Comment by patio11 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by patio11 | Hacker News Reader

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In this scenario, the extortionist and the drug dealer are the same party. The goal of the scam isn't extort $500k. That number is as real as my uncle's Nigerian inheritance. The goal is to extort the mark of $150k, and make him a) maximally disinclined to attempt to tell about the scam (by making him complicit in a "murder", much like 419 scammers generally try to make the marks complicit in defrauding Nigeria) and b) give the scammers the opportunity to come after him again, in the future. (One possible scenario: the "hitman" "hired" by the "drug dealer" for the "murder" attempts to shake down DPR in the future, threatening to expose his involvement in the murder unless he is paid off. The hitman is still the drug dealer is still the extortionist.)

The game theory of scam artists is really simple: your expected probability of scam N+1 working goes way the heck up if you've successfully worked that mark in scam N. That's why you can literally find people selling lists of folks who've fallen for 419 scams.

I'm saying from DPR's point, was it that bad of a move? Face total failure or $500K payment (with no guarantee of not getting hassled later), versus a $150K payment that lasted a while?

Edit: To to clear, DPR could have well assumed it was the same party and figured this was one way to negotiate, instead of saying "ok, how about $200K instead of $500K"?

> I'm saying from DPR's point, was it that bad of a move?

I guess it depends on whether you're factoring in the "on trial for attempted murder" angle.

Why would you believe that someone has compromised thousands of your users without evidence? It's the sort of thing you'd naturally expect someone to lie about. Furthermore, if such were the case, it would be egregiously stupid of Ulbricht not to change the way he protects user identities, and there's no indication he did that either.

After all, if friendlychemist did in fact have information on thousands of drug dealers, he ought to be able to get a pretty good asking price from the government, so why would he even contact Ulbricht in this scenario?

Does the government normally pay out hundreds of thousands of dollars for that kind of info? If so, I may need to start thinking about a career change...

Claim says he had info on about 2 dozen drug dealers not thousands, and that he had info on about 5 thousands buyers.

FriendlyChemist was a vendor who somehow had a falling out, and decided to try and extort DPR who probably yanked his account. He said he would release all the information he kept on people he shipped drugs to, for the sole purpose of creating instability and FUD in the market by dropping identities all over the forums.

What DPR should have done is had his team of admins hellban the guy everytime he tried to spam the forums with names so he could waste his time however DPR never seemed to give a shit about the forum even though it was his brand being represented there.

This is why Max Vision spied on all his buyers/users because if they ever tried to extort him in the same manner he would promptly reveal that he's been inside their systems for months and knew exactly who they were.

Nigerian American here

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