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The_Rev

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Yeah, he asked the anonymous 'supplier' who'd just that minute been put in touch with him by the anonymous potential victim, to murder him.

 

it sounds an awful lot like he paid someone $150,000 to create a new alias and promise to murder himself.

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Very interesting post from reddit with the details of the arrsest.

 

I just read the warrant:
  • Someone was posting on different Bitcoin related forums seemingly trying to advertise the site. Interestingly enough, they were posting through Tor to stay anonymous.
  • He included his email address at one point looking for an IT guy in the Bitcoin community to help with a venture backed BTC startup. The email address contained his name. This is the key evidence that lead them to him, the rest is just further proof.
  • Through associated accounts tied to this email address as well as IP logs, they were easily able to find the internet cafe he frequented as well as a friend whom he lived with when he moved to San Francisco in 2012. Apparently the two even made YouTube videos together (Let's find this!)
  • He posts on stackoverflow looking for PHP advice relating to Tor. He uses his real name but shortly afterwards changes it.
  • They were also able to cross reference records showing which VPN he was using to access the site as an admin. He apparently used this VPN and coded Silk Road to automatically log him in as administrator.
  • DPR refers to his time zone as PST, implying he's on the west coast.
  • He is threatened by a large vendor that says they will leak other vendors and users name and address if DPR doesn't pay 500k.
  • He tells the "leaker" who needs to pay his drug debts, to just get him in contact with them and he'll work something out.
  • He gets in contact with them, and just asks them to get rid of the guy so he is no longer bothered by him. He also tries to get them to join the site.
  • Later the original guy comes back and asks for 500k in BTC within 72 hours or else.
  • DPR contacts the guys drug dealers again and asks for them to get rid of him, he doesn't care if it's messy. The settle on 1.76k BTC.
  • However, this hit seems like it was faked since no murders were reported around the time and area of the hit happening.
  • He then orders from the same guys that did the hit fake identification to purchase servers.
  • The package is "randomly searched" as part of Canadian customs border security. We all know this "Random search" is BS.
  • They contained several fake IDs shipped to a house near the PC cafe.
  • The police go to his house where his roommates know him as "Josh". The pictures on the IDs match perfectly.
  • He avoids answering the police but implies that they could, in theory, be bought online at a site called The Silk Road.
  • The police now have access to his servers. The server contains his PMs as well as his entire financial history working with the site.
  • The warrant is executed.

Interestingly enough, there seems to be some be some "parallel investigating" going on. Thanks NSA! I didn't mention the exact instances, but they had logs (IP's and User Agents) of really old messages that had long been deleted. They also don't mention where the servers were located and how they accessed them. However, they did have a lot of time to go through the code and personal messages. So this implies that they had access of the servers for at least a few days now, without DPR's knowledge. So this also implies that they either had physical access to the servers stationed remotely, or remote access to them in-house through an exploit.

// conspiracy
Also, investigators ordered over 100 packages off the site. This fits in with the "Parallel investigation theory" because they don't mention why or what they got out of the purchases other than proving you can order real drugs. What most people aren't aware of, is it's pretty easy to find a SR vendor. Every post service in the US takes images of every single piece of mail that goes through the US at every facility. This makes it easy to route the origin of exactly which post office or UPS/Fedex office the package came from. From there, you just have to wait and look for people dropping off a lot of packages at that fit the description. If they bust the vendor, they can force them to allow access to their SR vendor account which they could use to talk to DPR and try to get information out of him.

This correlates with the leaker. I'm pretty sure the hitmen and the leaker were the same person or atleast working together. I would bet that the guy threatening to leak the information was actually an agent that got access to one or more vendor accounts. He then used this information to try and get DPR to slip up, which he eventually did.

Also the mail getting seized randomly is fishy. It just seems like 1 in a million odds that they got that package. Before this, they had no way of knowing his real address. So it looks like they already knew his address and used the seized package as a "correlating investigation" tactic. So they are clearly missing out some information here. How did they know his address? This is a huge issue for me. Again, my money is on them knowing who he was before even knowing his email. Someone, somewhere, who personally knew him, leaked his identity.
// end of conspiracy

Finally, DPRs messages seem only to date back to June. The only time the reference earlier private messages is when he personally referenced previous things he did. For instance, telling the hitman/drug dealers that he has done a hit before. So it's easy to assume two things: First, the messages were not encrypted, at least not the PMs -- who knows about orders. Second, messages were probably deleted after three months (something we already knew, but weren't certain they were actually erased until now.)

The police also confiscated 3.6m worth in BTC, though the police recognized he's done over 80m in commissions. This is clearly not all his BTC, so it's somewhere. Some of it's probably in cash in offshore accounts under fake names. Hopefully it doesn't get lost and deleted forever.

If I were a large vendor in the US/EU, I'd be very afraid right now. If they weren't able to bust you by reversing the postage route, they now have access to your PMs. So if you ever anything slip, they have it all now.

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"All hitmen you can hire over the internet are, like every open-minded 15 year-old nymphomaniac, really FBI or other law enforcement agents unless they're actually teenage boys having a laugh. If you think otherwise, you're too stupid to be on the internet."

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  • 3 weeks later...
  • 3 weeks later...
  • 2 weeks later...

I have literally no idea what this is all about - mining, crypto-currency?  I like to consider myself a clever guy, and I keep with with technological trends but reading about all this blows my mind.

To create Bitcoins your computer needs to decrypt an algorithm. That's called mining. 

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These things only really have value because of their illicit uses, at the moment, in my opinion. Am I right in thinking that bitcoin transactions are unique, untraceable, and p2p?

Is the conversion of BTC into currency traceable?

Scary stuff for governments and banks. I'm expecting loads of people to speculate on buying these in the hope that they will sell them at a premium at the 21million stage.

We've set some computers up at work for the kids to mine BTCs, it was worked out that it would take a single computer 90 years to mine a cluster of coins. We've got 5 on the go, working within one if the large pools.

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These things only really have value because of their illicit uses, at the moment, in my opinion. Am I right in thinking that bitcoin transactions are unique, untraceable, and p2p?

Is the conversion of BTC into currency traceable?

Scary stuff for governments and banks. I'm expecting loads of people to speculate on buying these in the hope that they will sell them at a premium at the 21million stage.

So the same as cash then?

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