Quote from: throwaway123 on July 23, 2012, 07:01 pmI just got off the phone with another family member. The reason they got busted had absolutely nothing to do with SR or whatever service they were using to mail drugs. They rented a house for the grow-op. The landlord did a routine "check in". The entire house was filled w/ grow rooms. They are pretty fucked. The feds are questioning them on the mailing aspects of the operation, and I doubt they are the type to hold up well, especially my cousin - like I said, she isn't the criminal type at all and doesn't have the mentality most of us do. As far as I can tell, they were only selling online, but could have a few local customers. They were for sure not selling bags, maybe some local weight to family or long time friends. It was the check-in that got them, but they did find multiple addressed packages on scene. I'm guessing something like the landlord was paying their utility bills to be included as part of the rent, and he noticed a huge spike in the electricity bill. The No.1 thing that catches grow-ops is the electricity bill, which is why you are supposed to invest serious energy in examining the physical properties of halogen lamps and so forth to get as much light/heat bang for your buck. There's lots of techniques to lower your electricity bill to below average that the weed grow experts know about more so than myself. The other related thing is that the electricity company itself is paid by the DEA to notice electricity spikes characteristic of a naive grow-op, and could have contacted local police to tell the landlord to check-in.Other possibilities are that a routine heat scan of the city by the local DEA unit discovered a source of heat from the air with a helicopter or by a car with the same apparatus. There is a video called 'How not to get busted' which describes this entire process I'm outlining here, there are ways to defeat such detection mechanisms.Or maybe the landlord is just nosy. That is certainly possible too. You can do funky thing like setting up cameras everywhere, but most grow-ops aren't large enough to justify such things. Anyway, it sucks.