have my team phishing and monitoring the TOR endnodes or output nodes, They probably will betaking down people that dont encrypt their messages and make things easier for them first Or the people that buy major amounts of shit for re-sale. If your buying an ounce of weed for personal it's not selling smack to kids at a school gate. Big difference, They are going to target the people slacking first, The people that think , Nah il be fine, i cant wait to order those cool new Shrooms, It's a shame i don't know PGP yet fuck it il just make 1 small order, That could be you linked to that SR account forever, digitally there would be a trail and everything. Not a good idea.
Basically yea watch, Be paranoid it helps, dont start getting best friends with people you talk to . this isn't an MMORPG.
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I definitely agree that Le are everywhere, It does not take a fucking genius to access SR.
They have people that it is their job to catch SR members and vendors.
If you encrypt everything and use no real info, Plus at the same time your not ordering major amounts, You should be ok, Not a guarantee it never is, But if you were the LE intelligence, and there's a site which you cant fully infiltrate or shut down, what would you do?
I certainly would make as many fake members as i could and get them recognized as part of the community, The whole anonymity thing helps that go a mile, Then at the same time i would have my team phishing and monitoring the TOR endnodes or output nodes, They probably will betaking down people that dont encrypt their messages and make things easier for them first Or the people that buy major amounts of shit for re-sale. If your buying an ounce of weed for personal it's not selling smack to kids at a school gate. Big difference, They are going to target the people slacking first, The people that think , Nah il be fine, i cant wait to order those cool new Shrooms, It's a shame i don't know PGP yet fuck it il just make 1 small order, That could be you linked to that SR account forever, digitally there would be a trail and everything. Not a good idea.
Basically yea watch, Be paranoid it helps, dont start getting best friends with people you talk to . this isn't an MMORPG.
+1 couldnt say it better watch and cover your trail.. you have all the tools to do so so do it and be safe
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I have been on SR for over a month now, not long, but I have done massive reading. Something happened here a while back that spooked me, caused big RED flags and caused me to change everything- I deleted my account, got a new tormail address, changed all names,pins and passwords. You all MUST be AWARE that surely LE has infiltrated now that this site has been so well publized. This is what happened: For a few weeks now I had been posting regular, mostly questions about Bitcoins and gpg, etc, about 25+ posts now. I was finally able to nail it and posted my public key and signature successfully. I had asked a Hero member via PM a simple question, he kindly replied. The in a span of the next 12 minutes, 3 minutes in between, I suddenly recieved detailed information in 4 private messages on how to do encrypting, blah blah blah. The REALLY strange thing was that I never solicited this stranger for help, never heard of them before then and these came out of the blue. They went as far as to verify my signature and offered to practice and help me as much as I needed. Now I went to this persons profile and learned they had only joined 3 days before, had only posted 7 times (and 4 to me) and they knew of Full and Hero members, Global Moderators, they named Scout,Nightcrawler and Astor and our administrator, DPR. Something else that struck me was that they were WAY too polished, WAY WAY too helpful, and too slick. Another odd thing that happened- I had a couple PM's out, to 2 people who still belong and they both PM's disappeared from my sent box. Now I am not a paranoid person, I am retired from the HealthCare field, therefore I have spent lots of time with patients and families, so I can read people pretty well and have spot on intuition. MY whole point is: newcomers and oldtimers too must be very discerning with who they choose to converse with- the enemy is all around. This is certainly NOT meant to scare anyone, just to share with you what happened and to be extra extra careful especially with personal info, no real name, no real email address, no location,(which I never did) be anonymous as possible to stay safe and protect others- WE are responsible. Any experiences others might share? This did freak me out a little since I am just now getting set up to make my first small purchase. Thoughts or opinions? and damn, I lost almost 30 posts! >:(
A healthy dose of paranoia is a good thing when navigating a dark net website selling illicit substances, you should treat everyone as if they were LE and never disclose any identifiable information.
It's nice to get cozy and make friends, share stories and help each other out but I would be thinking very carefully about sharing too much info. I'm no tin foil hat wearer either, but I like my liberty.
Best advice is don't get complacent.
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Very well put, Samesame and HeartFire!
I can understand why LE or anyone else for that matter stops people from buying fcked up drugs to sell to kids. But the thing is, most of the time LE choose to bring down smaller guys who buy less dangerous drugs and what not. At least in my country, they are known to be pussies. I can understand the latter part, if your wager is not that great then why risk your life bringing down Hells Angels members? :) They have been known to retaliate on police officers personal homes with letter bombs and shit.
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Just think twice what you're doing. don't go internet if you dont have brains.
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;) Thanks for all the feedback guys, I appreciate it. I wouldn't say I am paranoid, just extra cautious. And I wouldn't be here on SR if I didn't have the faith that they have set up safety nets to use and scads of helpful information to read, let alone all the helpful information from other anarchist fans. I do have another question though. I use GPG4USB and I do have the tutorial by Astor which has been immensely helpful, but I have run into a wall. I can import public keys, export my key, my signature and crypted messages. However, I am not able to decrypt messages. I import the persons public key and put it on my keyring. I have the message pasted on my text/editor board. I then click decrypt and a message comes up saying something to the effect "Decryption failed No Secret Key, No Private Key with ID-------- present in keyring". This makes no sense, what does it mean? What am I doing wrong? thanks, Moon Goddess
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i think you have givin the other member not your real public key you have to right click and hit export and it will give you your public key but make sure nothin is checked that says give with you secret key. this is how it is on GPGtools
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Thx for heads-up.
