Lord777
Professional
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The Darknet is a great place to engage in illegal activities, because with the right approach, you are technically anonymous.
However, there are two things to keep in mind:
SE in TOR
As well as "on the street", working undercover in the TOP is very effective. In 2014, an arms dealer was identified in the United States and continued to make transactions from his account on the site. And then they arrested everyone to whom they themselves sent weapons.
On the first in the TOP trading platform Silk Road, the authorities took possession of the account of a person from the site's team, and when the founder of the site, Ross Ulbricht, was arrested, they received an offer to work in the SilkRoad 2 team in direct contact with the founders on their hijacked account, and they immediately closed the site, having made more several arrests.
For half a year, the Australian authorities pretended to be the administrator of a child pornography site, where the users themselves uploaded original content, until all at once were imprisoned.
Hacking
The FBI programmers first caught the Playpen site admin server configuration error (with child pornography), calculated his IP, arrested everyone, and launched a virus on the site that, when clicking on the site, forces the user to give out his real IP address ; collected 1000 addresses in the United States and 3000 more in Europe, arrested 135 people.
The moderator of another similar site was sent a video with a built-in virus, upon clicking on which all its traffic went through the regular Internet.
In 2014, a group of programmers found a vulnerability in the TOP itself (of course, quickly fixed), which led to the closure of several stores.
It's not for nothing that the bosses of the Mexican cartels dislike high technology. How can tech people figure you out if you don't even use your phone? And darknet users should learn the basics of online security (start here). It is better to use a separate device for business with a system on a USB flash drive and a mobile modem and not go anywhere else from it.
Publicly available information
If a person is engaged in illegal on the darknet, he can still inherit on the regular Internet. Ross Ulbricht, who became fabulously rich on Silk Road, must have taken online safety seriously. But all his efforts went to waste when he, having unsubscribed on the legal forum in the clearnet, for some reason entered his mail in the e-mail line for illegal connections (autocomplete and inattention?). As a result, he became a suspect after a simple Google search.
And one comrade who traded marijuana under the nickname caliconnect decided to stake the name as an official trademark so that no one could legally use it.
Mass surveillance
Internet providers are obliged to install hardware for themselves at their own expense, which records and analyzes traffic. Of course, small players are not particularly interested in anyone, but given that your provider knows when you are using the TOP (if you do not hide it using bridges or VPN) and sees what you are reading through a regular browser, theoretically you can get into some list of unreliable, which is sometimes targeted to monitor for illegal activity. Small players at this level are of no interest to anyone, but try not to google "special" kind of information from under a regular browser.
In the first 30 months after the launch of such a system in Britain, ~ 50 pedophiles were individually calculated by reading what people are interested in.
Information on sites and at traders
A man in Germany was fined for mail ordering marijuana three years ago. We found out about this, having caught the operator, and he kept the details of the buyers' orders.
In order not to drown with the site or the trader who comes across, encrypt your personal data using PGP - saved messages with, for example, a delivery address, will look like a set of random characters. And the unencrypted address in the correspondence can be seen by simply gaining access to the account of the seller to whom you unsubscribed. Insist on using PGP when sharing personal information with merchants.
Money transfers
Bitcoin is not anonymous, but a pseudonym. Anonymity - when every single action of the same person cannot be linked together, for example, posts on an anonymous forum. Pseudonymity - when posts are written under the same nickname, but the nickname is not associated with the real name. The mechanics of bitcoin (blockchain) work allows you to theoretically trace the fate of every penny and transaction from every wallet. Vasya translated for Pete, Petya translated for Nastya, etc. Imagine that every time someone gives money to someone, the names of both, the time of the transaction, and the numbers of all the bills appear in the public database. By default, of course, no one knows who these people are, but, as you already understood, the authorities have ways.
It was this feature of bitcoin that became evidence in the trial of an agent of the US Secret Service, during the investigation on the Silk Road, who stole ~ 13,000 bitcoins from there. He brought them to the exchange, where he was registered under his own name, and the court proved that these are the same bitcoins.
However, there are two things to keep in mind:
- Don't underestimate law enforcement. With a strong desire, they can attract the most modern technology and the best specialists and set up rather ingenious traps.
