I was wondering - does anyone have any experience with The Silk Road on the TOR network? Any stories?
I am curious in how it works. Basically a person looking to sell makes a post and people make a payment through bitcoin. The seller then ships to the buyer. My questions are:
How do we know the seller will send? Do we rely on positive feedback? How do you make sure they don’t take the money and run?
Does sending that kind of material through the mail work? Won’t the post office intercept it when they realize the content? In other words…don’t they screen the packages?
The buyer is providing an address…aren’t they afraid to be reported?
This is all in morbid curiosity, not eh, investment purposes.
It’s all over multiple news sources so it’s definitely real. I’ve seen questions on other sites asking if he was the original owner or if he took it over at some point. Also a lot of theories that the person he hired for the hit was the same person he was trying to kill, but that’s all speculation.
Sounds like he got caught red handed with a whole lot of drugs, and I’m sure eventually there will be lots of other charges as they sort it all out.
He used his personal gmail acct for an online posting looking for help getting the site off the ground a few years back. The Feds unraveled it from there.
Copied from a Reddit post in a thread regarding this story:
[QUOTE]
Interesting things from the document so far:
[ul]
[li]Cryptography was really good, and the complaint states that the TOR network makes it “practically impossible” to trace users.[/li][li]The tumbler worked. It “frustrates attempts to track transactions back to the blockchain and makes it practically impossible to trace users.”[/li][li]There were 9 MILLION bitcoins worth of transactions that passed through the system over time.[/li][li]The server was in a foreign country. The report does not say where.[/li][li]There were 957k registered silkroad accounts.[/li][li]146k unique buyer accounts.[/li][li]It’s unstated from when the investigation started, but they received a complete copy of the Silk Road web server on the 23rd of July 2013. This was all done under the Mutual Legal Assistance Treaty, which implies that they had access to current site information up until the point they shut the site down.[/li][li]This included user account and transaction information. It’s unclear whether or not this covers addresses and other sensitive transaction information. **This also apparently covers at least 60 days worth of messages from the period where the site was copied. It seems from the information, PGP messages were probably ok given that the document said PGP makes it practically impossible to trace the users.[/li][li]Silkroad maintained a small staff of admins, it wasn’t just DPR.[/li][li]It is not certain that PGP worked for DPR, they have messages between the staff and DPR from “forensic analysis of the server.” Unless he was not using PGP.[/li][li]DPR solicited murder for hire. Someone was able to obtain thousands of usernames, passwords, and personal info of silkroad users. It is assumed the feds have this, because they speak about the sample messages of names that the hacker sent. As a result, DPR attempted to have him killed. It is not known if the guy ever was indeed killed.[/li][li]The silk road was basically made from the shroomery.com, it was the first place he visited. They traced him by finding his old posts on various forums where he advertised it, not as the owner, just saying “I found this site, what do you think about it?”[/li][li]They caught Ross Ulbricht through simple web sleuthing and a few subpoenas.[/li][li]He did his web administrating from an internet cafe on Laguna Street in San Fransisco.[/li][li]Canada intercepted fake ID’s going to his home. This was used to match with fake ID requests.[/li][li]For all the money he made, he lived in a small apartment with room mates for under 1000 a month.[/li][li]Here is the blockchain transaction for the “hit”: http://blockchain.info/en/tx/4a0a5b6036c0da84c3eb9c2a884b6ad72416d1758470e19fb1d2fa2a145b5601[/li][li]youtube URL: http://www.youtube.com/user/ohyeaross[/li][li]Interview between him and a friend: - YouTube site where he made his first mistake and gave out his email address in PMs with his name. IT pro needed for venture backed bitcoin startup
Kind of dumb to try and mail fake ID’s across the border. If he’d just done what every highschooler in the country does and got a fake ID from someone locally instead of using Silk Road, they probably wouldn’t have gotten him in trouble (granted it sounds like he still would’ve been screwed by using his name in his email address.)
He used his personal email address :smack: not even a pseudonym. I’d at least use Mailinator.com or something…
This is all completely (not) a surprise. But it’s amazing how little effort he put in, and how he expected not to get caught (I assume).
In some ways, the libertarian policies are appealing to me, but I’d never identify myself as such because Jesus Christ can you guys shut up about von Mises and Hayek and Rand? And tried to get DHS traffic on “someone’s” website!
Basically, I would not be surprised if there was a spam post on SDMB awhile back by some guy who “just discovered” Silk Road. If the mods didn’t obliterate it.
Silk Road was a “secret” website not accessible except through a special browser (TOR) that keeps its users anonymous. You sign in through that and go browsing for what you want. I actually checked it out once out of curiosity but didn’t try to buy anything. It was basically like an Amazon for illicit stuff. You could browse various vendors of pot, heroin, prescription drugs, really anything you can think of. You have to use Bitcoins to pay, and names/mailing addresses are sent in some kind of encryption format that’s hard to crack. From what I’ve heard, it was an easy and safe way to buy drugs.
ETA: Some people on Reddit (at r/silkroad) are freaking out, obviously, because they were fronted large amounts of money to buy drugs and now the money and the drugs are gone. Several people stating quite plainly (if they’re being honest) that they’re as good as dead.
I thought, once upon a time, I read about them also dealing in various other illegal items (child porn, etc). But I haven’t seen that angle in any of the articles so I’m not sure if Silk Road actually handled that sort of thing or if that was some other “secret internet”.
I don’t think that was Silk Road. You can buy porn on there but it’s just passwords to legit sites or data dumps of videos from pay sites. Like if you wanted to buy the entire “Bang Bus” series without joining the site.
However, the whole “secret internet” thing, I forget the actual term for it, has all kinds of stuff including CP like you mention, sights for hiring hit men (I mean undercover cops), basically anything you can think of. They’re separate from Silk Road though.
Makes sense. I remember a series of “secret internet” articles from 6-12 months ago (from various sources, it seemed to be a ‘thing’) and may have conflated them in my head since only Silk Road had a snazzy memorable name. I was mainly curious why it wouldn’t be in the Silk Road bust reporting if it existed there.
Eh, he wasn’t that bad. He used his own name once, two and a half years ago, and only when he was pretending to be someone looking for information on the site, not its creator.
So I’m not sure that its “incredibly sloppy” so much as that you have to be incredibly careful to not get caught doing this kind of thing. Since almost everything on the internet is stored for years and is often easily searchable, even the smallest fuckup years ago can be uncovered once someone decides to put some effort into looking for it.
Feedback. People do get ripped off without any real recourse, but those sellers don’t last long. Just like eBay or wherever else… there are shitty sellers that will fuck you over, but they won’t get much business in the long run.
From what I hear, it’s pretty easy to get stuff through the mail and FedEx and sellers use both. The PO doesn’t routinely search packages without a good reason and I hear that even with pot, which has a very distinct and strong odor, the sellers usually vacuum seal it and package it in a way that avoids it being detected. When things are intercepted, they’re usually just confiscated and destroyed and a notice sent to the buyer saying so.
The Vendors probably have more to fear than the buyers as they’re the bigger fish that could get into real trouble. Part of this guy’s legal issues involve him trying to arrange a hit on somebody threatening to release user information (which was probably all a setup by the Feds).
I found this"Ultimate Guide for Using Silk Road" that might help, though I understand this could be edging the rules of promoting illegal activities. However, since the site is locked down I would think this link should be ok to share for educational purposes as Silk Road is dead dead dead.