Silk Road 2.0 creators used personal email on site
12 replies, posted
[quote]The FBI arrested 26-year-old San Francisco tech worker Blake Benthall on Wednesday, accusing him of running the infamous deep web marketplace the Silk Road. Court documents for the seizure of both the original Silk Road and the Silk Road 2.0 show that the site's two alleged operators made the same error that enabled authorities to link them to the site. Ross Ulbricht, the San Francisco resident accused of creating the original Silk Road, allegedly used a Silk Road user account which was registered to his personal email address.
The [email]rossulbricht@gmail.com[/email] email account was also posted on the Bitcoin Talk forum as contact information for a poster looking to hire "an IT pro in the Bitcoin community." Ulbricht was caught in part due to the links between his personal Gmail account and other online accounts. It was trivially easy for investigators to string together usernames and IP addresses, with the help of information and IP logs obtained from Google. The records show that Ulbricht regularly logged into a VPN service in a San Francisco internet café. On the same days he was allegedly using the VPN to mask his web traffic to the Silk Road's administrative dashboard, Google's records showed that he also checked his personal Gmail account.
The FBI briefly took the Silk Road 2.0's servers offline in order to make a copy (known as an "image") of the site. Because of the way the hosting account was set up, it fired off a series of emails to a pre-determined address in order to detail the site's downtime. Those emails, the FBI claim, went to [email]blake@benthall.net[/email], the personal email account of the San Francisco web developer accused of running the site.
Benthall used his personal email account to manage the web hosting account that the FBI says was used to keep the Silk Road 2.0 online. Additionally, he used that email address to create an account on a US-based Bitcoin exchange, and received his first transaction on the very day that the Silk Road 2.0 came online.
As the Daily Dot reports, Google again turned over IP logs and account information, this time for Benthall's personal email account, to the FBI, revealing Benthall's name and location information. It was obvious who owned the account: The email address was [email]blake@benthall.net[/email], it was registered to "Blake Benthall," and IP logs show that it was accessed from Las Vegas and Lake Tahoe hotel rooms reserved under the name "Blake Benthall."
There's no denying that Ulbricht and Benthall were clever men, after all, the FBI accuses them both of running a complex deep web marketplace. Both men are alleged to have used modern anonymity services, and took care to anonymize their currency movements online. But it was the simple mistake of using their personal email accounts for activities related to the Silk Road that made the FBI's job easy, and likely led directly to their capture.[/quote]
Read more: [url]http://www.businessinsider.com/both-men-accused-of-running-the-silk-road-made-the-same-mistake-2014-11#ixzz3IQJXmND8[/url]
[editline]7th November 2014[/editline]
you'd think they would have taken more care.
Given the amount of precautions they must have been using in general that is incredibly sloppy.
What a bunch of morons. Especially after the way the first Silk Road got taken down. No internet trickery, just plain detective work. You'd think running one of the world's largest online drug marketplaces would make them paranoid. It was always a rumor that the people running it were incompetent but no one had an idea of the degree.
[quote]Benthall was taken into custody in San Francisco on Wednesday, but is being charged in the Southern District of New York. The investigation was run by the New York FBI and the office of Homeland Security Investigations, which had an undercover agent who "successfully infiltrated the support staff involved in the administration of the Silk Road 2.0 website, and was given access to private, restricted areas of the site," the release said.[/quote]
[url]http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/11/06/blake-benthall-silk-road_n_6115188.html[/url]
The criminal complaint is also in the link
And this is why the Tor Project advises to change habits if you want to stay truly anonymous.
Rookie mistake
Quite brain-dead for someone running a 8 million dollar a month drug business.
He didn't use it on the site. He used it to rent the server.
[editline]8th November 2014[/editline]
Though that's still pretty dumb.
"w-We didn't know it was illegal"
So has it been really proven that they're really the ones running the thing? If I'd make a complex deep web service, I'd plan everything out and use misleading identifiable information below anonymous services in case the anonymity breaks.
[quote]allegedly used a Silk Road user account which was registered to his personal email address.[/quote]
You're on a black market, why the hell are you using a personal email address?
Facepalming so hard.
How incredibly fucking stupid.
[QUOTE=Spacewolf;46434649]Given the amount of precautions they must have been using in general that is incredibly sloppy.[/QUOTE]
Only reason the original Slik road went down was because the owner got arrested for something unrelated.
They weren't exactly expecting the FBI to break Tor and take down 450 servers over night.
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