A
German DNM user contacted me recently to report about his legal
troubles. He is a SR1 DNM user who started on SR1 using mostly 1 account
name (unsurprisingly, because of the reputational benefits)
occasionally made small (usually <5g) orders of marijuana
domestically; he received all his orders and always used PGP for his
address, but not necessarily for all communications with sellers.
In early October 2015, he received a summons/citation letter from the
police for a hearing related to drug purchases; the letter was light on
details, and he assumed it was mostly a fishing expedition and probably
due to a seller getting arrested & having kept buyer records. He
checked German laws and decided that he was not compelled to attend or
say anything based on such a letter, and declined to show up for it. In
early March 2016, he received a second letter saying he had been fined
>€3000 for 17 cases of marijuana purchases January - October 2013
from various sellers on SR1 & "D&B" (Drugs & Bets, previous
name of Outlaw Market). A table of the 17 orders' data:
Bestelldatum |
Lieferdatum |
Packstation? |
Anbieter |
g |
sorte |
Preis |
14.01.2013 |
17.01.2013 |
x |
MadeInGermany |
4,6 |
White Widow |
75,28 $ |
26.01.2013 |
04.02.2013 |
- |
plegerin |
4 |
Ice Cool |
64,94 $ |
10.04.2013 |
16-18.04.2013 |
x |
Karotte |
3 |
Jack Herer |
53,99 $ |
02.05.2013 |
03.05.2013 |
x |
mkkh |
4,3 |
Jack Flash |
64,23 $ |
16.05.2013 |
17.05.2013 |
x |
Natural Weed |
4 |
Fruity Indica |
63,79 $ |
11.06.2013 |
15.06.2013 |
x |
High Voltage |
Min. 1 |
amnesia |
70,02 $ |
08.07.2013 |
10.07.2013 |
x |
mkkh (D&B) |
7,4 |
Jack Flash |
? |
16.07.2013 |
? |
? |
MadeInGermany |
4,6 |
„Killer Gras“ |
63,88 $ |
23.07.2013 |
27.07.2013 |
x |
hektorhellfire666 |
5 |
„outdoorgrowed haze“ |
53,00 $ |
25.07.2013 |
16.08.2013 |
x |
Mercury 31 |
5 |
amnesia (haze) |
69,12 $ |
02.08.2013 |
07.08.2013 |
x |
DrugsAndCash |
6 |
Fuzzy Wuzzy, Ed Rosenthal, Sour Diesel |
96,83 $ |
06.08.2013 |
08.08.2013 |
x |
Germanyexpress |
1,5 |
Early Special |
23,21 $ |
09.08.2013 |
12.08.2013 |
x |
ExpertGrowNL |
10(5) |
K2 Weed |
63,25 $ + 0.5 btc |
30.08.2013 |
02.09.2013 |
x |
MadeInGermany |
4,6 |
Killer Gras/Weed |
66,84 $ |
31.08.2013 |
? |
x |
DrugsAndCash |
5 |
ED Rosenthal Super Bud |
65,43 $ |
20.09.2013 |
25.09.2013 |
x |
hektorhellfire666 |
5 |
HQ indoor Weed |
70,55 $ |
01.10.2013 |
- |
- |
Mercury 31 |
5+5 |
amnesia (haze) + Power Plant |
70,02 $ + 68,99 $ |
(Case 13 was a mis-ship, where he ordered 5 and got 10, & paid
the difference; with case 17, SR1 was down by that point so he paid
twice.)
How? The supporting documentation (German) indicated that "Tobias Wald" from 36119 Neuhof, Germany (https://web.archive.org/web/20140208044838/http://www.greenit-wald.de/)
is the arrested seller "NaturWeed" from SR1, who he had ordered from,
and had kept records of buyer names & addresses, including his.
Wald's case is not covered in any media I found at the time, but the
buyer notes that there were some arrests in that area including a small
grow op, and that Natural Weed claimed to get his supply "from different
sources", suggesting that Wald fully cooperated and turned over his
suppliers as well as his buyer records.
