 All right this afternoon. We're going to learn a little bit about dark net offset op sec Pretty interesting talk. Please welcome our first time at Def Con and first time speaker Sam bent Thank you. It's great to be here. I never thought I'd be up on this stage So my talk is about dark net op sec from the point of view of Myself some of the precautions some of the things that I did as a dark net vendor to try to keep myself safe from the federal government and other adversaries that existed out there So these are my aliases I have a couple of them My day job involves me writing documentation pretty dry stuff, but I enjoy doing it While my night job, I'm a prison advocate So I do a lot of outreach work and try to help people and guide people through the myriad That is the federal prison system, whether it's them going into it or their family members going into it I have about 54 slides, so I'm gonna have to move pretty quick once I start So I've worked not only as a dark net vendor, but also worked on multiple dark net markets done PR work for them as well as Resolved disputes for customers things like that My objective with this talk is to give a different perspective than typically what's given at Conferences or on the mainstream media From someone who's actually been there not just studied it from a distance or speculated on it So there are a lot of similarities between The dark net subculture and the hacking subculture Both of them typically involve some kind of paranoia and a lot of times that paranoia is there for a reason Both very much value their anonymity secrecy intellectual dominance, especially in the hacking room or in the hacking scene But also There's a bit of a learning curve to each I would argue that the hacking scene has a much greater Learning curve than the dark net especially because in order to be a hacker. You don't just start up tour It's a lot that goes into it depending on what you're doing So the paths between being a hacker and a dark net vendor can differentiate to As a hacker you start off really with no adversaries whatsoever. You don't have anyone that's out to get you You know when you hop on IRC for the first time You Can learn almost everything as far as the process goes for a pen test inside of things like the pen test standard A lot of what we do is open source at this point. You can watch a defton talk and learn a lot about What it is that hackers do or the culture or just be here in this room come to defton That doesn't exist in the dark net You can't you know, just hop on and watch a YouTube video and learn about Dark net subculture. It's something that you have to hop on the dark net and you have to explore and learn and meet people and Hopefully be safe from doing it The sources for information are completely different For me my my favorite always was as a dark net vendor Dark net news sites dark fail is one that's been around for quite a while And is pretty good dread is a forum That's one of the most active on the dark net from what I've seen so there's a book that kevin mitnick wrote called ghosts in the wires and I took his approach when looking at operational security From that specifically the part where he called up law enforcement and social engineer them To allow him to use the NCIS system that they have I feel that a lot of the information that you could want or would be relevant Is located in manuals And if we know how Law enforcement operates we're trying to be criminals then we know what they're going to do next It's like having a cheat sheet So with that I Ended up going and looking and finding United States postal inspectors manual to see what he classified as a suspicious package I needed to know that if I was going to be shipping narcotics through the United States mail So this information is out there. This is not it But this is an example of some of the things that you would look at when evaluating things like this It'd be an eclectic process where you take what's valuable and leave what's not some of the things that would raise suspicion when you're trying to Move drugs through the United States mail system would be using too much tape Handwriting the labels if you don't use the official USPS boxes Fake names on recipients or return addresses all of these things add up as red flags That ultimately leads to a United States postal inspector Possibly applying for a search warrant for a box So in order to avoid these you just don't do those things. It's pretty straightforward It's like reverse engineering law enforcement to some degree For me, I had a moral dilemma when I wanted to ship drugs, which is kind of ironic. I didn't want to Send say cocaine from some random person's address you know, there's a lot of hard-working people in the world and To me sending out four ounces of blow to some guy who's a construction worker and just trying to make ends meet and I have DHS break through his door Really wasn't the best way to go about it and I was I was sure that somewhere there existed a database of people that I considered personally To be people okay to screw over So I searched for it and I tried to figure out what that database would be how it would look and how I would be able to Access it and the only solution that I could come up with was this So remember I said you need to have a valid return address and needs to be the correct name It