Dream - The Infiltration Of The Dark Net

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This reminds me that you mentioned the Silk Road when that happened, uh, we thought. that was going to have a big impact, but this is an economy, uh, that kind of movement moves to the right and two other sites appear, the new site has the same name and the same appearance on Twitter on Wednesday, the routes of silk, the supposed new operator announced the silk road. is back deja vu anyone we resurrect an fbi agent invaded a san francisco home and arrested a man calling himself this next story is one that has caught the world's attention a canadian man who died while in custody in a Thai prison is now accused of being an online kingpin he is going to build a fortune as the mastermind of the world's largest illegal online market again, as in the previous scenario, no market has been able to take the position of now, it has been a while since we talked about the clandestine world.

Of the

dark

net markets, however, that's not to say that there isn't much more to talk about, as this topic is so vast that you could literally spend all day and night speculating on particular markets and the various mysteries surrounding them. the world of cybercriminals and if there is anything that has become evident with the Silk Road is that taking down one market guarantees the emergence of many other dark markets soon after and I am sure that many people are not even aware of the fact that the silk road didn't even exist. The first was actually the Farmers Market which launched in 2006 and then went on tour in 2010 and the site wasn't seized until 2012, making it technically one of the longest running digital illicit markets to this day. today and I must say that it is an incredible feat for six years longer than any crypto market using Western Union and Paypal and in the context of the early history of the Internet, it is believed that the first transactions that took place by using Networked computers were Stanford students who used Arpanet to contact MIT students to organize flour collection Now, the reason I mention this is because, while darknet markets may be relatively new, the use of technology to facilitate the narcotics trade is not and has simply evolved over time and changed the rules of the game.

Law enforcement has evolved along with it, for example the use of cryptocurrency and Tor are just tools that have been adopted that have created another distribution route and every time cybercriminals adopt new tools it creates new rules on how the metagame works. and as a result, this has created a very, very predictable life cycle for how these markets eventually come to an end. While I touched on this a bit in my Empire Market video, I'll reiterate myself once again and say that there are really only two ways. that a darknet market will close, but to give you a general idea, let's review the average life cycle of a darknet market.

The beginning of the market cycle will begin with the founding of the site, where the goal is to build trust with users by providing them with good service, generally the first zero to three months are dedicated to onboarding suppliers and trying to have a wide variety of products available. However, I will point out that some sites are usually never created with the intention of selling anything, but rather to capitalize on the fact that another site has gone out of business, at which point everyone leaves the old market and comes to the new one, they will take the money of all and will get out of the scam, but assuming they intend to stay for a long time, the vast majority of them will still be gone within 4 to 8 months, as those initial months will dictate the ability of the market managers during this period of time, you will find that many darknet sites will succumb to hacking or voluntary shutdown if a darknet site manages to survive more than a year.

They rarely close due to the result of hacking, as the site administrators have usually earned enough to reinvest in the security of their own site, but if a marketplace manages to get past this point is when you will often find that there are actually only two results. the first way is that law enforcement will compromise the site and lead to the arrest of operators like silk road and the second way is that the administrators of a darknet market will do what is called an exit scam, such as the Empire. which I also made a video about the forever and DNM traders are at all times just one mistake away from completely blowing their cover, furthermore, the longer the market is operating, the greater the risk that, over time, those involved will generally be trapped.

It doesn't matter how good you are at operational security when you're a human being who can make mistakes, so the goal of many involved in the dark debt markets is to get in and out of the scam and make a lot of money, but Among all the other markets that have come and gone in exactly the same way, there is a market. has had a slightly different set of revelations and that is what today's video focuses on: the market we are going to talk about today is the market of

dream

s and to this day, even though this market closed as one of the oldest and one of the largest at any given time, no definitive answer has ever been given as to why this market was closed and as I said a moment ago, there are really only two reasons why a darknet market will close assuming it sees this level of success and What was quite peculiar about Dream Market was that the site administrators closed down and allowed people to withdraw their money from the market and not only did they announce their closure but they announced it a month before so that everyone could get their money back considering the fact.

That those administrators would have had to risk five and a half years to build trust in that site, naturally one has to wonder why they would give away millions of dollars in the end if they didn't get out of the scam. The only other option would be for them to be compromised by law enforcement and as far as the official record is concerned, there was only one arrest of a prominent vendor and lead moderator in 2017, but what is quite strange is that the marketplace closed in 2019 and this The premise is what we are going to discuss today because once you understand the full context of the

dream

market, it begins to point out that something very peculiar is happening on the dark web.

Now when it comes to the files related to the dream market, I will note that it is nowhere to be found. almost as extensive as the Silk Road, where basically every supplier identity was separated and analyzed bit by bit into complete archives, but in the case of Dream Market it's just a few articles over the years and a brief entry of Wikipedia, and that may have been one of Due to the market's stronger characteristics, was able to maintain a relatively low profile in its early years and its humble beginnings were easily overshadowed by the theatrical collapse of the Silk Road and the hectic news cycle that followed the dream market launched in November 2013 through use. from deep.wabba with the site operator under the pseudonym speed stepper and a dream was just one of the many markets that were popping up during this time, which made it very easy to get lost in the noise when the new wave of markets appeared. the dark web. appeared on the scene during the deep web era.

