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Comment by trulynissin | Hacker News Reader

Honestly surprised that this site was able to function undisputed, entirely on the public internet for this long despite it's entirely illegal nature.

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I work, kind of, in this space - and it's been wild to me how incredibly easy it is to embed myself into public Discord servers that offer fraud/abuse bots. That might speak to the sophistication of what I find (vs. groups with better OpSec). I agree though, I'm surprised this was operated on the public internet with a great domain name.

Probably much the same for phone spam which is why all of us get (semi-targeted) calls from indian call centers daily.

Plenty of these are spawn out of Discord/Telegram networks to coordinate infrastructure. Via the grey/blackhat versions of Twilio.

It's far too common for the operators to give a shit.

See: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=le71yVPh4uk

Yea but whats the option?

They need to sell to people so the Discord/Telegram and website need to be easy to access.

And Discord/Telegram and websites want it to be easy to make stuff with/on them. The alternative is some vetting process where you submit a form for what the site is for and then someone from an authority logs in and checks manually.

It looks like before the seizure, they had Chinese DNS (dnspod) and Russian web hosting (CLOUDX-AS, RU).

So they complied to US requests? Or did the FBI go for the tld?

The wording ("domains have been seized") implies they went for the TLD. The registry for .market is Rightside, who are US based.

Back when Brian Krebs was still on twitter, it was a pretty constant parade. New cybercrime site goes up, it's compromised by LEO on week two, they hang out collecting evidence for a year, then roll it up and send everyone to jail. A month later, a new site goes up...

Well, it’s worth considering that FBI had control over it long ago and ran it themselves for a while (hence it’s ability to be so public), and the impetus to give it up could be any number of things from threat of revelation to the more mundane cause of it having outlived its usefulness or just new projects taking priority/reassignments.

This is not conspiracy, the FBI seriously does shit like this.

Yeah this is entirely true, wouldn't be surprised if this is exactly how it went down, FBI can be very clever.

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