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Comment by dobbsbob | Hacker News Reader

The name Dread Pirate Roberts should've given away the fact the site is supposed to be handed down to different operators if you read/watched Princess Bride.

This guy is making a fatal mistake of talking to the press. History shows all blackmarket admins like Max Vision go down shortly after press articles come out with interviews. Now he went from guy running a drug site to "subverting the US with propaganda" so the NSA can get involved. Note to future outlaws: resist the temptation to make yourself famous by giving interviews. Just look how they amped the Swartz case after he went to the media

Can also now make a pretty good profile of this guy because he talks too much on his own forum and to forbes.

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Note to future outlaws: resist the temptation to make yourself famous by giving interviews.

Desire for fame seems to be a common theme in the downfalls of otherwise very successful individuals involved in this sort of undercover operation.

> The name Dread Pirate Roberts should've given away the fact the site is supposed to be handed down to different operators if you read/watched Princess Bride.

It did, and that has been pointed out literally since the start. It's one thing to know that the name suggests the ownership could change hands at any time, and quite another to have the current DPR state that this is so and when he took over.

> This guy is making a fatal mistake of talking to the press.

What makes chatting with a reporter on the SR forums any more damning or fatal than, say, a _Gawker_ article going viral years ago and inspiring US Senators to publicly condemn the site and call for its busting?

I think it's because you're flaunting yourself, you're daring them to do something, and they hate that even more.

>I think it's because you're flaunting yourself, you're daring them to do something, and they hate that even more.

Exactly. Everytime DPR gives an interview, it kicks the DEA in the balls and announces to the entire US through the media how inept they are. With this interview they can now go and get greenlighted double the resources to go after him. A guy here who was shipping seeds to the US was the only vendor caught out of dozens of storefonts doing the same thing because he was the only politically active one by funding NORML and other US legalization movements. They singled him out as the target to go after and even mentioned this in their press release after they caught him.

DEA go after low hanging fruit to get more press/funding, and whoever is making them look bad or is political. If you just stay in your quiet corner of the darknet and sell drugs they are more apt to leave you alone for the guy talking to Forbes beacuse there's only so much resources to go around. There's another market, BMR that you never hear much about because he's smart enough not to give interviews even though the site has been talked about in mainstream media articles as well. He learned his lesson saying too much when he closed down his clearnet site and let it slip he was starting BMR. Considering he's still operating without being arrested kind of obvious where the resources are going to (making an example of DPR, if they ever catch him).

Even worse he's calling out his competition which is a big mistake. It's like this guy has zero knowledge of the carding world and all the market vs market attacks that have gone on since the late 1990s. They sold drugs on those sites too

What's the carding world?

People who steal credit cards (usually in industrial quantities, often mag stripe data), then use those credit cards fraudulently. You get credit cards by retail theft (corrupt waitstaff, etc.), site breakins (particularly before PCI and vaulting, when every crappy ecommerce site had a bunch of card data lying around), compromises at network participants like acquirers, corrupt staff, etc.

There are whole communities of people in this space -- it tends to be fairly large and organized groups, since the actual monetization side involves printing a bunch of plastic cards and distributing them to people to make purchases (at retail).

It's related to the ATM skimming/theft/etc. world, and overlaps a lot with "traditional organized crime". Lots of Eastern European presence, too.

Carding sites and forums exist to make a market in credit cards, exploits to get more credit cards, tools to monetize them, etc.

That sounds like a lot of effort and genuine technical skill to invest in crime. If that is true, you have to wonder what motivates people to do it. Is it really profitable enough to be rationally worth the risk if you don't care about the ethics involved, or is it that the people who do it can't find legitimate employment where they live due to the state of the local economy or have personal traits that prevent them from being employed?

1) It's incredibly profitable for some of the participants

2) Until maybe 2007, there were not a whole lot of comparably-profitable licit opportunities for Eastern Europeans. The contract marketplaces have helped. We really need to fix our immigration system in the US (and, worldwide, really) to help more.