Now, during this period, the barrier to entry for creating a dark debt market was low and as a result, it created a massive influx into short-lived markets by cybercriminals with little to no experience. and the desire to make a lot of money in a short time and the reason why I call it the era of the deep web is because a review site basically simplified the process of connecting markets with buyers on the surface web, this made this industry grow tremendously clandestine and put laws. Law enforcement was behind it for several years essentially playing whack-a-mole and to understand why this happened, if you are familiar with the history of the Silk Road market, think about how Ross Ulbrich first announced the Silk Road. of the silk and acted as if he had just bumped into it. a random website and was vouching for its legitimacy on shroomery.org, a sketchy web forum, and realistically all the feds needed was a trip to Google to find the nickname.

Altoid was the first person to mention the site's existence on the surface web, now naturally. This was just one of Ross Ulbricht's many operational security failures, but it would also have been a hurdle for anyone else at the time. Marketing a dark web site requires some degree of word of mouth marketing and people to ensure the trustworthiness of the site. in authenticity and before the end of 2013 there were no efficient ways for markets to get started without leaving some sort of paper trail. Webb, acting as a link aggregator for various hidden services, essentially became a solution to this very obstacle and soon after.

The review site quickly became a multi-million dollar funnel, taking people from the surface web to the dark web and educating them on marketplaces to buy from, but ultimately, as it gained popularity, now anyone as of 2013 It had the cover of the review site. To speed up the spread and lay the groundwork for seeing how the existence of dream markets fits into the broad spectrum of things, let me share with you how hilariously hectic everything was due to the fall of the Silk Road and the opportunity that everyone was taking advantage online. to become the next fearsome pirate roberts now, as a general note, what I'm about to go over is by no means the entire history of the dark web and the various markets that came and went, but these are just a few that I found.

It's interesting and how they relate to our story, but as of September 2013, Atlantis, the first exchange to accept the Litecoin exit, was scammed a week before the Silk Road was raided about a month later, another market with the name black flag project with a trader who was also called metadread pirate roberts, he got scammed and I want you to keep in mind that every time a market goes down, it creates another opportunity for another exit scam to appear right after, but Moving on to the next major exit scam come from the sheep market which managed to absorb a lot of market share after the Silk Road fell.

A vulnerability was found in a cheap market that led two users to steal around four and a half million. These transactions were later traced back to Coinbase in 2016 and two men from Florida were arrested and ended up losing the money. Furthermore, the sheep market manager who took the rest of the money left in the escrow was later arrested and sent to prison for nine years. However, it is worth noting that approximately 40 million in total were stolen from the sheep market to the state, although authorities are tracking several purchases made by the creator of the sheet market, they still do not know what happened to the rest. from the user's funds, perhaps my favorite excuse came from 2013. from a market called black market reloaded who after winningPopularity quickly declared that there were too many customers and too little competition, which made them the only target of the authorities at the time when, naturally, they also got scammed in the face of 2014, the silk.

Road launched with version 2.0 alongside Agora Marketplace at the beginning of the year, shortly after another marketplace by the name of Utopia was launched for just eight days until the Dutch authorities managed to take it down, and while you might think that marketplace was A short lived marketplace called Black Goblin takes the cake as the owner announced the launch of the site via Reddit and the site was hosted via an http that didn't use the Tor hidden service and basically didn't even protect the IP from your server. on clearnet, reddit users would modify the server IP in a matter of minutes and while this might seem like the worst attempt at a darknet market in history, I agree that another Market Flower Road managed to take second place and was also removed in a matter of days it was hacked through the use of SQL injections, which seems to indicate that the website operator had little to no knowledge about cybersecurity or even some of the more basic exploits and I believe it was even You could argue that there were a little too many markets appearing at this point so many people were hesitant to even touch them and to give you an example of what I'm talking about, one market that appeared on Reddit was called Breaking Bad.market this market had no a single sale and I think the name speaks for itself now just from the details that I have shared with you about the early years of the fallout of the silk roads and the deep dot network, you probably know that there was a lot going on and It gave way to a lot of noise that would make even paying attention to the dream market at the time highly unlikely, and in reality, as of late 2014, the dream market didn't even seem to have much momentum, as A Capture from the Wayback Machine shows that his first reviews on Deep Dot Web were made at the beginning of the year in 2015.

However, no one knew that a final event in 2014 would set a precedent for the current mystery surrounding the dream market years. Later, in the last 24 hours, there has been globally coordinated law enforcement activity targeting those people and those systems that use the dark web to carry out criminal activities. The notable event that occurred in late 2014 was the collapse of Silk Road 2 in an event called Operation Anonymous or the alternative name given by NCA as Project Protein, which was a collaborative effort of several law enforcement agencies. the law, including the department of homeland security ice and euro fbi nca europool, only to take down several darknet markets, the project was announced after the fact with the arrest of the operator of the silk road 2.0 market called Blake Benthal, a former SpaceX software engineer at the time he was arrested, was not suspiciously rich aside from his Tesla, which he bought using bitcoin before that existed and Blake Benthal was a 26-year-old coder involved in several startups. who lived in San Francisco and ran this at night and was accused of running Silk Road 2 under the name defcon, but I will point out that Silk Road 2 has problems as it was. started by several veterans of the old site where many of the other operators were arrested early on and the original dpr regarding silk road 2.0 ended up handing the site over to defcon around december 2013. and the man responsible for being a dpr2 In this case it was a man named Thomas White who was later arrested, but that was not the only thing that happened in November 2014 as Operation Anonymous announced over 400 hidden services seizures included in this particular event and I will take note from this.

