Silk Road forums
Discussion => Security => Topic started by: aksu on February 18, 2012, 06:54 am
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hey guys, just have a question about drop spots - are you using people's houses/apts who you know? I read somewhere else that it's a bad idea to use fake names and abandoned places for drops. but you're not just pinching packages from someone's doorstep either, I presume. I feel like that would be even dumber.
So what's the deal? how do drops work? it's of particular interest to me since i live with others who may not approve of a roommate using their address in such a way. Would it help (if delivering straight to your place) to have the previous tenant's name?
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Click search and search the forums for the following:
- virtual office
- pigeon holes (or shared accommodation)
- private mail box
I've already posted How-Tos for those ideas.
Other ideas exist as well, like holiday homes.
Often privately owned holiday homes are collected onto websites for organizing bookings. These allow you to work out whether a property is vacated or not for the week. So if you were shipping domestically it should work as long as you do your research. 9/10 the key is under the flowerpot/mat/rock near the door, and Mr Postman is used to seeing many many different faces at this property. This doesn't always work, it depends on the setup.
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I don't see the point in using an empty house or something like that.
They can't get a warrant to your house just because somebody sends you something. If they ask you to sign for a package just say you didn't order anything and don't accept random packages because someone sent you a bomb one time, lol.
If it makes it to your mailbox without an officermailman knocking on your door asking for you to sign it, then you'll be fine. As long as you don't sign it, you're safe.
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I don't see the point in using an empty house or something like that.
They can't get a warrant to your house just because somebody sends you something. If they ask you to sign for a package just say you didn't order anything and don't accept random packages because someone sent you a bomb one time, lol.
If it makes it to your mailbox without an officermailman knocking on your door asking for you to sign it, then you'll be fine. As long as you don't sign it, you're safe.
They do usually try to get you to sign for it, but I know of multiple cases where they did not.
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interesting about the vacation homes lol. seems like you could get into a lot more trouble for breaking into someone's house.
but would work pretty well if you/someone you know owns the place, i'd guess.
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I dont see the worry about signing for stuff, it doesnt prove that you ordered it. I sign for anything that comes and then open it to see what it is, I often forget what I have ordered when I go on ebay after I have had a few beers. Its not a complicated defence and one that would easily stand up in court.
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Try to visualize the outcome of this scenario:
Little old lady gets a box of methcrack needlepills in the mail. The cops, watching through binoculars from the woods across the street, pounce as soon as she opens her mailbox and touches the package. After they toss her in the back of the armored tank, they proceed to get a warrant and rip her couch apart using Rambo knives and bloodhounds. Finding nothing but bibles and blood pressure pills, the cops find themselves publicly humiliated and the subject of several letters to the editor of the local newspaper. When the little old lady says she has no idea why a box of drugs from Foreignplaceistan arrived at her house, the cops figure out that she was a patsy.
Now, do the cops:
A) Give up on the whole drug war thing,
B) Try to convince a jury that the little old lady is the head of a cartel,
C) Attempt to save face by devoting every spare resource and waking moment to tracking down the person who ordered the drugs that got them plastered all over the newspaper under the headline "complete incompetent twits use overfunded department to beat up grannie"
My point here is that cops are barely motivated to hunt you if you are ordering stuff in the mail, but they would be VERY motivated to hunt you if they felt you framed an innocent bystander by using their address and name rather than your own. Either way, they are unlikely to actually succeed, but why risk motivating them?
Besides, it does not look that suspicious for you to open your own mailbox; it looks odd as hell for you to be checking the mail of an abandoned vacation home every day while you wait for your delivery. You DON'T want to use some kind of shipping that has a tracking number, and if you let a package sit in the mailbox for several days you are taking an increased risk that someone else will open it. So you pretty much have to guess that it will arrive over a 3-5 day span and check every day.
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Actually coptcha, the owners of vacation homes are rarely in them...
You can work this out quite easily, since they are being rented out for the majority of the year to strangers.
Strangers, who will think the package belongs to the owner and thus leave it untouched, probably bringing it into the house warm and safe for which you have the key.
And like I said, the key is almost always about the front or back door area. People are fundamentally lazy. You should watch out for CCTV though, that could cook your goose ASAP.
And, should you be 'caught', well, you could easily be a 'cleaner' or 'inspector'. You just need one or two props. And if it's the owner, aha, you got the wrong house today. This is totally feasible, because these houses need to be cleaned between every visit by holidaymakers and are inspected frequently by people who visit thousands of these houses.
As long as you're not stupid enough to start removing items from the house or start living there or something, it's nearly impossible to get a B&E rap. It's not as hard as it sounds, it's literally a 2 minute operation every couple of days for which a timetable is handily posted onto a website.
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Gotta disagree, Pine. That sounds like one of those plans that works great on paper, but not in real life.
For one thing, most people who own vacation houses leave keys with the house's neighbors in case of a maintenance problem or some such thing. Those neighbors may not know who is renting the place at any given time, but they are very likely to know if the owner has a regular cleaning crew. If they notice someone walking in and don't find it suspicious, there is still the chance that at some point they will talk to the owner and say "I see you rented your place last month. How is that going?" If it's a vacation rental property, there is always a chance that someone will actually rent it (imagine your delivery day happening while they are unpacking!)
Look, if it's a vacation house you know, fine. That would be ideal, actually. It means YOU are that neighbor that would notice something amiss and tell (or, not) the owner about it. Other neighbors would know you are the person who checks on the plumbing when there is a cold snap or something, and thus would not think it odd for you to be checking the mail every day for a week. Cool. That situation is great, but practically any other variant on the vacation home/vacant house/abandoned property idea is just way, way more likely to get you noticed than simply sending stuff to your home.