But the 17 listed cases go well beyond just the Natural Weed orders,
implying that while his address was protected by PGP, it was recovered
from Natural Weed's records, and then the name & address linked up
with the sales database of the Silk Road 1 server when it was imaged in
Iceland in June 2013 and then seized in October 2013. As we know from
other cases, the FBI has shared data about buyers & sellers of
particular nationalities with those countries' respective LE agencies
(eg Norway).
This explains the timewindow of orders and how they were able to link
all of them to the buyer, which is a lesson about the power of market
databases to cause trouble years later and about the lingering betrayal
of seller records.
This also answers a question sometimes asked (eg by /u/MagnusLarsson recently):
can a buyer, in the absence of any intercepted packages or possession
of illegal drugs, be prosecuted or otherwise get into trouble? At least
in Germany, the answer seems to be yes, under §29 BtMG (although since he didn't fight the fine, hypothetically there could have been other, more physical evidence, which they didn't reveal). But there are further points of interest.
Each of the orders specifies whether they know it was picked up at a
packstation or not, and the delivery date (not just the sent date, which
could be extracted from the SR1 database). This implies, at the very
minimum, extensive retrospective mail records which include packstation
timestamps and likely surveillance. Dollars to donuts, Germany or the EU
is operating a mail cover database on the lines of the USPS mail cover
database photographing all packages sent. (A quick google didn't turn up
anything, so any enterprising German journalists might want to dig into
that.)
One order is an oddity: the mkkh order on 7 August 2013 was not done on Silk Road 1, it was done on Outlaw Market
(formerly known as "Drugs & Bets" / D&B). This present a
mystery: how could they know about it at all, much less, when it was
sent, delivered, for what amount - but not price?
- Drugs&Bets/Outlaw Market has not, as far as I know, ever been
seized or imaged by LE. (It is possible but unlikely it was imaged as
part of Operation Onymous.)
- mkkh is a still active seller on Outlaw Market, apparently; this
implies he has not been arrested, as undercover sellers typically do not
get operated for a long time, and if they do (like in the gun &
poison stings), tend to engage in highly targeted sales rather than
marijuana sales of a few grams. The buyer also describes mkkh's
packaging as excellent, reducing the chance he had been caught.
- while Carl Mark Force the IV mentions that the DE purchased buyer
records from various SR1 sellers, he gives the impression that by this
point they had largely stopped bothering
- the buyer does not remember ever alluding to that mkkh order on SR1, much less in that kind of detail
- the order was received, ruling out the possibility of a postal
interception; a seized order, in any case, would not yield the exact
vendor/market even if they could infer dates and product and amount.
None of the possibilities makes much sense, so I am stumped as to how they knew about his D&B order.
Overall, this is an interesting case study showing the power of an
integrated cross-national LE investigation linking together various
datasets to nail someone years after the fact who should've gotten away
scot-free.
So what could've been done to avoid this? The buyer used PGP
appropriately, did not do anything obviously idiotic, but still was
caught and fined.
- Avoiding packstations would have helped a little but would not have saved him
- Burning accounts regularly and switching sellers would've helped
avoid the linking of 17 purchases to him, but at the cost of exposing
his address to that many more sellers who could keep a copy, and
restarting reputationally from scratch every time. This is not much of a
solution.
SR1 could have practiced much better data retention
policies than it did. There was no need to keep over 6 months of orders
around, when they had all finalized without any disputes. (AlphaBay
users should consider this carefully as AlphaBay either does not know or care about data retention
and appears to keep at least a year's worth of PMs around, implying it
probably keeps everything else as well.) This sort of data retention
endangers both sellers and buyers: any non-PGP messages are easy prey of
course, and sales information like this from the horse's mouth can be
used to prioritize investigations and then get seller records to go
after buyers. Data retention can be semi-verified by sellers seeing what
they have access to in the DNM's UI; if they can access too-old
records, then that DNM fails...
A distributed DNM might work around this buyer feedback problem by using some sort of blind signature or zero-knowledge proof
to attest to a buyer having successful transactions worth a total of ฿Y
without revealing the seller, number of orders, or product, which would
at least minimize the legal damage (since those transactions could have
been for anything, illegal or legal).
sellers should not be keeping records, but there doesn't seem to be any way to enforce this
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