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Comment by downandout | Hacker News Reader

Lessons learned:

1) Don't engage in businesses that make you a target of the world's best-funded law enforcement agencies.

2) If ignoring lesson 1, don't access servers directly, from home, and don't pay for said servers with personal credit card.

3) Don't pay for your $130K Tesla using BTC a month after you open up a massive illegal drug marketplace that runs exclusively on BTC. Someone may suspect something.

4) When cashing in your ill-gotten gains, don't use your real name.

Seriously, if you're going to do this kind of stuff, paranoia is your friend. "They" probably are, indeed, following you.

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Just how law enforcement agents were able to locate the Dark Web sites despite their use of the Tor anonymity software remains a looming mystery.

Do you happen to have a source for the "personal credit card" and "Tesla for BTC" lessons, or is this mere speculation?

Edit: Tesla downpayment documented in Blake Benthall Criminal Complaint: http://www.scribd.com/doc/245744857/Blake-Benthall-Criminal-...

The Ars Technica article at http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2014/11/silk-road-2-0-inf... has the quote:

> "The server was controlled and maintained during the relevant time by an individual using the email account 'blake@benthall.net,'"

Since he used his personal e-mail for hosting, I would assume he used his personal credit card too.

That might be right, but there are tens of thousands of people who use their personal email and credit card to buy hosting services. You can't assume they all operate Silk Road 2.x

You're spot on with the Tesla comment. How does the government bust every big drug trafficker, mafioso, or fraudster? Answer: tax evasion. It might be hard to prove in court that this kid was behind SR2 but it's easy to prove that he pulled $70K out of thin air for a Tesla and never paid taxes on that income. Easy federal prison sentence.

You can easily do this in Brazil. Incompetence is so widespread that the data center will need years before they know what you're doing there.

Law enforcement doesn't have a single idea of how to operate on the internet, being the most recent proof of that the fact that the NSA spied on our president's email for years without anyone noticing it.

Just keep your distance from drug cartels, politicians and banks and you'll be safe.

You'd do well to just avoid the U.S. of A. (and friends, I guess). Take those profits and go somewhere safe and manage your newfound business from there. That could be one of the reasons some of the larger markets are still standing.

Ignore the fact that the entire West is working together at your peril.

They catch Russian carding marketplace admins all the time so living in Brazil or Russia is no guarantee you won't end up in jail either. Just takes one mistake and you are on a plane in handcuffs to a federal court. They could bribe local police to pick you up for them too especially if you aren't politically connected in those countries.

if you are russian and living in russia they will not extradite you and as long as you are not targeting russians the police will not care that is why many of these carders dont get arrested and if they do it is usually when they leave russia.

And let's be honest, if one were to go to jail in the US, Brazil, or Russia, especially as a (formerly) wealthy American, the US is an order of magnitude better than the other two.

Actually most wealthy people live like a king in prison, and if the crime is a financial crime they end up in house arrest after only a short prison term ALWAYS.

Actually, Brazil has very tight control on financial transactions that take place in the country. Especially international transactions are closely monitored. I heard this is the reason why Paypal took so long to get here. In addition, I've read many news which point out close cooperation between Brazilian police and foreign agencies. I think a shady BTC millionaire would have a short run in here, unless he was very insightful of the local system, as well as extremely cautious and creative with the way he handled money.

0) Don't engage in business someone else has a large interest on the status quo (drug distribution and sales).

I can't tell if this means anything.

As a guess, it probably means that cartels and the DEA make tons of money fighting each other, and joining or interfering in that fight is a generally bad idea as an independent third party.

You forgot big pharma.

Also trust no one and don't give other people you don't know access to your personal details or the server that hosts the website. They could be (and in this case were) Law Enforcement.

Forgot to mention bragging, that is one thing people like that tend to do, in due time.

This gives me an interesting thought for a startup. Provide training and testing for law enforcement for these scenarios. Would also give you the chance to outsmart law enforcement without getting arrested.

Doesn't palantir basically just do this for them?

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