Does anyone find it funny that each criminal group could have been better off relying on a "kid who knows computers" level of expertise and bog standard devices running open source software which at least wouldn't be trivially systematically turned against them all at once quite so easily.
Protip to the cartels - pay top dollar to some world class engineers to setup a dark web market and you'll make buckets. Most if not all markets until now have been run by geeks with limited knowledge and skills, wading in to the criminal underworld and inevitably making rookie mistakes. Both Ross and the guy in Bangkok had their personal emails tied to the markets. Some kids running a big market from Germany connect…
We don't know how Ross and other dark web folks were caught, despite all the official stories. We know what the FBI _tells_ us was the security issue. However, the Snowden doc's reveal that they are instructed to construct other legitimate stories for how to implicate a criminal after the have compromised him in order to not reveal their tactics. The exact term they used in the docs escapes my memory, but we only know that Ross _was_ captured, but we have no clue how. Perhaps he had perfect op-sec, but the real security issue was a raft of 0-day attacks and then they signed up something in his name, later legally gagging him. We really have no clue.