At the time it appeared to mark the first operation involving collaboration between law enforcement agencies and raised many questions about the fact that so many raids could occur at once. The first trick is to identify where they are and there are some technical aspects that I can't share with them. their audience, but together we were able to identify these hidden services and some of the people behind them and then the idea was to coordinate this to do the arrest simultaneously and also the takedown so that they can't warn each other because as soon as you do something on this network dark you will get warnings for everyone and they will be disconnected, so of course we had to act very, very quickly.

This was the goal of having all these member states here and then doing it simultaneously and we have shown that we are actually very very good at cooperating, we couldn't say this a year ago, but the international police corporation has really improved a lot, so I am very optimistic because this is the first operation and more will follow and these websites have really been taken down, haven't they? you can still operate within these areas of the dark web, these websites that we have identified have been removed, you will see a site called removal where you will see that if you try to buy medicines from your usual service provider, you will see that No, no, we have charge on this side and it's down, so all the infrastructure is gone too.

We hope this is a significant blow to them as well. Of course, they can repair it. The ones we haven't captured can work again, but then we. will bring them down once again and this will be a costly affair so it is not risk and cost free to do business in the dark and this is also part of the signal and it is also worth noting that the purpose of this announcement of these seizures was to make it look like the feds had opened up the Tor network and, with regards to this particular raid, the methods used to do so have never been fully revealed, as a Europool representative put it, this is something we want.

To keep to ourselves the way we do this we can't share it with the whole world because we want to do it over and over again, however on the other hand it is worth noting what was actually taken with this seizure as the 400 plus claimed be hidden Services seemed to indicate a mind game on the part of the feds because this 400 figure was later reduced to 50 sites without any explanation and based on actual seizures that were traceable, it actually only meant about 27 actual individual services, of which 14 were included in the criminal complaints. they were actually dark debt marketplaces and the rest were hidden services used to sell specific, unique things, like stolen credit card information.

Now, numbers aside, this was still fundamentally questionable because 27 sites seized it once, it's still very substantial and this still points to law enforcement. agencies that are aware of some zero-day exploit within the Tor network that would allow them to anonymize their users and by zero-day exploit I essentially mean a backdoor that only the feds knew how to use now in case you're not familiar with the. Despite its bad reputation for use by criminals to browse anonymously, it is also used for government operations in different countries, used by activists, whistleblowers, and in some cases used to spread news in countries where censorship prevails. in their media and Just so you understand, the concern here is that if this exploit had been leaked to other people, this could have endangered many other innocent bystanders on the Tor network, while there have been multiple documented vulnerabilities in the Tor network over the years and protocol. has its limitations, what makes this particular case suspicious was the timeline of a major tour exploit that was discovered in early 2014 and which was something called an early relay traffic confirmation attack, as court documents related to the silk road 2.0 case and one of the administrators who was arrested because he was dr. of citing trusted IP addresses from Tor hidden services such as Silk Road 2.

And according to a legal document from his defense on October 13, 2015, the government provided the defense council with a letter indicating that Mr. Farrell's involvement with Silk Road 2.0 was identified based on information. obtained by a university research institute that operated its own computers on the anonymous network used by Silk Road 2.0, also known as Tor, In response to this letter, the Information Sciences Council requested additional discovery from the government to determine the relationship between the university research institute. and the federal government, as well as the means used to identify Mr. Farrell on what was supposed to operate as an anonymous website.

To date, the government has refused to produce any additional discovery now that the certificate of the carnegie mellon university and the investigators there who were responsible, if this accusation were true, it is essentially outsourcing police work under the guise of conducting an investigation for something that would normally require a court order and now I must point out that The person who was making this accusation was the head of the Tor project who also claimed that they were paid around $1 million to conduct research on his behalf and what makes this particularly interesting is that an attack on the Tor network It took place exactly between January 30 and July 4, coinciding with the exact timeline used in the search warrant.

Furthermore, this attack on the Tor network had been known for quite some time, as Ed Felton of Public Affairs from Princeton University and the Information Technology Center, noted that on January 30, 2014, 115 new machines joined the Tor network as relays. carrying out the ongoing attack and from February 18 to April 4 they claim that the researchers had submitted a presentation proposal discussing a new identification attack on Tor and in June their proposal was accepted at the Black Hat cybersecurity conference where They plan to share their research and give a talk on the topic I looked up the actual summary of this talk they were planning to give and it said that in this talk we demonstrate how the distributed nature combined with recently discovered deficiencies in network design and implementation can be abused Tor to break Tor anonymity in In our analysis we have discovered that a persistent adversary with a handful of powerful servers and a couple of gigabit links can anonymize hundreds of thousands of Tor clients and thousands of hidden services in a couple of months at a cost total investment of just under 3,000.

