Alphabay, Largest Darknet Market, Shut Down!

archive.is/JuNYw

AlphaBay was a successor to the first and most famous market operating on the so-called dark net, Silk Road, which the authorities took down in October 2013.

AlphaBay grew into a business with 200,000 users and 40,000 vendors — or 10 times the size of Silk Road — the Justice Department said on Thursday.

Mr. Cazes, originally from Canada, had his laptop open and was logged in to AlphaBay at the time of his arrest, allowing the authorities to gain access to all of AlphaBay’s hidden servers and financial accounts, according to legal documents unsealed on Thursday.

Mr. Cazes committed suicide in his jail cell shortly after he was arrested, the authorities said on Thursday. He was 25 years old.

The authorities have moved quickly to seize Mr. Cazes’ significant assets, including properties in Antigua, Cyprus and Thailand; 10 vehicles, including a Lamborghini and a Porsche; and financial assets of about $18 million.

Some of Mr. Cazes’ money was in the virtual currencies used on AlphaBay, including Bitcoin, Ether and Monero. He also had bank accounts in Liechtenstein, Thailand and Cyprus.

Officials said they had found Mr. Cazes because he posted his personal email address, [email protected], in some early messages from AlphaBay.

Even before AlphaBay went down, it had several large competitors. In the last few weeks, a site known as Dream Market has emerged as the leading player.

On Thursday, Dream Market had 57,000 listings for drugs and 4,000 listings for opioids.

Other urls found in this thread:

documentcloud.org/documents/3898109-AlphaBay-Cazes-Forfeiture-Complaint.html#document/p14/a363652
nytimes.com/2015/03/31/nyregion/silk-road-case-federal-agents-charges.html
newsweek.com/key-moments-life-silk-road-creator-ross-ulbricht-307815
youtu.be/HYShi9dhhJY
youtu.be/XEdEr8CfF8o
justice.gov/opa/pr/alphabay-largest-online-dark-market-shut-down
twitter.com/AnonBabble

What does it mean for small time buyeers?

Are they fucked?

No when they closed Silk Road they only went after a few vendors, not buyers, and especially not buyers of personal use quantities.

Why do these massive names in cryptocurrency always have such terrible opsec

I think they're fine but probably on a government database. Doesn't make sense for them to sort through thousands of users to go get a government agency to arrest billy who bought 5 hits of acid.

I think they want the carders, fent dealers, and any other vendors or irl resellers they can catch.

Also, hansa was backdoored by the Dutch police for the last month.

The vendors generally have great security the issue was the guy used a regular old email. Silk Road's founder, Ross Ulbricht, failed to use PGP and also used his real email for stuff:

Firstly, he was foolish with his email address and online identities while promoting the site, getting technical advice and hiring help, alleges the FBI. He used the same online handle (altoid) on several forum sites to make users aware that Silk Road was active in early 2011. He then used 'altoid' again to hire developers for a "venture-backed bitcoin startup company". But this time, he asked people to send their resumes to [email protected].

FBI investigators obtained the records for this email address from Google and cross-referenced it to Ulbricht's Google+ account. This included a photo that matched the picture on Ulbricht's LinkedIn account.

Ulbricht used the same email address - and his real name - when posting on Stack Overflow, a popular community site for programming advice. He asked how to connect to Tor using the PHP web programming language. Agents later found code on the Silk Road servers identical to the code that Stack Overflow members showed him.

But it's been written in several articles that interpol is getting a lot of adresses from customers, is this situation not different from the silk road?

And what constitutes personal quantities in the eyes of ignorant G-men? I mean 30ish tabs is something I'd keep to myself and some friends, not something I'd make a profit from.

I'm going to be paranoid for a few weeks now.

Generally not worth it to prosecute, and also that's why you are supposed to use PGP to encamp your address. I doubt anyone who didn't sell is in danger.

encrypt*

Its different for every drug but I think under 100 pills, an ounce of weed, 10g of MDMA, 50 tabs of lsd, around those amounts.

You and me both buddy. Clean house, don't have any drugs on ya. And I'd say with purchases under like a couple hundred dollars of non hard drugs you should be fine.

Also, not sure, but what legally can they even do with just your address? I don't think they will launch a whole investigation into you being personal user off of just an address.

I think they will focus on the producers not the consumers. If you bought stuff to use it won't be so bad, if you were selling products on it though then you're in poo poo.

This is why you were supposed to post your address in PGP. You did that, right?

>being degenerate

It may be bullshit to hide the real method, but it seems the guy in Thailand was caught, not by tracing the server, but because he used, as the site's administrator, the e-mail account he'd been using for years on the clearnet.

documentcloud.org/documents/3898109-AlphaBay-Cazes-Forfeiture-Complaint.html#document/p14/a363652

I used the vendor's PGP on the site, but if they've been compromised for a whole month not sure if they are reliable.

