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Comment by downandout | Hacker News Reader

Not to add insult to injury, but these people posting on Reddit complaining about the money they have lost are opening themselves up to massive prison sentences. Reddit is a US site; all it takes to arrest everyone posting is to subpoena Reddit, get their IP's/emails/whatever, then raid their houses looking for drugs and whatever other contraband the police can find. Complaining publicly that you lost money on a site whose sole purpose was to sell illegal items is plenty of probable cause - especially with several implied death threats and people saying they may be killed over missing funds right in the thread. The feds will be all over this.

Not that they shouldn't complain somewhere, but maybe keep it on the darknet sites.

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I'm not a lawyer, but that sounds a little dicey to me. I think for getting search warrants, you need probable cause to believe that somebody has a specific amount of a specific drug or other contraband, ideally in a specific place. Claiming on an anonymous website that you lost some amount of money on a site known for trafficking mostly contraband sounds more like a fishing expedition - you have no way to tell if they were lying entirely, or what they supposedly lost money on, or if it's actually illegal in their jurisdiction. You generally can't, or at least aren't supposed to be able to, get a warrant based on a hunch that somebody is doing something illegal.

This is perhaps cause to open an investigation on somebody, but I'd think they'd have to actually contact these people and complete a sale for something illegal to move forward with legal action. Which would probably not be worth the trouble for most agencies capable of doing that sort of thing, unless they had reason to believe that you were a pretty big fish.

I'd presume they are posting to Reddit cia TOR, so I doubt subpoenaing Reddit would give much new information.

I thought about that, but you never know. There are other bits and pieces available...email, which might lead to a real IP via another subpoena if the person isn't careful, ad/tracking cookies, etc. I would guarantee you that some of these people aren't being that careful with their clearnet activities.

Would it be worth investing those kind of resources into tracking lower-tier sellers or buyers though?

Well....reading the thread, there are people claiming that drug gangs are going to kill people (both the owners of the site and people who are going to come up short paying their suppliers), at least one person seriously talking about suicide, and another saying that he has contact info for the owners. I can't say what resources they will put into it, but there are a ton of law enforcement red alerts and more than enough probable cause in that one thread to subpoena Reddit.

If you're the kind of person who is smart enough to use Tor properly, you're the kind of person who is unlikely to be complaining about money you lost in drug trades on a high-profile web site.

Even smart people make mistakes, especially after seeing other seemingly smart people making those mistakes.

Given that these are people who put significant amounts of money at risk in unregulated and outright illegal businesses; you may be making unwarranted assumptions about their intelligence and operational security.

Is it illegal to use these sites? Surely, they would have to explicitly say that they purchased/sold drugs (or something else illegal) for a subpoena and later search warrant to be legal.

Is it illegal to use them? No. Does talking about how much money you lost when a known illegal drug marketplace goes down give the police probable cause to believe that you may be dealing or buying drugs? Most likely, yes.

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