needs to be the correct address all of these had that So they qualified and they made them real and if it got sent back to them or if they are rated I Didn't really have any qualms in that and it was interesting because the Department of Homeland Security special agent That was in charge when they ended up rating me felt the exact same way this crowd feels You laughed about it too. It thought it was hilarious So I when I ship The thing that I came to my conclusion was You can pick obviously you have a ton of different services that you can use to ship anything nowadays My favorite by far is the United States Postal Service And there's a few reasons for that Private pat private services like DHL or a UPS they can open up your package whenever they want There's no rules that they're a private corporation But a warrant is required for your the you for USPS to be able to open something They also have more locations than anyone else And they can get to your door from tour to door in three days Which is great, especially if you're going for good reviews on the dark net, you know So it's it's run by the federal government, which is kind of You know, it's kind of an ironic thing that the people that are hunting you You know a branch of their system is going to be enabling you to traffic drugs on a national or international level kind of I should say like a spiteful thing to do Where you're you're having the feds Send your drugs for you so the the other thing to take into account is the amount of packages that exist How hard is it to find my one package out of that? 21.5 billion You probably have a better chance at winning the power Especially because I'm I'm well aware of what you're looking for when it comes to a suspicious package You might none of my packages are ever gonna look that way And we compare them to some of the other shippers and you can see the numbers are pretty drastic in terms of differences Drug sniffing dogs can compare to what like a lot of people think drug sniffing dogs. They don't work eight-hour shifts. They're sporadic You can't work them like you could in Amazon employees. So So That's one thing but then you take into account permeation which is where a smell can go through an object All those things come into play when I would ship I would ship two to three day There's not enough time for it to come through vacuum sealed bags and a visual barrier in that amount of time So on top of that like when you get when you if your drugs do get intercepted What happens is you you get a notice and we call it a love letter And it comes from USPS typically or customs if it's an overseas order And they just say that We've intercepted your drugs. They don't meant they don't say like that. They say we have your package Please come to the post office and pick up your package Once you show up with that letter you're acknowledging that that's your package Because aside from that they can't prove it's yours. They can't you didn't order this on Amazon So there's they can't hop on and see you know your credit your credit card transaction Where you bought these drugs you bought in Bitcoin or your monorail or you know any one of the available options that existed to you So they rely on things like that. So, you know your countermeasure for when you get a love letter is to burn it Or throw it away It's relevant So the other thing that law enforcement likes to do on occasion is control delivery And control deliveries a little bit more aggressive obviously than a love letter, but again, you have countermeasures for that as well You have no obligation to open your door for anyone And if they had you know, even if it was the police if they had if they had permission to come into your house They wouldn't be knocking right they'd be kicking in the door and they'd be coming in And they'd be taking you out So it's all voluntary You answering that door and it's the same thing with delivery services You can just not answer that door and a lot of the times dark net vendors are not going to require signature Because it would be like, you know requiring you to give your real name When you're using a handle as a hacker It's just not something you're going to do if I ask you on an IRC chat What's your real name and we just met how willing are you going to be to give that information over? Probably not likely So from that There there are countermeasures for it So sometimes they'll put devices in the box and we'll just let the box sit for 24 hours or 48 hours or three days Until the batteries in that device if it's small die or if they're using something local like a radio frequency we travel Open the box up 10 miles away Any transmitter they have and there would be well out of distance So if you do it well This is what they should know about you Should be nothing It should be oh, yeah, he's the computer guy So in making an image for yourself on the dark net one of the best ways I found to do that was to be helpful and You know just like on a social engineering campaign if you're disingenuous people pick that up Very quickly It's like flattery, you know a lot of times flattery has the opposite effect that you intended to have so being disingenuous in the dark and it is something that can be picked up by some people and a lot of people find it repulsive just like you do in real life when someone Compliment you for the fifth