That would be reasonable. Are G-men reasonable?

I'm picturing the RAID barging in my flat, seizing my laptop and going through everything I've downloaded and posted on Sup Forums and other bullshit like losing my job, etc etc.

I'm stone cold sober, yet I've been told my whole like it was the drugs that would make me paranoid.

They had control of hansa and switched vendors pgps with their own. We shall see what they do, if browsing chans for 8 years hasn't put me on some list, I am certainly on one now.

I used the website's PGP... but how is that not compromised since the site has been watched for a month?

Brool story co.

Fuck off
Early opsec error kills these big guys, he also had a forum account named alpha02 from 2009

highly doubt they're going after Pot Heads or Pot Dealers mate.

You think they can get a warrant off addresses alone? I doubt it.

It is compromised

I dunno how French cops do things though. I wish I was in the US right now

>tfw no way to get a gun from deepweb
feels bad mane

You'll be fine bro. Just keep a clean house for a couple months. After they seized silkroad they didn't seem to go after buyers of modest quantities. The Dutch seized nearly $3million in btc from hansa, I doubt your order of .023 worth of cid is anything to worry too much over. Learn from this, pgp encrypt manually, and tumble coins.

>Mr. Cazes committed suicide in his jail cell shortly after he was arrested
How convenient. It's almost like I've never heard of similar cases before

Thanks dude, it is a learning experience though.

Too much bullshit to deal with. I'll never rest easy while ordering online again.

Fuck, I don't want to just do homegrown mushrooms for the rest of my life.

I used my personal email and house address when sill road went down
Nothing happens if you're small time

>allowing the authorities to gain access to all of AlphaBay’s hidden servers and financial accounts

Ah yes more money for CIA black ops. God bless bitcoin.

christ

Even if that whole thing is parallel construction to hide the use of NSA records, Ulbricht is still retarded

I also have my doubts over these claims, one has to wonder if maybe they were lying about how they came across this information. It doesn't seem to be in the best interest of intelligence agencies to expose their methods.

>Officials said they had found Mr. Cazes because he posted his personal email address, [email protected], in some early messages from AlphaBay.

Is this a joke? They caught him almost the same way they caught Ross Ulbricht? Ulbricht also posted his real e-mail adress in an early "advertisment" for the site.
During the trail there where douts if this was really the method with which Ulbricht was found.
History repeats itself?

There was extensive documentation of who the authorities went after when Silk Road went down. For one this site was 10x as popular so they are unlikely to be able to apprehend everybody.

That said, I thought Alphabay had an easy to work PGP functionality. Haven't used it in a long time.

With Silk Road, they only prosecuted maybe 50 of the largest vendors and most of those arrests came from doing weeks or months of surveillance in person on them and using people wearing a wire to deliver packages to them that they would have to sign to get in trouble. I don't think any just plain users of the Silk Road were targeted, though I could be wrong. There's a bunch of websites on the clearnet that go into extensive detail on this subject.

I'm not sure what to make of that.

Dream Market

Ross was known for not requiring PGP and not using it himself. Had he used pgp and throwaway emails he would not have gotten caught. Also, if these sites are honeypots, they take down a very small percentage of their users.

He faked his death like the Ken Lay of Enron.

Nobody rich goes to jail. If they do they payoff the DA, Cops and Corner.

The only exception is of Madoff but he was made example of because he jewed other jews.

like they are going to reveal the true power of X-Keyscore to the public.

Thanks, you calmed me down a bit and you are correct about Ross' op sec mistakes bringing about his demise.

Do you no also fear that dream or dhl could be future targets? Or did the agencies "blow their load" so to speak, and are hoping this news is enough to scare users?

It doesn't matter. Nobody who ever only used PGP and bitcoin has every been successfully prosecuted. As long as sites allow both, you are fine.

Yeah but remember the new AG is Jeff "when I gas all the drug users I'm gonna start with the pot smokers" Sessions

Except he has done nothing and Trump has been entirely unconcerned with social conservatism so far.

Yep, sounds like it. They should have found a different "excuse" this time.

I don't smoke cigarettes let alone drugs but I've always been fascinated by the darknet markets.
Can someone share any link to buy normal stuff like carrots or veggies or any other legal stuff?

When I visited darkweb in my teen days, I felt that place as overtly spooky and really weird. Sometimes I even had nightmares of stuff I saw there.

But what if the vendors pgp is replaced by an agency, and your address is readable by the government? Supposedly they altered vendors pgps on hansa with their own, to trick users into sending them their information.

They would have had to go in and manually replace the keys for every vendor on a huge website. Unlikely. Maybe on Hansa they did for a few big vendors, but I doubt that would reveal a lot of good info. On Silk Road they had the server flashed for a month or two I think before shutting it down and they did nothing of the sort. Vendors would notice if they had a different PGP key and orders would be unreadable so that would be noticed fast.