3) A lot of the more dangerous parts are essentially blue collar crime; this is FAR safer than drugs/prostitution/human trafficking/terrorism/armed robbery/etc., so it's a clear decision for those guys.

2-4% of all credit card transactions are fraudulent. Credit card fraud is a $200B+/year business.

It's extremely lucrative. You can learn and buy everything you need to get started on the open Internet.

The interviewer didn't even get the operator's first name. I think he (she? they?)'ll be fine.

We know he found a wallet bug so that immediately gives away what level of competency/expertise to look for on the bitcoin forums which he undoubtedly posts there too. How he discovered the site is relevant and will give away how long he has been on bitcointalk since the orig dpr advertised there. We know his book recommendations from the forum which he prob recommended on clearnet in the past, or attached to his FB profile. Theres dozens of other ID markers he's left which I don't think is misinfo, mainly his Libertarian arguments which again he prob repeated elsewhere. Stylometry analysis incoming.

#1 rule to stay out of jail by thegrugq: stop talking

Not to mention, the dude had to have money (even before taking this over) if he said the previous owner was "well compensated".

I thought the article said he worked along side of the original owner for some time before buying him out with his share? Or did I misread that part?

There is no guarantee that the money is actually available to him. He probably has most / all of it tied up in Bitcoin, and is probably using only small amounts at a time via exchanges.

It is the classic mafia problem. Yes you can make lots of money on the black market, but it is useless if spending means getting caught. Hence money laundering.

This was interesting too, since I always assumed one of the big vendors on the site bought him out but clearly not thanks to his helpful talking.

I bet he raised the money through a group loan, fund or he runs a coin mixing service/mining pool. something that would give you expertise in setting up secure wallets. This is why saying anything is bad unless it's for misinformation only.

DPR clearly hasn't seen the weev court docs where everything he wrote on IRC was used against him to cement a flimsy case

flip side, it could have been a down payment then an 'earn-out' where the former DPR took xx% of revenue until the debt was paid off.

I hadn't thought of a few of those tactics. Good thinking. Just goes to show how little data you need acquire identifying information. Still though, I think the interview is fascinating, if possibly revealing.

Are there tools to beat stylometry? Like something that strips all personality out of your writing.

There is: https://www.cs.drexel.edu/~pv42/thebiz/ and JStylo https://psal.cs.drexel.edu/index.php/JStylo-Anonymouth

I bet you could scramble it through a translation tool. Though it's probably not the best idea to feed Google your secret messages, there's probably a local solution.

hmm indeed, although that could be predictable and not as random as Jstylo/Anonymouth.

I wouldn't believe any of what DPR said is actually true.

Or he could easily have stolen the book recommendations from absolutely anywhere on the damn planet. Also who cares if he posted on bitcointalk, also do you honestly believe he has a facebook or if he does do you honestly believe there is any overlap between the 2 personas? If so, your recent silk road purchase must have been a humdinger.

Considering the so-called advanced APT1 Chinese state sponsored hacker team was decloaked through facebook cookies I'd say yes. DPR may not be caught through his online gloating or political rhetoric, but they may use it against him in court to shatter whatever defense he's cooked up by linking his words to his IRL identify. Not like people haven't gone to jail over totally circumstantial evidence before (weev).

The way a proper counterintelligence effort goes after someone like this is to develop a list of candidates based on known facts, then use surveillance, statistics, etc to rule people out. I could ID DPR for $500k with a few staff in a year, either by breaking the law or as an official state entitity breaking the laws of other countries.

I would start by examining where all the major Tor exit nodes are, since that's likely where you would hide your heavy trafficked Tor hidden service, right beside a giant exit node to blend in with the other traffic. Feds already know this, this is probably how they caught Freedom Hosting.