time on your shoes So my move was to contribute 5,000 posts and I did that on Hansa in a month and by doing that Basically everyone in that community now associates my name With good things with helping out with upset with you know enjoying helping other people And that's the kind of the irony is everyone seems to think about the dark net is this horrible place where you know There's there are really bad things on there. It's not up for debate, but at the same time Not everyone on there is a psychopath, you know a lot of times. It's just people So with that I was able to establish rapid rapport in that community people knew me and When someone came in there just like any other community if you come into any community and you start You know threatening someone or like you know if someone came in here and started saying a well-known speaker Didn't know what he was talking about the community would probably revolt against that. They wouldn't like that very much You have the same thing in the dark now But instead of having that trust you have that verification through things like PGP signatures and sign messages and all you know stuff like that when we look at the history and the present and the future of reconnaissance and Information gathering when it comes to law enforcement There are a few different countermeasures a dark net vendor can take if he's informed if he knows enough about it My thing was to hop on Pacer like you might see the Department of Justice Announce a dark net bust, but they don't really give you details Pacer will Pacer is the place where you can find federal cases You can find the United States attorneys wording and how they caught that person What that person did where they screwed up Again, if we can look and we can map out how they screwed up we can make it so that we never screw up We never make those same mistakes that our predecessors did and we're playing in this game. You're playing for keeps You know messing up here. It doesn't mean that you know you this this particular assignment You have to go find another penetration testing engagement. It means that you're going to federal prison So it's not something you want to screw up So tend to tread a lot more carefully even when it comes to things like cashing out crypto or You know making it so that the chain that law enforcement uses to trace you or trace your transactions is a lot harder to uncover so From what I've seen on the dark net the majority of the time that dark net sites actually get taken down is not from Law enforcement being highly talented It's from just a Administrator making a stupid upset mistake Or not updating or getting complacent right because we have that kind of sliding scale Where we have complacency on one side and security on the other and time seems to be a variable that wears that down to the other side where they become complacent so Reddit ended up banning dark net markets and Our response was to create dread hug bunter is famously known as the one who created it he created it and he ended up Making it and making it public as a replacement for a dark net markets was which is a massive subreddit And their ban of it came out of nowhere And what it did was it made it so that people on the clear net or people that weren't using tour It made them a lot harder to get their questions answered on how to navigate the dark net And that removal of information was a tactic used by law enforcement to try to stop people from using the dark net And that was our answer was dread Charles a administrator on So when you get started You want to look at a few different things Your main goal obviously is to avoid incarceration Avoid arrest You want to create a secure persona Sometimes it's good to create multiple personas Have them all age your ultimate Goal is to not get arrested and if you do screw something up. That's that's what's going to happen You are successful as long as you're not in federal custody and Once you are it's far too late to go back My suggestion is to map out and have responses to any type of incident that may occur just like a major company has Security policies, you know, they set up and counter measures set up to be able to handle anything that goes wrong It's the responsibility of that person who's going to be you know Dealing in transactions to make sure that they do the same So some of the threats that exist are physical threats like DNA If that dark nav vendor doesn't know anything about physical security or operational security Or anything like that he might assume that you know, they're not going to go through the effort of you know, looking for skin cells or Analyzing a package heavily and the fact of the matter is if you don't know it for sure Then you're always better airing on the side of caution Um noisy neighbors and these kind of you know, if you have issues with your neighbors, they don't like you That's an adversary, you know They can call up when I even even know wellness check, you know, they can they can anyone can write an email To the FBI, you know, I see him come in with 20 packages a day. It's abnormal. It's a red flag Bluetooth Wi-Fi attacks all those things that we we know very well, you know people in this con understand very well Trash is another one. It's always better to shred it or burn it if possible It's a lot of these same security measures that we take in