The article mentions the us irs were involved. For a german marketplace run by an Australian. Any idea why?
Possibly someone getting audited about surprising income, which then got forwarded over to police?
German police take down 'world's largest darknet marketplace'
31–40 of 332 posts
Re: German police take down 'world's largest darknet marketplace'
#32The article mentions the us irs were involved. For a german marketplace run by an Australian. Any idea why?
An idea: much of the time the way dark net vendors are taken down involve the IRS. Did you know that you can legally report illicit income, legally, with ostensibly no negative consequence? >Income from illegal activities, such as money from dealing illegal drugs, must be included in your income on Schedule 1 (Form 1040), line 8, or on Schedule C (Form 1040) if from your self-employment activity. https://www.irs.gov/…
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Re: German police take down 'world's largest darknet marketplace'
#33No matter what anyone says, I believe with every fiber of my being that simple drug dealing is a victimless crime. Free people choose to purchase and consume drugs to their own detriment (benefit). All violence related to the sale of drugs is ancillary to the fact some drugs (but not others - alcohol, marijuana, caffeine for starters) are illegal. https://freeross.org/
> I believe with every fiber of my being that simple drug dealing is a victimless crime.
Quick, ugly counterexample:
Date rape drugs.
You can of course say that the crime is on whoever uses it but criminal neglect is a thing.
Somewhat more nuanced example:
Vulnerable people are still given highly addictive drugs as "marketing" from dealers.
This isn't something all of those victims have chosen, so I'd say it isn't victimless.
That said I agree that there's a fair chance that legalizing many drugs would bring large benefits to society.
Re: German police take down 'world's largest darknet marketplace'
#34Earlier quoted context omitted.
>"Whoops I forgot to turn my VPN on" Why would someone be using a VPN if they're using tor for the market? Why would a VPN offer any protection at all? If you're using a VPN and "SSH into one of the servers that they are already watching", then a VPN isn't going to provide anonymity.
The model would be something like User --> VPN --> Tor --> Market Assuming the VPN is trustworthy and you don't connect to Tor without it, the VPN would cover up the fact that you used Tor at all. If you normally use the VPN, but forget it one time, you are now exposed.
If they are able to do a deanonymization attack on the 3 hop Tor circuit why should a VPN protect you? They can just mount a similar attack on the one hop VPN.
Re: German police take down 'world's largest darknet marketplace'
#35No matter what anyone says, I believe with every fiber of my being that simple drug dealing is a victimless crime. Free people choose to purchase and consume drugs to their own detriment (benefit). All violence related to the sale of drugs is ancillary to the fact some drugs (but not others - alcohol, marijuana, caffeine for starters) are illegal. https://freeross.org/
> I believe with every fiber of my being that simple drug dealing is a victimless crime. Quick, ugly counterexample: Date rape drugs. You can of course say that the crime is on whoever uses it but criminal neglect is a thing. Somewhat more nuanced example: Vulnerable people are still given highly addictive drugs as "marketing" from dealers. This isn't something all of those victims have chosen, so I'd say it isn't vi…
Any store that sells knives contributes to murders. I would argue that alcohol is the biggest date rape drug by a large amount. Do you advocate banning alcohol?
Re: German police take down 'world's largest darknet marketplace'
#36Earlier quoted context omitted.
> I believe with every fiber of my being that simple drug dealing is a victimless crime. Quick, ugly counterexample: Date rape drugs. You can of course say that the crime is on whoever uses it but criminal neglect is a thing. Somewhat more nuanced example: Vulnerable people are still given highly addictive drugs as "marketing" from dealers. This isn't something all of those victims have chosen, so I'd say it isn't vi…
Any store that sells knives contributes to murders. I would argue that alcohol is the biggest date rape drug by a large amount. Do you advocate banning alcohol?
> Any store that sells knives contributes to murders.
Many countries has laws that regulate the sale of certain kinds of knives that are created primarily for use in fights/combat.
> I would argue that alcohol is the biggest date rape drug by a large amount. Do you advocate banning alcohol?
Good point. There's still an order of magnitude or two between those options.
Also the alcohol is mostly consumed voluntarily unlike date rape drugs that are almost only consumed involuntarily.
Re: German police take down 'world's largest darknet marketplace'
#37Re: German police take down 'world's largest darknet marketplace'
#38No matter what anyone says, I believe with every fiber of my being that simple drug dealing is a victimless crime. Free people choose to purchase and consume drugs to their own detriment (benefit). All violence related to the sale of drugs is ancillary to the fact some drugs (but not others - alcohol, marijuana, caffeine for starters) are illegal. https://freeross.org/
if you're dealing drugs on a black market you're not paying taxes, you may be selling drugs to children, which is definitely not a victimless crime, and you're likely facilitate all other sorts of crime and money laundering.
Not to mention that some drugs are so addictive and destructive that jurisdictions have good reason to stop their distribution.
Re: German police take down 'world's largest darknet marketplace'
#39No matter what anyone says, I believe with every fiber of my being that simple drug dealing is a victimless crime. Free people choose to purchase and consume drugs to their own detriment (benefit). All violence related to the sale of drugs is ancillary to the fact some drugs (but not others - alcohol, marijuana, caffeine for starters) are illegal. https://freeross.org/
Without getting into detailed arguments have a look into the opium wars (basically the UK forcing China to keep accepting opium imports) and the effects opium had on Chinese society. Super interesting and a case in point about how drugs - much less addictive compared to modern standards - when used at scale and widely available can destroy the fabric of society.
There is no country where drugs are legal, just some where drugs are not criminalised and I think that's a sane approach (Portugal as prime example). But to have wide and legal sale of drugs would probably destroy society.
Re: German police take down 'world's largest darknet marketplace'
#40Earlier quoted context omitted.
The model would be something like User --> VPN --> Tor --> Market Assuming the VPN is trustworthy and you don't connect to Tor without it, the VPN would cover up the fact that you used Tor at all. If you normally use the VPN, but forget it one time, you are now exposed.
If they are able to do a deanonymization attack on the 3 hop Tor circuit why should a VPN protect you? They can just mount a similar attack on the one hop VPN.
Thus the requirement for the VPN to be trustworthy.
What that means changes on the threat model, but for this scenario we'll say a hypothetical VPN provider in a different jurisdiction that takes Monero and has good OpSec.
The reason they can do the deanonymization attack on the Tor circuit is that they have basically unlimited resources to set up nodes, and Tor is built on the assumption that the nodes are all unrelated.
If a Tor session looks like:
User -> VPN -> Tor( A -> B -> C ) -> Market
Anyone can set up a Tor node, but it's not possible to just randomly add nodes to a VPN's network, so they shouldn't be vulnerable to that (barring insecurity in other forms).