Failing that go looking for hosting services that accept bitcoin, or online wallet services esp one's coded in php, since this guy has expertise in that area it's logical to assume he's running a hosting front so when the feds come in to seize the servers, he would be the guy they ask to retrieve it. You wouldn't want to trust your multi-million dollar drug site to colocation you'd want to see your server all day and be able to get to it or notice if somebody sabotaged it. He kind of already dropped he had physical control of the server when it crashed once while he was "out of town". Now cash out a lot of your coins and pretend it's for contract services, DDOS, hosting ect. You could also then enjoy plausible deniability, claiming an unknown customer set that site up and it wasn't you. Since your site accepts bitcoins, you have a reason to be using them. All well and good.. unless you talk too much and drop intel on yourself so they can use other circumstantial evidence against you in court.

He would also have to launder and sell all those coins. If I were him I'd be selling them directly to buyers in an underserved country using a decoy clearnet fixed-rate exchange, or I'd also be running my own small exchange and dumping coins in it, using fake ID scans and paying for traffic to simulate customer records. I'd probably also run my own mixing service like bitfog, lending service, or online casino/betting site to help launder them. If there's any large bitcoin investment funds still around I'd be all over that too, getting new coins out from other investors and giving them my SR coins.

Feds can identify the operators of all the above and then compare them to identity markings DPR has dropped on himself. Anybody with a 60% or higher chance of fitting the profile mark them for long term surveillance they will slip up eventually. Feds already know all of this.. which is why you need to be incredibly careful and never get too comfortable running the world's biggest outlaw darkmarket. Satoshi is a good example of excellent OPSEC. Never once did he stray from the topic of development of bitcoin. There is only 1 post in his entire bitcointalk history that does and it was when he chastised some idiots who wanted to sign up Wikileaks back in 2010 for donations, warning them Bitcoin would be killed before it could even start. He certainly didn't talk about politics with the exception of his genesis block comment. He also seemed to have had chosen a fictitious personality and slid in and out of it confusing anybody trying to go after him. Every unique phrase or word he wrote was analyzed then looked for in old whitepapers and mailing lists... nothing.

He also doesn't give interviews

>I would start by examining where all the major Tor exit nodes are, since that's likely where you would hide your heavy trafficked Tor hidden service, right beside a giant exit node to blend in with the other traffic. Feds already know this, this is probably how they caught Freedom Hosting.

You would not want to run a heavily used hidden service that you want to remain hidden right beside an exit node. That would be foolish.

I wouldn't want to run a long-lived service which attracted serious attention on an onion routed network. You could get some initial protection by terminating the onion frontend traffic on "tamper resistant, untraceable, throwaway nodes", and then backhaul (maybe via Tor?), to other servers, etc. The frontends would be able to do some local processing to maybe break up the traffic somewhat.

All of this kind of stuff would impair site reliability. IMO, if SR went down more often, I'd have a higher opinion of the paranoid exhibited by the admins. A highly reliable underground site is usually either 1) run by people who are going to get caught or 2) run by people who are doing the catching. There's I guess 3) run by really exceptional people who are doing it as a political statement -- generally unlikely, but in this case, possible.

> He also doesn't give interviews

Unless he's DPR.

This almost sounds like what happens at the start of Vernor Vinge's True Names a book written in late 1970s and still relevant.

Pride goes before destruction, and a haughty spirit before a fall.

The kinds of things he is saying are very widely espoused by people of similar mindset. If you were trying to profile based on political beliefs and agitation he could easily be me.

(he isn't, for what that's worth, I personally know thousands of others that fit in the exact same category and I am sure there are many, many more.)

>[You] personally know thousands of others that fit in the exact same category.

"personally know thousands". Let that sink in.

Robin Dunbar disagrees with this huge monkeysphere

I guess I should clarify what I mean by that;

I do not physically interact with the people in question on a regular basis in meatspace, but the mindset is basically the bedrock of near every anarcho capitalist focused community in existence, and within this sphere I have regularly observed at least that many frequent participants on discussions.

So the idea that the position held is useful in identifying who that person might actually be based on its rarity is not very plausible. Unless all those people are actually just sock puppets I suppose?

> This guy is making a fatal mistake of talking to the press.

Naw, the interview was on the forums and via PM. I'd be more worried about his book club entropy than the interview

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