- Do not underestimate human laziness and stupidity. The fact that you are on the dark web through the TOP does not automatically make you invulnerable to organs; having relaxed, you can extremely ineptly squander your anonymity.
SE in TOR
As well as "on the street", working undercover in the TOP is very effective. In 2014, an arms dealer was identified in the United States and continued to make transactions from his account on the site. And then they arrested everyone to whom they themselves sent weapons.
On the first in the TOP trading platform Silk Road, the authorities took possession of the account of a person from the site's team, and when the founder of the site, Ross Ulbricht, was arrested, they received an offer to work in the SilkRoad 2 team in direct contact with the founders on their hijacked account, and they immediately closed the site, having made more several arrests.
For half a year, the Australian authorities pretended to be the administrator of a child pornography site, where the users themselves uploaded original content, until all at once were imprisoned.
Hacking
The FBI programmers first caught the Playpen site admin server configuration error (with child pornography), calculated his IP, arrested everyone, and launched a virus on the site that, when clicking on the site, forces the user to give out his real IP address ; collected 1000 addresses in the United States and 3000 more in Europe, arrested 135 people.
The moderator of another similar site was sent a video with a built-in virus, upon clicking on which all its traffic went through the regular Internet.
In 2014, a group of programmers found a vulnerability in the TOP itself (of course, quickly fixed), which led to the closure of several stores.
It's not for nothing that the bosses of the Mexican cartels dislike high technology. How can tech people figure you out if you don't even use your phone? And darknet users should learn the basics of online security (start here). It is better to use a separate device for business with a system on a USB flash drive and a mobile modem and not go anywhere else from it.
Publicly available information
If a person is engaged in illegal on the darknet, he can still inherit on the regular Internet. Ross Ulbricht, who became fabulously rich on Silk Road, must have taken online safety seriously. But all his efforts went to waste when he, having unsubscribed on the legal forum in the clearnet, for some reason entered his mail in the e-mail line for illegal connections (autocomplete and inattention?). As a result, he became a suspect after a simple Google search.
And one comrade who traded marijuana under the nickname caliconnect decided to stake the name as an official trademark so that no one could legally use it.
Mass surveillance
Internet providers are obliged to install hardware for themselves at their own expense, which records and analyzes traffic. Of course, small players are not particularly interested in anyone, but given that your provider knows when you are using the TOP (if you do not hide it using bridges or VPN) and sees what you are reading through a regular browser, theoretically you can get into some list of unreliable, which is sometimes targeted to monitor for illegal activity. Small players at this level are of no interest to anyone, but try not to google "special" kind of information from under a regular browser.
In the first 30 months after the launch of such a system in Britain, ~ 50 pedophiles were individually calculated by reading what people are interested in.
Information on sites and at traders
A man in Germany was fined for mail ordering marijuana three years ago. We found out about this, having caught the operator, and he kept the details of the buyers' orders.
In order not to drown with the site or the trader who comes across, encrypt your personal data using PGP - saved messages with, for example, a delivery address, will look like a set of random characters. And the unencrypted address in the correspondence can be seen by simply gaining access to the account of the seller to whom you unsubscribed. Insist on using PGP when sharing personal information with merchants.
Money transfers
Bitcoin is not anonymous, but a pseudonym. Anonymity - when every single action of the same person cannot be linked together, for example, posts on an anonymous forum. Pseudonymity - when posts are written under the same nickname, but the nickname is not associated with the real name. The mechanics of bitcoin (blockchain) work allows you to theoretically trace the fate of every penny and transaction from every wallet. Vasya translated for Pete, Petya translated for Nastya, etc. Imagine that every time someone gives money to someone, the names of both, the time of the transaction, and the numbers of all the bills appear in the public database. By default, of course, no one knows who these people are, but, as you already understood, the authorities have ways.
It was this feature of bitcoin that became evidence in the trial of an agent of the US Secret Service, during the investigation on the Silk Road, who stole ~ 13,000 bitcoins from there. He brought them to the exchange, where he was registered under his own name, and the court proved that these are the same bitcoins.