In this talk we'll quickly cover the nature, feasibility, and limitations of potential attacks and then delve into dozens of successful real-world anonymization case studies; However, around July 2014, before Operation Onimus was announced, the Torah Project noticed the attack and patched the vulnerability. in July of that year and this was a major turning point as it seemed to turn the tides in the darknet markets for some time as the markets would continue to come and go but there was much more stability starting in 2015, while there were definitely its share of exit scams throughout 2015 with several large markets, such as evolution in March, taking with it $12 million in that black exit bank in May and agora in August, all of this would lead ultimately to a market 10 times bigger than the silk road, okay?

The following story is one that has caught the world's attention: A Canadian man who died while in custody in a Thai prison is now accused of being an online kingpin who built a fortune as the mastermind of the largest illegal online market in the world. world called alpha, but you would never do it. I found the site through a search engine I lived on the so-called dark web now every day business is done on this little understood part of the Internet that for the vast majority of us is completely invisible much of what is bought and sold on Internet The dark web is illegal drugs, stolen data, even weapons, but now alpha bay is no more.

Police in several countries have shut it down in one of the largest dark web sting operations in history. Alpha Bay was destined to become one of the largest Stockton markets of all time. would actually cause a significant ripple effect on the darknet markets, as you will soon see because, as I mentioned before, operation animus was the first attempt by law enforcement to address the darknet markets as a whole and As you can probably guess, given enough time, it won't be the last, but once the Tor vulnerability was fixed, it created more stability starting in 2015, giving time for the markets to grow, and in October 2015, The various closures largely eliminated competition for Alpha Bay, which had already built a fairly robust user base of 200,000 users after receiving a lot of press when stolen Uber accounts were sold on the site, which forced Uber to make astatement regarding the data breach, which in turn attracted more customers to the market.

This also happened with another company of the same name. The creator or administrator based on Talk Talk alpha was called Alpha O2 or D Snake and while you might think that the name Alphabay would just be something chosen at random, like many of the other marketplaces, but in this case, if you understand the person. who ran it, it makes a lot more sense that the person was named alexander kazus. He was a Canadian man who later moved to Thailand, probably due to his obsession with the art of the pick-up, as well as the fact that Thailand was an area for quite some time. which cybercriminals like to flock to, since before 2019 government agencies didn't have as much control over web traffic monitoring, but getting back to the causes, a good part of the time the guy spent online was showing off on a pick up forum where he apparently paid to be a member of this forum dedicated to that particular pick up artist, he wrote several thousand word posts about finding wives in Thailand, he described himself as a professional cheater and made posts like the most beta one you made in his thousands of online posts about In casual discussion, he frequently preached about his hatred of Western women, and while a simple way to describe it would be simply misogynistic, I can't help but feel that the This person's personality was so completely rooted in him overcompensating and trying to look like an alpha date now. the name alphabet might make a little more sense and you'll soon see that its link to this word dates back to 2008 to the inception of alphabay, but continuing with alphabay stood out for its monero integration and the sheer size it grew to become the main market in 2015, it already had 200,000 users and by 2017 it had grown to a staggering 400,000, where at its peak it was generating approximately 800,000 per day in revenue and when it comes to product listings on Alphabay, peaked at 250,000 listings for substances and over a hundred thousand listings for other items like fraudulent documents, malware, and other things like that, which, in comparison, Silk Road had only 14,000.

And this incredible discrepancy is possible. They may have indicated to the authorities that their actions and frequent market takedowns had actually only been affecting the administrators, as a number of suppliers and items for sale really only seemed to increase, but that being said, it is quite incredible that alpha bay has even become so long as he did it, because when it comes to how he ended up getting caught, it really wouldn't take an alpha to figure this out according to the court documents that law enforcement learned in 2016 when new users first signed up. time on the site when it first opened in 2014, the welcome email included his pimp alex91 email address at hotmail.com, this was in the email header information, as well as when users visited to reset your password on the forum this means you made a mistake as bad as Black Goblin and but continued anyway this was later changed but it seems the authorities gained access to an early alphabay account or early email , according to the Forfeiture Report Police learned in December 2016 about this email address and while they don't specify how they discovered this detail, I can only hazard a guess that someone sent a tip to the police or someone used it as a negotiation tool afterwards. they got caught this is just a guess but the reason I say this is because the original criminal complaint describes the company alphabay and throughout the indictment two counties in eastern california are redacted in regards to suppliers individuals and with regard to the undercover agent. purchases made by law enforcement, various vendors, and around 26 alexander kazus was not necessarily a good operator for one of the alpha-based servers were hosted on an account that was directly linked to his real name, plus the name alphao2 was a reused username when the site was first launched. as he used to sell guides on various forums related to cart fraud, now this wouldn't have been horrible, but this was the same alias he used back in 2008 on a sketchy web forum directly linked to his email, it's also safe to say. the guy really had an attachment to the word alpha and when it came to how he managed his wealth by doing things under the table, he was anything but subtle, owned multiple properties in multiple jurisdictions and drove multiple luxury vehicles including a lamborghini aventador and a porsche panamera, all while acting under the guise of a company called ebx technologies that had not updated its website since 2015 and its business bank account was collecting millions, while in reality no real verifiable business was being done on how casus was arrested, this started when the canadian police would attack ebx technology where the alpha based servers were hosted in montreal, once they had access to the back of the website they would be able to monitor everything that was happening here after they would perform a glitch in the servers system, which would cause reasons to go check. on your site and log back in and restart it after they knew you were logged in, then they staged a car accident outside your front door, this distracted kazus away from your computer where you would go check on your cars to make sure everything was well in the future.