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Bogeyman is out to get you. More for me. Mmmmmm
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I did export my public key to the editor/text board, then pasted it under "reply" on whatever the most recent newbie post is. If I didn't give them my "real" public key then what did I give them? And I cannot find any thing marked "secret key" or "private Key". Is there an address or link to gpgtools? is it "gpgtools.com? Thank-you very much for your help and time, Moon Goddess. This is so frustrating, it took a couple of days to even figure out how to import public keys and that was with the help of Astors tutorial. Trying to learn this makes me feel so stupid, damn it
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sorry man the gpgtools is for mac users.. use gpg4win.org thats the windows version man. this program is so easy to use from the first time i loged on its simple say import key and export. and ther website has everything to show you how to do it
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I did export my public key to the editor/text board, then pasted it under "reply" on whatever the most recent newbie post is. If I didn't give them my "real" public key then what did I give them? And I cannot find any thing marked "secret key" or "private Key". Is there an address or link to gpgtools? is it "gpgtools.com? Thank-you very much for your help and time, Moon Goddess. This is so frustrating, it took a couple of days to even figure out how to import public keys and that was with the help of Astors tutorial. Trying to learn this makes me feel so stupid, damn it
Hi mate , its a bit of a pain but once you have it you'l never forget. Pgp- like riding a bike .
heres a link that really helped me out, you might have to read a few bits a few times over but guarantee you will get it.
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I would think that the LEO on here would pretty much be strictly federal. Maybe some people from the huge PD's like LA or NY, but mostly I'd assume it's the federal assholes. The local fuzz can't even being to address this site. PGP is awesome once I learned how to do it. Stay safe people. And never forget that this is a life and death battle over personal liberty and freedom, two things the federal government HATES.
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This site is so fucking well known it's insane. 2-3 people the first thing they asked when I sold to em was if I had got it from Silk Road. Police can't really bust people through the main site, but I wouldn't be surprised to see them trying on the forum.
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NEVER think that because you use PGP and tor you are safe, There are ways of hacking tor exitnodes etc and Backtracking Ip's. Im notgetting into it, But trust me , dont attract attention to yourself, it's for your own good.
Haha Of course it's not local LE, do you honestly think that it's Local LE and feds? thats it?
Listen they will have the CIA FBI NSA DEA MI6 and countless other security and intelligence agencies working on it, Fuck the police, These guys really dont fuck around.
entity creature @ i noticed You said that its LE who are targeting local smaller type guys but that's probably because they aren't being as careful as the bigger guys. Do you not think that if they had the choice on who to bust it would be the bigger gangs or dealers? Of course, But they take extra precautions that Charlie your street dealer does not.
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I've helped a handful of people with GPG who just figured out how to make their key-pair and get their public key.
Most of them I sent like 3-4 posts after the original one, before they replied, with fairly lengthy and descriptive PMs on how to use GPG and some of it's intricacies that we need for it's use here (there's lots of GPG stuff we don't need to use for our purposes of encrypting msgs to each other).
I did it cuz ... i'm bored lol, and I just wanted to try to hammer home how important GPG is for some information and give em as detailed but easy to understand and apply to our needs that I can word just cuz i'd like to see them start to use it regularly for the same reason I use it. My own personal security, and it's ease of use.
I had no idea that trying to be so helpful would ever brand me as LE or a person of concern, granted i'm not a few day old member with 7 post's, just strange to read this thread cuz I spent all that time just to try and ensure they used it to encrypt at least their address for their own safety.
I think most of the LE here remains silent and is just collecting information from post's like these. Those that are active are looking pretty much solely at the vendor's or people buying massive quantities of drugs. There's just too many people here and too little resources most LEOs have to target small quantity buyers, they want the big fish/
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i had a similar experience to this when I started
I will purposefully leave out some details so as to not tie myself to any identities other than me.
I was also trying to learn the ins and outs of PGP (which is horrifying when youre in a sea of sharks and already distrusting) when I posted on a thread with my recently created Key.
I was hoping to get a message with a PGP encoded string, but instead got a msg from a kind moderator. They informed me that my post had contained some revealing information as to my online persona so I quickly abandoned ship; thats also how I first was told that LE crawls these forums and SR everyday combing for information on vendors and buyers.
Luckily I was still learning and had done nothing illegal. It was as easy as starting fresh and checking my list 4 times instead of my normal twice.
We sometimes think we cant be stopped or discovered but this ain't recess here people.
on a positive note, love these forum, love the community as well. <3
-Parabolic
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To the original poster of this subject ARE YOU SURE YOUR NOT THE POLICE I mean instead of thanking the person for helping you with the stuff you asked help for your calling them POLICE which sounds loud n clear to me that your trying to take some sort of blame off of yourself in my books your 50 for sure and the reason i've taken time out to reply to you is just so that I can call you an idiot scum police yourself and i'm not even backing no one up it's the truth cos you mentioned it so your talking about yourself whoever reads this think about it logically ok cos i'm pretty sure the original poster of this subject is the police their self WTF someone helps you and you call them police yeah alright LE officer
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good good, careful now boys,
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I also thought the original poster was talking about me. I helped some newbies out with encryption software and sent some messages back and forth. I deleted the last account I was using so the messages I sent with that account would have been deleted in your inbox. Anyway, nobody's out to get anybody unless you are moving a lot of gear.
You just need to be careful to not reveal any personal info. Which isn't too hard. You protect yur name and address and phone. Simple.