this field safeguarding Corporations are the things that you will see a responsible dark net vendor take the only differences instead of having teams do it and Millions of dollars to do it. They're stuck trying to figure it out and do it all themselves Which is why and which is which is one of the things that creates that low-hanging fruit for law enforcement Those people who don't understand encryption or don't know fully about opsec and maybe they're just drug traffickers They don't have a background in that Another thing is Linguistical and analytics is something I always tried to keep mindful of if I'm writing on the dark net on a forum I'm from New England So we tend to say the word like wicked to just to describe something as very you know So if I say this is a wiki good talk, it means it's a very good talk and With that said if I use that terminology in a forum and Law enforcement picks that up now. They know okay. This guy's from New England But they you know this guy's from Massachusetts, you know, they they they can they can get Detailed information on where I am based on that and that's a threat. That's a problem And something that again a lot of people they don't they don't think about when they go into it And there's no manual for this, you know unlike the hacking culture. We've been around a long time, you know it's a big culture and The dark net culture isn't so much. It's a lot more secretive. What's interesting is everything I'm telling you today. All of this is freely available You know, so if you're from the Department of Homeland Security and you're here hoping to learn some elite, you know Things just not gonna happens all publicly available to anyone who seeks this information My internet service when I was a dark man that vendor it didn't exist Again, I drew I drew a lot of my inspiration now from Kevin Mitnick I liked a lot of the stuff that he did I thought a lot of his things were ingenious and along with those was something I barred which is a little bit more localized than what he did with cell towers was Grabbing a yogi and connecting to a neighbor's internet who I had no visual barriers to meaning I could see His house, but it was far enough away for me to feel secure So if I saw, you know, a bunch of black SUVs rolling up I could assume it was safe to burn everything I had and get rid of everything clean house Because my neighbor was getting raided So one thing I would always check I would do perimeter checks on a regular basis I was a homebody. I didn't like to leave I'm definitely not big on social interactions Personally the guy have a little bit of agoraphobia. So this talk is extremely challenging for me However, it was something that I felt I would love to share and I'm glad that Defcon gave me the opportunity to share it with you guys But one of the things that needs to be Stayed on top of is security checks just like in a corporation You constantly have to make sure that everyone's staying on point because again complacency is the enemy of security So that was one of the big things that I had I had weekly daily and monthly checklists of things That I would make sure that I was doing at the end of the day We all feel safe when we're at home. We all feel safe. We all feel secure and then one day we lose our keys and Then all of a sudden we're all penetration testers We can look at our house and we can say oh, I can card the door Oh, I left that window open now all of a sudden you can find three four different vulnerabilities in your home and You stop stop feeling so safe until you get to a security and I think that's something that as As a dark net vendor, it's it's very easy to get comfortable just like it is for our average people Checking out your weaknesses and making sure that they're fixed Evaluating your op-sac on a regular basis to me is mandatory Especially because the repercussions aren't a data breach their incarceration in the federal facility Staying away from emotional decisions things like drinking and typing Will get you rated will get you a 10 to 25 year sentence So it's suicide career suicide on a little bit of a different level than what we're used to I like to always advise to never never answer questions even to this day I don't I only answer questions after this talk, but you know like in general When it comes to law enforcement or obviously someone you don't know Calling up, you know and asking questions and a really great You know thing to watch is to go to the SC village and see people Calling people up and those people just giving out information. Obviously, we all know it's not a good idea so I'm always leery of that and In turn, I always I always like to answer that question with the question. So once you actually pull that trigger and you start being a dark net vendor and You start having to actually deal with customers. You have to write terms and conditions You know, when are you gonna refund a customer? How long is it gonna go? How long are you gonna wait before you know if someone buys something from you today and tomorrow they say hey I want a tracking number. Are you gonna give it to him? Should you give it to him? You know, if you give it to him, then they'll know where you ship that from Maybe you want a little bit more time before you're willing to give that away So all those little kind of things are things that need to be