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Comment by msikora | Hacker News Reader

Do any of these darknet markets or services operators ever successfully "exit" to enjoy their ill-gotten spoils in retirement?

Seems like they always get nailed in the end. Even the operator of Grams (darknet market search engine)and Helix (Bitcoin tumbler) who shut down his services in 2017 got arrested just this year. Seems like the heyday of Darknet markets was 5+ years ago and since then law enforcement started to win in a big way.

Who got away? Maybe the operators of Agora? Who else?

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The cat is out of the bag. Sure a few close every year, but new ones start up. The risk is less than distributing anything on the streets, or dealing with anything physical.

Now they got 180 vendors by looking at data from last year, and probably by finding them at active markets and ordering from them and trying to backtrace mail, cross-reference the listings (someone got busted via a high res image that enabled law enforcement to acquire a fingerprint - and that was in the system).

But no news about any market shutdown.

And it probably takes a lot of work. The article claims that law enforcement got very good at this, but there's hardly any data to back this up.

The question is how many dealers there really are. If you look at the volumes of some of the arrested dealers, it seems like few people dominate these platforms. Arresting them is enough to disrupt the market for a bit. Sure, new ones will come but in the end, it could very well be that most sellers on these platforms will get arrested.

People are stupid and many won't be deterred by this. But I'm not sure if it's profitable in the long run to be a seller on these platforms.

For the buyer, on the other hand, it's much better. They don't face the risks they do when buying on the street and police doesn't really care unless they buy enough to be distributors themselves.

It seems the supply of people willing to risk a long-term incarceration for short-term gains is basically endless. And the ratio of those who then get greedy, and/or don't want to silently exit is also seems to be high.

That said, there are probably many-many thousands of people who are ex-dealers. And we'll probably never know about the ex-online-dealers, who had sufficiently good OpSec. (So maybe in 10 years we'll hear about some people who heard about those who did it for a few years and then silently quit.)

In crime there seems to be the oposite of survivor bias.

We see the successful legal businesses without seeing those that failed.

We see the failed drug dealers without seeing those that succeeded.

I imagine that this is intentional on the part of the state and the media to deter criminality. If the public message is “crime doesn’t pay” that might deter opportunists.

It is more an intrinsic to being a successful criminal.... if the public knows you are a criminal, so do the police and criminal justice system, since they are part of the public.

How would the government do what you are accusing them of? How would they hide successful drug dealers from the public?

other than a plot to cover things up (which is less likely because Occams razor), they simply don't know what they don't know.

I'm not sure if selling and shipping drugs to end customers was ever a good job to get into. Wholesale drug shipments maybe, but selling to end customers always had way too much risk for the money you could make there.

We shouldn't assume that people go into the business because it's rational to do so. They see the short term gains, not the long term risks.

I might be wrong but I think any criminal who really cared about long term risk adjusted gains stayed away from selling a few pills here and there.

This appears to be how most legal chemical manufacturers operate as well. Customers are just a huge hassle in general.

It is actually quite amazing how well drug logistics work. Even in countries with prohibition, you often have no problem getting some weed, I suspect other drugs being similarly well distributed. If have seen weed and other stuff packaged in high tech cases so even dogs couldn't sniff it out.

Especially with the amount of drug use, the logistical challenge isn't trivial.

You actually believe these FBI/DOJ notices that you can't hide? lol someone promote that public relations agent to a GS-15!

Darknet markets are bigger than ever, more hardened than ever, the investigations and busts are more expensive than ever and the results are smaller than ever.

This operation got a win because the server was seized and accessed. That part isn't supposed to happen.

Further hardening is that messages shouldn't be on the server. Everyone on Tor says use OTR on Jabber, EVERYONE.

On top of that, funds shouldn't be stored on the marketplaces, marketplace centralized escrow is still prevalent but multisignature is what should be used. (transaction is revertible by customer and merchant in the event that the escrow agent is incapacitated, customer and merchant can form a transaction again with the same funds elsewhere, or not, either way the state gets nothing whether they seized the server or seized the marketplace's wallets)

Next, bitcoin should be less used and Monero should become more used.

Monero with multisignature should become more used on top of that, which is not something I would consider "production ready" but following busts like this people might just prioritize developing it better.

There are a couple of inconvenient marketplaces that do all of the above. The user experience just has to improve.

After a certain level of abstraction the liability will shift away from the marketplace operators, or they'll evolve into completely unmanned autonomous organizations, in both cases they will both evolve into places where we really won't know where earnings go.

Yes, empire exited with 30 million in crypto.

Empire takedown is too recent to say they’ll end up getting away with it. Arrests often come well after the crime as mentioned by the GP.

unless they do something stupid (like come out of retirement and start funding their new operation with their unwashed existing loot), with every day that passes it's more likely that they won't get caught.

maybe you don't tend to hear about them?

Question: if you started an agency offering SEO and marketing to darknet sites, would you get in trouble for that?

Yes - IF any of your customers/clients did anything illegal. Proceeds of crime, KYC etc. I mean, think about it - what search terms would you optimize on? "Best weed in the market?" "Buy your murders here?" ... Good luck trying to explain away that you had zero knowledge of working with 'shady' customers. IANAL so go ahead if it seems to anyone to be a good idea.

Or perhaps you meant operating as a sort of entirely Dark-Web Only SEO operation? If so, they already exist.

CGMC shut down without taking peoples money and I haven't heard of any arrests for that yet

Evolution seemed to get away

If they do exit scam first? Was any of those caught?

Isn't the idea that you setup something like this, and run it for a while, and then you bailout and sell it to someone else and they do the same? It's a game of hot potato. So long as you don't leave too much evidence and you launder your currencies correctly, only the last owner gets caught.

Thats how the Dread Pirate Roberts got his name no?

The question is whether anyone has actually done that in reality rather than telling stories about the theory.

That a fascinating story that DPR told the judge (One of many), who did not believe one bit of it.

"Because a judge" isn't necessarily the be-all one might wish it to be. A judge is just human and brings along their beliefs and knowledge or lack of to every case.

Or the defendant was lying.... I don't think you or I know any more than the judge did (and we likely know way less)

The idea is that you close suddenly stealing whatever money you can at the moment.

I don't find idea of black market operator stealing shocking nor unbelievable.

Interestingly, Ross Ulbricht didn't claim to take over the site from others, he claimed to be the original creator, the original DPR, and then later handed it off to other people who got away.

https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/9akg85/irs-found-accused-...

empire?

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