The authorities caught him at this point and arrested him while he was walking outside as a way to ensure that he could not access his computer and encrypt anything, although this was not necessary as it appeared that all the contents of the laptop of him remained complete. unencrypted after being arrested on July 5, alphabay would mysteriously go offline as users of the site speculated about an exit scam, as none of this information was made public at the time he was arrested on July 12 while facing the extradition to the United States and many criminal charges that would have easily led to life in prison.

The low-end kazus would have died two hours before his extradition as an apparent result of his own action. He was last seen asking the time before entering the bathroom. the cell however this was far from the end because naturally You have to wonder if the feds found out about this in 2016 and this was such an obvious case of who was running the site then why did it take almost seven months to do something? And the answer to that question is where Operation Bayonet and the Dream Market come from. The operation bayonet at play was once again another collaborative multi-agency takedown including the royal dutch police, fbi, europool etc. but this time it only included two marketplaces, alpha bay and hansa, however it appears that the target was a little different and the feds seemed to take a different approach: The alphabet case is part of a broader international effort to attack dark web markets that broker criminal transactions.

This was a coordinated international operation against alpha bay and also another website known as hansa market that Dutch authorities have been investigating and shutting down. Earlier today, as part of this operation, the administrators of the two sites were arrested and authorities confiscated a large amount of evidence and illicit assets related to those companies. Now, while the anonymous operation was in operation with the intention of going after the market administrators, the bayonet operation would be a coordinated equivalent to go after. users and providers en masse, as the goal of this takedown was to take over the largest market and the second largest market, where that second market was a honey pot designed to extract as much information as possible about its users and whether I had to guess based on alpha Success may have gone on too long in order to burst that bubble later in the operation because Hansa had been compromised just 10 days before Alexander Kaza's court order and what I mean , compromised rather than an immediate shutdown, quietly took over the website and continued posing as the administrators while collecting information and data on its suppliers while the Dutch police continued to administer the site for a few weeks.

All user passwords were recorded in plain text which was then used to check whether those users had used the same account logins across multiple different markets. hansa also had a pgp encryption tool on their site for users who didn't. They wanted to encrypt things in a different application, this was sabotaged and recoded to spit out a plain text version of the pgp messages using this tool, meaning that during the time this was taken over any provider using this tool would have all their unencrypted messages the website also had a tool that was used to remove metadata on photos and that was modified to record metadata before removing it and placing it on the site the site also used a multi-signature escrow that was sabotaged in order to confiscate more funds and lastly, some vendors were tricked into downloading an Excel file that was supposed to include a recent summary of all their transactions, when downloaded it automatically ran a script to ping their target computer without the use of Tor thus obtaining your IP and on July 20, after spending several weeks collecting as much data as possible and receiving approximately 8,000 new registrations per day, a seizure notice would finally appear listing the names of those identified. buyers and sellers in real time, this was obviously another massive shake-up, as many users logged in and saw their real name written in front of them as the site updated as arrests were made.

Now I will say that as resilient as these communities are. on the dark web, this seemed to spark substantial paranoia, this seemed to mark a point where it was no longer about the administrators of the marketplace but rather its users and the idea of ​​law enforcement actively profiling and collecting information such as Facebook, but on the dark web made more people willing to look over their shoulders, rumors would begin to emerge that certain markets had been compromised by law enforcement, fundamentally undermining confidence in the markets as a whole, Since that was the goal of this entire operation, as it was done to maximize paranoia and target user trust the FBI delayed the alphabay announcement to make people think that an exit scam had occurred and made it worse. finally announcing it when the Dutch police had just revealed that the site had been under Dutch police control for quite some time and although it is thought that this type of

infiltration

could be relatively contained in the two markets, this paranoia was maximized by the fact that Dutch police had also used login credentials on one marketplace to log into another marketplace, withdraw funds from that account, and then re-upload a new PGP key to that provider's account, thus allowing it to impersonate other providers. in other markets.

Rumors would begin to emerge that certain markets had been compromised by law enforcement, and although ultimately the closure of Hansa would lead to the emergence of a dream market that is not the case. Let's just say some of those paranoid thoughts weren't warranted now when it comes to the dream market and how it got to the top. I must say that it did not become as big as Alpha Bay which peaked at a hundred thousand total listings at its peak, while subsequent research studies on the dark web as a whole showed that trust was eroding in the markets. and no marketplace really emerged to fill the gap where alphabay had been left, but that being said, considering that the main funnel into the dark web was still deep.webb and was listed directly at the top during 2017, this would naturally make it the next target of law enforcement, but as you will soon see, the events surrounding a dream market are anything but typical and to show you how things just weren't quite right.

