[tor-talk] Silk Road taken down by FBI

[mirimir]

On 10/04/2013 03:01 PM, Ted Smith wrote:

> On Fri, 2013-10-04 at 03:22 +0000, mirimir wrote:
>> OK, I just read the Maryland complaint. It's obvious what happened.
>>
>> An FBI undercover agent contacted him, wanting to sell large
>> quantities
>> of cocaine. He found a buyer, and delegated the details to his
>> employee.
>> Said employee had full admin access to his servers.
>>
>> His employee then provided his ACTUAL PHYSICAL ADDRESS to the
>> undercover
>> FBI agent. The FBI mailed 1 Kg (very highly cut) cocaine to said
>> employee, and arrested him on receipt. Said employee soon told the FBI
>> all that he knew.
> 
> The way I read it, it seemed like the address was for a SR vendor, not
> for the employee (they use the names VENDOR and EMPLOYEE in the
> complaint).

We're both right. I just reread pp. 4-5 of the Maryland complaint. It
says: "The Vendor provided the UC with an address to which to ship the
cocaine, an address which federal agents later determined was the
residence of the Employee."

So it seems that Employee was pretending to be the Vendor. Or maybe they
lived together. Strange.

> How did the employee get arrested?

The UC had a shipping address for the Vendor. So the FBI was at that
address when the cocaine was delivered. And so they arrested the
Employee (and maybe also the Vendor, if different person).