seriously evaluated when you're considering building a a Platform or when you're considering being a dark net vendor Again, I have it as number six here. Don't drink and type. It's essential So changing your PGP key not a lot of vendors do this But it lets you switch up as you switch up your identity, which means you your reputation dies and That's unfortunate But you can always build that reputation back up and it will take a massive target off your back So your point of you doing this is to make money. That's how I saw it was to make money just to get in just to get out And that was my goal So having that mapped out with your ingress your egress and your regress as far as things like changing your PGP key You're things like that were essential to me before I started and with things that I kept in mind during the whole time Once you start building a reputation on the dark net it's in spider out So what I mean by that is like you as professionals right now if you have you work for a big company Right, or you write a book you're building a reputation. You can use that reputation to get a better job and You can do the same thing on the dark net Except instead of me offering a former employer might be a verifiable PGP signed message To a new employer You know a new dark net opens up and I message the admin and I say hey listen I can help you out. I have these previous accounts. I can validate them. You can check them and I can prove that I've done this kind of work before and It allows you again to spider out and end up getting multiple different jobs Which pay? sometimes a lot better Then if you're just starting out as a vendor That reputation is something you can buy and you can sell and you can trade on And your you know your PGP key your identity is much more restricted and it's restricted to dark net Market admins as opposed to All the users so me personally I hate Bitcoin tumblers. I never use them I I just didn't like them. I don't like sending my Bitcoin to someone and I don't know who they are It always kind of rub me the wrong way So what I used to do is I used to convert it from Bitcoin to Monero and then back to Bitcoin And I was happy with that because I knew that the link between the two different types of Bitcoin that I had was completely broken It's kind of like robbing a bank Buying a bunch of weed and selling all that weed and now the money that you have is completely different Whether or not you made money on it is a different fact Alternatively I'm also buying drugs So if I sold $20,000 worth of narcotics in three days, I could turn around and I could buy Narcotics and I could sell them locally at a much steeper mark up and still have anonymity So then you get to retirement if you make enough, you know, if you're lucky enough you get to this point And surprisingly a lot of people I've known a lot of dark net vendors who have gotten to this point They say like drug dealers don't get to retire will dark net vendors do when I've known a couple of them It's completely possible I'm not encouraging anyone to do it if you're at this con. You're obviously intelligent I suggest that you don't do it because it has horrible ROI and it's a lot of stress and You know, I'm 37 and looking at the gray hair. I have you know, it's not an easy job So I don't recommend it to anyone and that's one thing I definitely like to make clear So and I talk about here that, you know, we do switch up switch up PGP keys Again, that kills kills all your business, but that's it's a necessary So when my Department of Justice announcement came out where they announced me and about 33 other people that got Rated they said that it was because of operation dark gold And I'm from Vermont. You can see a little arrow going up north from that. Well, maybe you can't yeah, you probably count the screen I'm sorry about that but That's what they claim basically operation dark gold was they caught someone who was laundering Bitcoin And they have this guy continue to do it and people would cash out their Bitcoin to him for 10% And he would send them cash in the mail At this time KYC the know-your-customer policy for Bitcoin wasn't really prevalent And it only applied to banking institutions at that point. So personal Bitcoin transactions are not illegal and You know quoting trying to say that because someone bought Bitcoin from someone this was how you caught them to me I Thought it was asinine because it made absolutely no sense whatsoever To me it was just a way to collect names of people who were on the dark net That's exactly what they did that was but that was how they said that they ended up catching me The issue that I had with that Was that at the end of the day? You have a hearing called the Frank's hearing in law and Frank's hearing is when you can prove that law enforcement Violated the law in order to catch you doing something or to get a warrant to search your house they themselves broke the law in Trying to ascertain that information that was my case the United States Postal Inspector opened a package that he'd never warrant for again, one of my favorite reasons why I Use the United States Postal Service was it requires a warrant for you to open a package and and this one back to my opsec and They broke that but in breaking that they also gave me a way to exit out of my ten count federal indictment that they also hit me