XKeyscore was supposedly/is used for email interception but only of unencrypted text and I assume only for providers they have a relationship with, gmail and such. Also that's only supposed to be used to intercept foreign intellegence and such. I'm sure they can read your gmail, but I don't think that means they have intercepted PGP or you would hear about a lot more arrests.

One of Ulbrichts motivations for creating Silk Road was a actually the idea for a free totally unregulated market. Kind of like an experiment.

>[email protected]
lol wtf

My understanding was that he had dropped out of graduate school and needed something to do. It was never clear whether he was using drugs at the time, but certainly not as much as his administrators, a couple of whom died from Heroin. Also, I remember part of the story being he grew mushrooms and wanted to sell them. There was an interesting article about the cyclical nature of markets that internet drug sales had always existed, his was just the most advanced system for incorporating darknet and bitcoin.

Yea I read about his Economics thought.
I consider him as a Visionary niceguy but he got caught.

I watched a documentary based on him. His parents are quite brave.

>Dream Market
Is that the next one to get pwned?

Fuck You jeff Sessions

>[email protected]

Dude whenever I watch his moms interviews I just try to imagine my mom in that situation. She would crack, no way she would handle it like ross' mom has.

So he was a libertarian fag. I heard some crooked FBI agent managed to steal MILLIONS in bc + some guy was shaking down DPR for like mad moneys as well.

Yes, this is really him

It appears to be the largest one that is still functioning.

There are two ways for a market to die, the owners run off with the money, or the feds seize it.

>muh Agorism

They would never shut up about it. Had some pretty smart people involved though.

DEA agent I think. He went to jail though.

nytimes.com/2015/03/31/nyregion/silk-road-case-federal-agents-charges.html

Yeah, one dea agent posed as a hells angels biker and carried out fake hits for ross in exchange for Bitcoin.

The agents, Carl Mark Force IV, who worked for the Drug Enforcement Administration, and Shaun W. Bridges, who worked for the Secret Service, had resigned amid growing scrutiny, and on Monday they were charged with money laundering and wire fraud. Mr. Force was also charged with theft of government property and conflict of interest.

While investigating Silk Road, Mr. Force “stole and converted to his own personal use a sizable amount of Bitcoins,” the digital currency that was used by buyers and sellers on the website and which he obtained in his undercover capacity, the complaint said.


“Rather than turning those Bitcoin over to the government, Force deposited them into his own personal accounts,” it added.

Mr. Bridges, meanwhile, who was described as a computer forensics expert, diverted to a personal account more than $800,000 in digital currency that he gained control of during the Silk Road investigation, the authorities said.

The complaint described both former agents as members of a Baltimore-based task force that investigated Silk Road. The website had been the subject of investigations in several cities. A Manhattan-based investigation ultimately led to the filing of charges against the website’s founder, Ross W. Ulbricht, who was convicted last month on numerous counts.

The only part of the story unclear is if he was paranoid because he was on drugs (Ross).

What drugs was ross suspected of being on? Speed or something?

And do you believe the transcripts of him ordering the hits to be real?

He also had 10 cars.

And killed himself at 25.

Some people aren't very smart.

No he wasn't suspected of being on them. I heard a story that he started Silk Road to sell shrooms he grow but the general impression was that he was fairly normal, perhaps drank and smoked pot, but wasn't into the harder drugs and research chemicals that delighted most of his staff.

I doubt that is actually him.

You are probably right. Not long ago they ahd to release thousands of pedophiles because they would have had to disclose how they found incriminating evidence.

>Officials said they had found Mr. Cazes because he posted his personal email address, [email protected], in some early messages from AlphaBay.

Loose lips sink ships

As is the same with Ross, he seems like an exceptionally gifted kid who, because physically is removed from the situation, ended up getting in way deeper than he meant to or had the balls to initially.

Idk how any of these guys operating dark net markets expect to cash out that much Bitcoin without getting caught

That is him, it comes up when you search his "pimp" hotmail email lol. Compared to his picture from LinkedIn it pretty similar.

>My understanding was that he had dropped out of graduate school and needed something to do. It was never clear whether he was using drugs at the time, but certainly not as much as his administrators, a couple of whom died from Heroin. Also, I remember part of the story being he grew mushrooms and wanted to sell them. There was an interesting article about the cyclical nature of markets that internet drug sales had always existed, his was just the most advanced system for incorporating darknet and bitcoin.
Didn't he try first a legal online business? I think is was something with used books?
Then when he realised that this woudl be a fuckton of work and not much profi he changes his focus to the illegal markets?
I don't remember rn the libertarian theorist he liked to quote.
I think the whole theory / experiment with the free market was more an excuse.
He wanted to make money and try something exciting imho.