Walking in and out of a place you don't have a legit reason to walk in and out of will get you noticed eventually.
I don't want to be proven right about this. It's never a good thing to see people thrown in jail for victimless crimes combined with the normal human trait of noticing patterns and out-of-place people.
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Well coptcha, I'm ultimately a pragmatist so I'm happy as long as something works. Most dead drop/proxy mailing concepts are highly situation dependent, so there is no real best-fits-all scenario really. But there's always an idea that works, no matter what your situation is.
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Depends what you're ordering, I think.
Take something like coke for an example. IME most buyers are buying grams, maybe balls (3.5g). Well that's a lot of ski, but it's not really a lot of Powder X, if you know what I mean. To wit, a US nickel is 5.0 g. A penny is half that.
Well, think about that. As some of you may know, I tend to write some pretty tl;dr posts when I feel it could help someone (or when it amuses me, lol). Think about what the mass of one of those letters would be if I wrote them down!
Point is that a gram of coke is virtually invisible to something like The Mail System, regardless of country (especially domestically or in other cases where no customs declaration is involved). It's all machines til you get down to the person putting it in the mailbox.
Take that point . . . And then think about this: you are the mail carrier. What do YOU do? What would make YOU suspicious of an envelope? Hell, remove your already-assumed bias - even if you were the most anti-drug person in the world, would one gram of coke shipped from, say, Washington to Virginia even tip your eyebrow if the package wasn't crazily/stupidly illegal? If it were just .. in a flat envelope with a printed label?
Point: in lots of cases a drop box may be unnecessary. Fact of the matter is that if you're a cautious casual user and you order a gram of blow (or whatever) in the mail, get it, then use it, there will be nearly no evidence left to prosecute you on, if anybody even cared. LEOs don't care! Why would they? Seriously - I've posted about this elsewhere, so I've said it before, and I'll say it again: LEOs are people like you and me. They don't give a shit if you buy a gram of ski!
The bottom line is that putting a fake name, getting it sent to a fake address, etc. etc. etc. may be just raising suspicion on something unnecessarily. Because the mail officials and such are busy looking for stuff they SHOULD be looking for, you know?
Just playing devil's advocate, I suppose :) But I like to dissipate paranoia! It's ok to use drops and such, don't get me wrong, but it's a bit of a misgiving, I think, to just be afraid SR is going to get you arrested right away. The number of people who got caught because of SR based on someone else's stupidity (i.e., a vendor's and not their own) is still remarkably small. In fact, I can't think of any viable and verifiable examples offhand.
Be smart, be sane, be safe.
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The number of people who got caught because of SR based on someone else's stupidity (i.e., a vendor's and not their own) is still remarkably small. In fact, I can't think of any viable and verifiable examples offhand.
is there a #?
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The number of people who got caught because of SR based on someone else's stupidity (i.e., a vendor's and not their own) is still remarkably small. In fact, I can't think of any viable and verifiable examples offhand.
is there a #?
I've heard of one and only one. Of course there have been others here who have gotten pinched but I apply the But For principle in this case (i.e., wouldn't have been caught but for SR), and in that case they don't get counted:)
That one case was in Ireland and it's been around the forums for a while. It has to do with a vendor's poor packaging techniques, which I think is an issue all but displaced by time by now.
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Most dead drop/proxy mailing concepts are highly situation dependent, so there is no real best-fits-all scenario really. But there's always an idea that works, no matter what your situation is.
Good point on situation-dependence. I agree. I guess if you find a situation that works, that's all that is really important.
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Believe it or not, I've sent all of my orders to my real house under my real name and have had no trouble or even been asked to sign for anything. Everything just ends up getting plopped into my mailbox real nonchalantly, and I absolutely love it! ;D
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Pine, those searches turn up nothing but random posts that use the word "virtual" or you simply stating to search for x term.. Care to either post a link or talk about it again? Maybe a conglomerate thread of "Pine's awesome teachings"?
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Believe it or not, I've sent all of my orders to my real house under my real name and have had no trouble or even been asked to sign for anything. Everything just ends up getting plopped into my mailbox real nonchalantly, and I absolutely love it! ;D
ROFL @Gary that's exactly the opposite advice than assumed i guess.
as a noob here i better lurk and listen, but let me say that this is an extremely helpful community :)
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Having small amounts sent domestically to your home is most likely fine. Just write "Return to Sender" on it as soon as you receive it, and leave it on top of your fridge for a couple hours. We've never had a Priority package not be delivered, for over 10 years, even with a fake name. I believe it's USPS protocol to deliver a Priority package regardless of the associated name.
Correct me if I am wrong.
And NEVER sign for ANYTHING!
For a real "drop", find a "Mom n' Pop" place, and open a PO box with a fake ID. Track your package carefully to notice any delay's at customs (if required), and let any package sit for a few weeks to "cool down". This should eliminate the chance of any ongoing 'real world' stake-outs, depending of course, on the amounts you are expecting. They simply don't have the budget or manpower to stake-out relatively "small" amounts of things. "Small" being, as a rule, anything below 250 grams.
Then have a friend open a completely legal box to check regularly for any new camera's, ect that might get installed to investigate you.
And there are ways to safely grab your package after a few weeks. Well paid friends of a different gender help a lot.
But there are ways to be informed beforehand not to touch the package anyways if it has been compromised. Besides recon, you could use a metal detector to check for tracking beacons, and look into the transmitter technology some are developing on the forum. These will potentially alert you if your package has been opened at customs.
That's our advice. :)
Peace
The Flipside Crew