with Because they broke the law We didn't get to that point and that was because Before we could bring that up after our Frank's hearing was granted my cousin had already written a statement which established conspiracy and The feds can give you a mandatory minimum for a conspiracy charge can be anywhere from 10 years to 20 years So it's not something that you really want to take a gamble with So after I was caught It's convicted But only after I plot out I agreed to a maximum term of 108 months in federal prison And I was actually given 60 months Which is awesome I thought it was awesome because then I didn't know anything about the federal system when I first got charged I had a ten-count indictment when I looked up those Charges I saw each one came with a maximum of 20 years. We do the math. That's 200 years So that's what I thought I was gonna get I thought well, I'm gonna get 200 years I'm never gonna get out of prison Which it was it just about it's not how it works in the federal system. So I Studied law for 18 months while I was in federal prison Because I inherently I saw a lot of power in it just like a lot of you see a lot of power in learning how to code Those things allow you to do things that you know the person who doesn't know how to code Maybe not they can't do or they can't automate or they can't get as much done as you can So for me the code I wanted to learn was federal law and that's what I learned and By doing that I was able to get myself out of prison They have a thing called a compassionate release where You know if you can prove that there's a danger From you know because of your health Then you can apply for compassionate release And I did I wrote a 200 page motion and I mailed it in to the federal court so that was essentially my brute force attack to the federal courts and It worked and they released me But it was after a lot of studying a lot of hours a lot of 12-hour days reading federal law So this year deaf cons theme Is hacker homecoming and for me that's especially true Technically my release date is for the third day in January of 2023 So I'm very happy to be here standing on the stage Talking to all of you as opposed to being in a prison cell So I made a stupid mistake and I got I got myself in trouble and I paid the consequence for what I did but at the same time that hacker mentality of never giving up of always wanting to fight and Just continually bashing your head against that wall It ended up paying off in a totally different way than a lot of us see on a regular basis, you know It wasn't that that code finally ran without crashing. It was that you know, I wasn't stuck in a Small cell with a bunch of sociopaths You know who have life sentences, so it was it was a great thing But it's one of the things that Really made me appreciate both communities because I started out in the hacking community And I ended up going into the dark net community because it's such an easy Transition, you know, you one of the most paramount things is understanding security and Being in this field you already do that and that's I think that's the really dangerous Thing that exists is because it's so easy to just move over to that side, you know for me I was anyways So in conclusion, you know moving over from that from from being a hacker to being a dark net vendor It was ridiculous easy, but again, you know, you don't you can have the perfect op-sec and Still get fucked over and get fucked up You know, you there's no such thing. We all know there's no such thing as an unpickable lock, right? There's no such thing as a full-proof plan There's no security application that we can install that's gonna make us all safe guaranteed It's the same thing no matter what side of that fence you're on whether it's law enforcement or you know criminal Thank you for letting me speak here. I think they're gonna open it up for Q&A if you guys have any questions Questions anyone what's that? Should you use more than one sock puppet? I don't know If you have a question come on up here, so how did you originally find out about? The dark net markets and what all markets did you operate on? So I operated on probably a total of about 15 different markets. I remember the first time I really heard about Bitcoin was from a friend of mine and He was discussing how there's a site called BTC faucet which used to exist back in the day We're like you could hop on once a day and you get anywhere from like five to fifty Bitcoin And we'd we'd done that a bunch of times and then I got to a point where we had like 300 Bitcoin And we were like this is a waste of time. It's crap. You know, we just threw away the wall. It's Big time regret there. Yes. Oh, yeah Hey, so you talked a lot about like operational hygiene and stuff like that relating to Okay, so like you talked a lot about like operational hygiene so like in In a week or in a month you had like these routines and things you would do to try to like Promote like a good good like sick Sec ops like hygiene right to make sure I can't make out. Okay. Sorry. I can't So for things like you you have like Is is there any strategy you would use specifically for like Trying to determine what your weakest points are for trying to do like trying to establish a Good. Hey, this is what I'm gonna check this week, right? Because you can't check everything You can't check every