All drug users need to spend time in jail.

>I'm not sure what to make of that
Mr. Cazes was a nobody who wanted to play in the Big Boys League, made relatively large sum of money in short period of time with little to no risk from something which would put dozens of people for 10,000 years in prison.

All the facade aside, system is ruthless when it comes to punishment. Maybe he knew something or someone he shouldn't, idk, here in Poland people like him are sent into 24/7 'surveillance' cells and hang themselves in 30 square centimeters camera's blind spot

Yes. Goodwagon Books. Mises. He called himself an agonist. They had a book club.

newsweek.com/key-moments-life-silk-road-creator-ross-ulbricht-307815

youtu.be/HYShi9dhhJY

I made so much money through AB. I feel bad for him. He lived my ideology to the fullest.

Press F

been there, done that.

some people are afraid to go out on a limb.
some people are not.

You appear to be the former. What's the matter, batshit insanity too scary for you?

He didn't learn from how the silkroad guy got caught. Sad.
These people need to use a flash drive as part of their encryption key and have it tied to their wrist.
Police raid, yell hands up and out comes the only thing keeping you logged in. I'm sure they would rather "forget their password because stress" than get caught.

That's actually pretty sweet. Good Lord.

I really don't get why he killed himself. Surely he would get less than Ross (assuming he never solicited any murders for hire).

I had $120 in bitcoins on AB when it was taken down

Are they gone for good?
Shame because I was about to order 60 hits of acid

>both buttons on his jacket buttoned
You can have all the btc in the world but you can't buy class or style.

Who is that pictured?

Ross was tackled very carefully in a library with his laptop open to avoid that problem. I believed he used a usb based linux that disappears without the flash but he didn't have it tied to his wrist.

Only 2 dollars a hit now? Certainly those sites have democratized the prices.

Alexander Cazes aka alpha02 aka the admin of alpha bay and the guy who "hung" himself in Thai prison last week.

Interesting. Did he have any social media accounts?

youtu.be/XEdEr8CfF8o

Yea, too bad I missed out right before it was taken down

Wow.

Way more sophisticated than SR1.

I don't understand you even dear this shit.
Here you do it through people you know

I've lurked all these sites for keks and comparison, but would never use it

>I'm gonna dress the same way everyone does
>but you guys have no style
You're the reason tailors stopped putting the bottom button. Try to find your own style instead of mimicking others, shitlord.

Ordering from the Netherlands to us is sketchy fyi

Surely it's just 1P

I highly down anyone's dropped the price of real acid to a dollar a hit for regular folk

Plus nobody's going to break down a gram into an amount like 110ug a hit. This means they broke down a gram and a tenth every pack, but for what? To say they have more in each hit? Naw.

It fits him like shit though

Yeah, it's too small for him, plus the fabric is shit.

You guys know this guy got murk'd, right? it wasn't a suicide.

I'm pretty sure the FBI (or some low-ish yet still fairly high gov agency) seized servers, and found quite a bit more than just Alphabay related stuff. prob some CIA shenanigans (i.e. pedo blackmail, human trafficking, or weapons stuff) in one form or another. in order to tie up looses ends, they aired it as solely Alphabay bust, ad then kill the admin. case closed. never hear a peep about whatever else they found.

either that, or they're just using this for publicity, like they did with the first SR site. ever notice the BTC price skyrocket shortly following all the news coverage of SR1/Ross trial? it's not an accident.

So was it Alpha or DeSnake that killed himself?

If I were that rich, living in Thailand, I'm sure I'd have a contingency plan in place or something. Maybe he bribed a guard and is in Belize.

Alpha02
justice.gov/opa/pr/alphabay-largest-online-dark-market-shut-down

Ross was going to run off to Dominica I believe when he was captured.

I still cannot believe for how bright Ross was, that he operated out of the United States.

>Had he used pgp and throwaway emails he would not have gotten caught
>what is parallel construction
They just found plausible explanation with his opsec weakness after they found him with other methods.

who knows. it wouldn't surprise me if the email thing had been planned since the start, though. a perfect little breadcrumb. nobody, even a noob, is that retarded. ESPECIALLY after Ross. I wouldn't doubt the guy was little more than a high level "smurf" as well, buying various properties, cars, posing in silly stupid photos all for use by the group operating behind the scenes. I'd be incredibly curious to know what was going on in his properties all the time he's not there....they were in quite a few different countries. sounds like CIA to me

anyway what we are seeing IS the contingency plan. maybe not necessarily his contingency plan, but somebody's.

read up on the Son of Sam killings. it was done by a group, not an individual, and the story the public got was the contingency plan. the orchestration is absolutely insane. it's the same thing going on here.

I'm inclined to agree.