So the top seller on SR sold 2kg of coke, 0,5kg of heroin and 100g of meth in nearly half a year? You can imagine all the Tony Montanas of this world lifting their eyes up from their coffers each filled with 100 times that amount of drugs, before erupting with maniacal laughter and proceeding to bribe more politicians into perpetuating the digital arm of this war.
320,000$ revenue in 5 months is not bad, considering that dealers of hard drugs at least double up on their investment. I can also think of vendors on SR that were moving a lot more weight than this, just based on their public feedback. Plus keep in mind that some of the largest vendors were not publicly listed.
Over 1 1/2 years ago, the vendor tony76 made off with over 100,000$ in a single week in one of the largest SR scams.
"According to the government, NOD had 1,400 reviews for individual sales/purchases of small amounts of drugs, including: 2,269.5 grams of cocaine, 593 grams of heroin and 105 grams of meth."
I may be naive, but is 2 kilos of cocaine really a "small amount of drugs"? Isn't that an amount that a drug dealer would buy, as opposed to a user?
According to this reference[1], a kilo of cocaine generally costs anywhere from $12,000 to $35,000.
That is the cumulative amounts that he sold I believe, which means that through 1,400 reviews the actual amount per sale is quite small (as they note, individual amounts per sale not bulk sales).
If you're talking about the course of a year or two of sales, sales in the 10s and even 100s of thousands isn't all that much if you consider the profit margin. What kind of volume do you think an eBay or Amazon seller does in a year to make $100k?
The complaint notes that these amounts don’t count sales
going back more than five months prior to the investigation
The volume estimated is only for a 5 month period, not the defendants' entire careers. Drug dealers have much higher margins than eBay sellers, according to one source earning a 200% markup (66% profit margin) splitting up kilos of cocaine [1]
Looking at the reddit thread [0] referenced in the article I am really suprised about how openly those redditors are talking about illegal drug purchases (incl. personal experiences, etc). Aren't they worried that they might be investigated?
I'm not. Police don't usually go after small time users. Any good city cop can find a trap house and pinpoint the crack heads going in and out. It's a waste of resources to arrest them though, they want the distributors.
BUT I also never thought they would bust SR dealers...
Article shows a "Thor Data Center" in Iceland. This looked awfully familiar and it turned out to be owned by Advania: http://www.advania.com/datacentres
What this doesn't say, is how they tracked the guy after the intercept. My guess is that they somehow cracked more of the security than we have been lead to believe...
Read the complaint PDF. Basically when they started finding stuff in the mail, they noticed most packages looked pretty similar. Went down to the post office where some of them were being shipped from, told them to keep an eye out for similar packages. Didn't take them long to track down a couple of people who were posting them, etc, etc.
Even if the buyer had been strongarmed by the feds into cooperating for a deal, I don't think they'd have much useful information to catch the seller with, apart from an account that the seller trusted that they could use to order more packages, and they would have used his testimony to link the activities of Sadler/White to the NOD account.
I guess that means they found several packages from this one guy, which means the intercept rate is above 0.1% (I guess not too hard to sniff drugs in the mail) - that shows that buying is not a very safe activity (especially regularly!). I find the whole thing fascinating, learning lots about security and police etc. Where's the link to the complaint PDF?