I want to play a clip from Digital Shadows, which was a cybersecurity company that had published an extensive research report in 2018, almost a year after the Alpha Bay crash. I guess we started with the first one and the one we would hope would have been. The leader in terms of establishment was the dream market, but that has not worked very well. Very few people see it as a viable market now. If you look at the things sold there, it's minimal. I think one person said it was like the bodies were alive,but there's actually no one, there's a zombie market, yeah, then there's a couple of things going on there, one is that there's been very bad communication from the admins and when people initially moved to Hansa again, Hansel was Having seen technical difficulties, people were having trouble contacting administrators, so when we put all that together, what we get is what really came out of this investigation, it's this issue of trust, people are very suspicious after what happened with Hansa and that that honeypot operation was actually being managed by law enforcement to attract people, people are very skeptical about any site, the administrators are silent or the site keeps going down, so Dream Market He has also been a victim of that, people in general are much more suspicious since Operation Bayonet. and I think that is one of the reasons why the established markets have not been able to really consolidate their position;

What's more, I think it's worth noting that the authorities clearly have their priorities when it comes to these markets, while closing Alphabay and Hansa would deter people. for some time, that wouldn't be the case forever and they knew it because when those users finally came back, you'd probably imagine that law enforcement would have another set of strategies to implement, which is why I want to share with you some government-funded research of 2016 and 2015 to help you familiarize yourself with the authorities and once you get through it, you will understand why I spent so much time giving you all this context and, according to a study. conducted by researchers at Carnegie Mellon University who also actively monitored and selected pages for research within 16 markets between 2013 and 2015.

And while I know quite a few key points about the average distribution of sellers on the dark web, as well as other things that are very interesting, like that between 2013 and 2015, the top one percent of the most successful suppliers were responsible for 51 percent of all volume and the bottom 70 percent only managed to sell less than a thousand dollars, but perhaps the most interesting point came from the public policy findings section our measurements suggest that the ecosystem appears quite resistant to law enforcement takedowns, we see this unambiguously in response to the original silk road takedown and although it is too early to determine the impacts lasting effects of the anonymous operation, its main effect so far. appears to have been to consolidate transactions in the two dominant markets at the time of the crash.

More generally, economics tells us that entrepreneurial individuals will apparently always be interested in meeting this demand. The natural question is whether the cat and mouse game between the authorities and the market. Traders could end up with a complete disappearance of anonymous online markets. Our results suggest that this is unlikely, so considering the expenses incurred in very lengthy investigations and the level of international coordination required in operations such as Operation Anonymous, the time may have come to investigate alternative solutions and further down the line. In the conclusion section of this research paper, it will be worth investigating whether more specific interventions at the vendor level have had measurable effects on the overall ecosystem and as you can see, this was funded in part by the department of homeland security.

Please note this. The article was written in 2015 and two years later, I think they obtained considerable results because, according to another article from 2018 titled The Lost in the Dream, which measures the effects of the bayonet operation on suppliers who migrate to the dream market, they noticed some particularly interesting effects that occur with these. suppliers despite these limitations, if we apply our methodology to measure the effects of operation bayonet on suppliers migrating to the dream market, we see signs of a game-changing police intervention compared to simple takedowns like that of alphabay, the demolition of hanson market stands out in a positive way the police might add, as users do not simply move on after the closure of hanson market, some of them simply migrated, some take evasive measures such as changing their username or password pgp, but many start with a clean slate at Dream Market, this may seem like a minor detail, but the opposite is the case when a seller starts over and loses their reputation and customer base like a Michelin star restaurant moving city ​​while changing his name, website and phone number, no one will recognize the fancy restaurant before and the chef will probably be forced to start rebuilding his reputation from scratch.

We need to see if the effects of this innovative intervention are sustained in the long term, but for now the initial effects are notable in light of previous interventions targeting anonymous people online. markets now, I will point out that this paper was produced by researchers on behalf of tnl, which is also funded by the government, but I think it is clear that these honey pots targeting user trust are much more effective at hindering the growth across the space, so I think it's A natural assumption is that when it comes to these markets, just as providers and administrators evolved to adopt more advanced strategies, the same way law enforcement strategy will be to deal to build on their previous successes with additional advancements and this is what leads me to write an article. 2016 and in this 200-page report they reach four conclusions based on what their future action will be: the first of which are traditional investigation techniques applied to the supply chain, the second is postal detection and interception and the third are big data online detection techniques. monitoring online markets and tracking money flows and the last one is online disruption being the last option and that is ending online markets.

Now the one I want to highlight here is the third one in case you are not familiar with big data techniques. It essentially refers to machine learning and in case you've never heard that term before, just think about how you as a human learn, we learn from our past experiences and our brains try to figure out what pattern led us to a particular result that the Computers can do the same thing, such as feeding a large number of images of a dog or cat to a computer, where the computer can then begin to identify dogs and cats on its own;

However, the main difference here is that the computer is the one that understands what it is doing. the person who coded the program does not fully understand how it works and lastly, the more data the computer has, the more precise and fine-tuned it can be in finding a particular result and the applications of machine learning with respect to dark debt markets are in incredibly high reality for one, it can be used to track bitcoin transactions and find other wallets related to particular entities and the same machine learning principle that will only improve over time applies to particular CEOs who preach that bitcoin can also be used to avoid taxes.

