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I'm curious how they attacked this network -- I'd assume the payment side is still the easiest, and they could look for some patterns and then set up physical surveillance at WU or other locations to catch cash transactions.

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> accepting payment through PayPal

Uh. How did they expect to remain anonymous with a PayPal account?

hahaha...seriously? with PayPal? i suppose it could (maybe) be done with prepaid credit cards, but still.

Use forged documents for everything (including your bank accounts), and keep really small balances. Maybe also do business accounts, ideally also with forged info (particularly for US businesses, people don't check the documents very well). I assume PayPal does lazy checking, and will not check a low balance account as much.

Linkability is the real enemy of anonymity.

When I first heard about this, I heard they anonymized their payments through bitcoins.

PayPal seems a bit of a move to widen their market

No, that's the Silk Road.

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