The bitcoiner's response is oh yeah, my bitcoin, uh, I lost it in a boating accident, have you ever heard that phrase, it's kind of a trope, but what it means is that at the end of the day, if you push me too hard, I'll I lost, it's gone, I'm sorry. Tax that treasure trove operation and one might assume it's a very good thing. Turns out it's not. It is a new program started by the IRS to eradicate unreported crypto income and just a month later, South Korea began confiscating users' tax funds. evaders who hid their assets using cryptocurrencies, but that is not the only big data technique used in these dark web markets, as well as another article by the same Carnegie Mellon researchers in 2019 who managed to train an algorithm to identify multiple belonging supplier accounts. to the same person even when they tried to hide their original identity and use different usernames;

The highest accuracy of the algorithm was found in relation to larger suppliers who had over eleven thousand dollars in sales. Even more impressive, the algorithm was also able to detect to some extent when users were impersonating other providers and could detect when certain users had been compromised. We manually reviewed some false negatives where the model predicted that the pairs were extremely unlikely to belong to the same seller, but shared the same pgp key. We found that 26 out of 117 of these manually reviewed peers had the same key only because the Dutch national police had briefly taken over these accounts and rekeyed theirs.

That said, the implication of using big data techniques implies an interest in wanting to collect more data for the future to refine these processes, as well as large amounts of data being collected on the dark web and that is where Dream Market fits into everything. This because what better way to collect data about your users than to run a darknet marketplace yourself. Now I want to make it explicitly clear that everything I refer to for the information I have is publicly available information, while the authorities have never explicitly stated that they were operating the dream market, nor have they denied it and, until now According to the official record, only one moderator was arrested about a month and a half after Hansa closed in August 2017.

But that being said, it is quite strange that any research paper titled about dream exploration of the dream market, where it lists data incredibly detailed. in dream market and in one of the introductory paragraphs they state that law enforcement interventions such as animus, along with exit scams and hacks, have successfully shut down numerous crypto markets, including dream route silk from Alpha Bay and more recently Wall Street, and with respect to all these markets, one of these is not like the others, since no real announcement was made about Dream Market and we know that they did not get out of the scam either, since that users were able to withdraw their funds a whole month earlier and in the reference to the side if you really check the article they are referring to it never mentions that it has been closed by law enforcement or that it is controlled either and if you really look at the article it says , judging by that commercial bustle, there are indications that just a week before global law enforcement announced the takedown of two of the world's largest dark websites, known as Wall Street Market and Valhalla, or that the most popular marketplace called Dream had gone offline late last month, perhaps sensing that law enforcement was closing in, as you can see, the quote does not match the article and please note that this article was funded by the foundation national science, another entity funded by the government, how did it not know the result of the market?

He is writing an extensive investigative report about and regarding the moderator who was arrested in 2017, I believe. I should explain that full context because I think the only way this all makes sense is that speedstepper was in fact the same moderator who was called oxymonster on one of the accounts he used for administrative tasks and then the second identity was for the majority. After preliminary work and acting as a seller, the investigation into Dream Market began in February 2016. Law enforcement authorities noted that the original Dream Market forums and the person who announced the administrative hierarchy was not Speed ​​Stepper.

The person who announced it was oxymonster, where he almost immediately becomes an admin without much natural progression in the community, basically, as oxymonster would become more prominent, a speedstepper would disappear from the picture by his own accusation. They noticed that Dream Market's tip jar on the forums was found in their forum signature where they then traced the bitcoins that were in their account to a local bitcoin account to a citizen named gal valerius and at this point they investigated his personal identity. , his social media accounts and began monitoring him around August 2017. Galvalarius was heading to a beard competition in Austin, Texas to compete and at the airport police stopped him and searched his computer, where he revealed a large sum of bitcoins. for a total of around 700 thousand dollars.

At this point, it is worth noting that the official report just labeled it. as a top manager and the guy was facing 40 years for his original charge, which is pretty high for just a moderator bar seller and he was also labeled a kingpin initially when the Miami Herald reported tracking down Valerius, the biggest average dozen dark web targets charged. Last year in South Florida was not easy, it involvedthe DEA's FBI national security investigations and the US Postal Inspection Service. Now isn't it pretty strange that the biggest target they wanted to go after was a moderator and not a fast passer who we know? was the founder, this only makes sense if they were the same person, but also, what a lot of people don't know about this case is that Valerius ended up getting a plea deal that reduced his sentence to 20 years, now assuming the intent here was following someone.

Further up the chain, why would you publicly announce his plea deal when in the Silk Road case they kept it a secret for quite some time? This seems to indicate that the goal of the plea deal was something else: the feds wanted help. To quote the agreement given in the plea agreement, the defendant agrees that he will fully cooperate with the office by providing truthful and incomplete information and testimony and by presenting documents, records and other evidence when requested by this office, whether in interviews before a large jury or in any trial or other judicial proceedings b appear at hearings of grand jury proceedings, trials and other judicial proceedings and at meetings as may be required by this office if requested by this office working in a covert role under the supervision and in compliance with law enforcement officers and agents, further, the defendant agrees that he will not protect any person or entity through false information or omission, that he will not falsely implicate any person or entity, and that he will not commit further crimes.

Paragraph 18 states that the defendant agrees not to make an application under the international prison transfer program until such time as his cooperation pursuant to paragraph 11 just read of this agreement is complete or three years from the date of his arrest, whichever comes first, this plea agreement was filed on June 12, 2018. All of this was while Dream Market was still in operation and what is quite strange was that about 10 days before, Dream Market had announced that it had removed its main forum, which was on a hidden tour service, and replaced a new forum in the clear in its place. net, could you make it even more obvious at this point?

Considering the fact that the deep web, which was the name of the website that was the forum, was hosted by godaddy, it would be as simple as the government subpoenaing godaddy to control the server that is literally in their jurisdiction, but that is not what happens, Dream Market continues as if nothing had happened and I must inform you that the person who registered this domain originally was a Dutchman since Hansa was controlled by the Dutch police. This makes a lot of sense since the FBI was working closely with them for some time. The entity I have blurred here was the one controlling the deep web and I also believe they are the moderator with the name Water Chain and email.

It was registered with a pgp key in addition to being linked to the Twitter deep web network, which is now deleted. The deep web seemed to be some sort of derivative of deep.web and I also want to mention the fact that speedstepper ended up signing his pgp key on the deep web as a website in a later screenshot several IP addresses were also found in the code . An IP address that was leaked linked the site's hosting to a Miami-based hosting company known to have government data centers and despite this, being reported to the hosting company, they never followed up on Dream Market. and they also claimed to have a hard drive failure that caused all users' wallet funds to be depleted in September 2017.

And I also find it funny at the moment that the site seems to be subject to the law. app control in 2017, the messages are signed by the speedsteppers on the team even though speedstepper was never plural until that point, they also allowed monero deposits just to take the money and allow people to donate to uncle sam, but maybe the craziest turn of events was how the operation came to an end with a final operation in 2019 with the name operation saboteur the day the dream market announced its closure, it came exactly the same day the DEA announced an offensive against the darknet markets along with 61rs, they probably did this to track those funds in new aliases when people sign up to new markets and I want to read you the closing message that came from a user called Water Chain, who let me remind you that they are almost 100 law enforcement officers.

Hello everyone, I'm official. Dream Market Moderator, As you already know, Dream Market plans to close on April 30, 2019. As we also said, Dream will be transferred to a partner company which will be a fair and honest company. Dream Market has been suspended for the past seven weeks. by a user who wanted 400k in dollars and we have denied that the real problem with ddos ​​was a big problem for Dream Market. Our Dream Market technical team worked as hard as they could, but the real problem regarding the DDOS attack lies with Tor. on the browser side, so we had no problems resolving this error.

There are some people who asked why there was a random v3 mirror on Dream Market. I can explain that there are versions like one, two, three and we were using version v2, we thought it was v3. It's more up to date and I would avoid the ddos ​​which didn't help, also a reminder that this needs to be highly respected and everyone can withdraw their money before the dream market closes. I also want to remind everyone that there are some unstable people who spread nonsense. about law enforcement etc whatever just ignore all the nonsense that is being spread and to make everyone happy wait for the new market to come out it will be as good as a dream plus I am a person who wants the best for everyone and look positively at the future, all I ask of you is to smile, be excited and wait until the new market comes out.

If you have a dispute that needs to be resolved starting today, Wednesday, feel free to send me a private message and I will make a decision. Look at it, smiling face, thank you all for supporting the dream. Hopefully we'll see each other soon in the new market. I'm just going to say flat out that none of it made sense, none of the reasoning is consistent and his last message, which follows an hour later, or his retirement speech, and assuming this person Outside Dutch law enforcement, this may be one of the messiest things I've ever seen dear darknet users, this is my official retirement speech to everyone.

I want to thank everyone I have met in this dark world. There are many great people around me. I would like to thank Speed ​​Stepper Dream Market. Hugs to the Bunter Dread staff. and everyone I met I no longer have a say in Dream Market since two corrupt Dream moderators blocked my access to my account. Speedstepper has been missing since the market closed. I'm sure the speed is still available and the other market will be fine, after this message I will be dust and disappear forever. I recommend everyone to continue using Dread and support it also for everyone who has used Dream Market.

I suggest you give Wall Street Market a chance since it is number one or two on the list. Speed ​​if you ever read this, it was an honor to work with you, like I said before, keep using Dread and give Wall Street Market a chance to be number one. Goodbye everyone, I love you all. First, he claims that Adidos and then claims that a corrupt moderator blocked him. from your account and I think you should know that after everyone was allowed to withdraw their funds until the 30th and I think they even left it for longer, however on May 3rd, just three days after Dream Market was eliminated, Europool was announced. the takeover of Valhalla and the Department of Justice announced the takeover of Wall Street Market and, in particular, these announcements were coordinated because the arrests that occurred at Wall Street Market occurred at the beginning of the month, since the men involved with Wall Street Market were arrested on the 23rd and 24th as They tried to get out of the scam on April 16th and I think it is safe to assume that this was coordinated to move one market to the other, but that was not all because on May 7th the final door would close as soon as possible. profoundly possible.

The gateway to all these markets was also closed and their operators were arrested for receiving bribes in the sale of purchases on the dark web, thus concluding the deepa.web era. This is hardly sociable. Have a good night.