failure point every area. What kind of things would you specifically look for as part of like your strategy? to protect yourself Opsec wise. Yep. So initially I spent six months doing research Looking at previous cases where the feds had rated people why they had rated them and that that was kind of my starting point for that And then once you start to grasp that you start finding your own little hacks and things that you can do to make it improved Yep, so it put it to answer your question. It was mainly History right because history predicts the future. So I would try to look at What happened in the past to evaluate what was going to happen or what I would need to do to evolve and not be the guy in that DOJ announcement You have time for about two more questions Hey, you said you would burn identities with some regularity To not leave any tracks about who you were Did you ever get caught on any of these markets by people you interacted with as being Somebody on a different market using a different identity and if you did that caused any issues So I heard the first part of it. What was the second part? Did you ever get caught? Using multiple identities on a number of these different websites by people you interacted with whether it be other staff other users For being you know a vendor under different names Yeah, so so you see It's interesting because once you're there for so long and like that kind of anonymous environment you can start to see people's mannerisms It's a lot like with 4chan right when you start having you started having people who would use the same kind of terminology or wording You could tell who's who even if their name changes 50 times You still know that person because you spent a lot of time talking to them You know their idea their ideals of their politics or whatever it is that they're discussing So there's things that using the using your identity for other things To me it would it wouldn't be something that I wasn't really there for the socialization aspect, you know, I was there strictly to make money and Anything that helped further that goal. I would be there So when it did come to having to establish an identity and you know just make a ridiculous amount of posts to the community That's what I would use it for but I wouldn't I wouldn't use it anywhere else I actually remember reading a case about a dark nev vendor who had his PGP key On the dark nev and then the idiot decided to use that as his Gmail PGP key. You know and he didn't last long Interesting doc, thank you. I was wanting to get your thoughts on like some markets had an exit scams and kind of What was involved in that process for mods behind it and also the second question is the DDoS attacks on a lot of markets. Is that Really revenue depleting for them or Money losing that they pay off the DDoS people to stop that happen So I've seen really dance to the second question real quick the I think the primary motive that you see for DDoS's when it comes to dark net markets is Mainly federal agencies It's like well, how can you prove that? Well, you can't you know But but but really it's it's one of the only ways that you can really see them take down markets With any kind of regularity, but even then you know they just create new URLs and good luck they move on But aside from that I've known dark net Market admins who have wanted to conduct those campaigns against competing dark net markets Hi, um, can you can you explain if and why certain drugs or pharmaceuticals aren't as targeted? I explain as in like for example Like health wellness drugs or something like that as opposed to like cocaine or heroin And then also it kind of ties in with my follow-up question, but What goes into the ability for someone to order internationally from like a Drugstore internationally and why is that legal? To import certain drugs when you don't have a prescription Do you know anything about that so one of One of the more lucrative trades that I found when I was doing it was just that was to do retail So you have a lot of people who aren't comfortable ordering internationally Because internationally is when it goes through customs if I'm sending you any kind of narcotic through the mail Here in the US it doesn't go through customs So there's not a whole bunch of scrutiny So it's fairly easy to do that, but when it goes through customs is a little bit more So I know that One of the things I started doing after a while was looking at Which countries would produce the best of a certain type of drugs so for example? LSD There's a vendor and again. This isn't a secret. It's very well known called gamma goblin who makes some of the best LSD that exists and He lives in the Netherlands. That's where he's located out of if you get a package from him That's where it's going to come from sometimes but The Netherlands is really known for having good quality LSD and good quality MDMA So for me I would source the countries that had the best quality and then I would find vendors in that because you can always you can you can Refine those search parameters in almost any dark net market and then with that information I would go when I would look on sites like dread and I would cross-reference and find their reputation Find out what people said about them So I would find the countries that had the best of a certain type of drug Then I would find the guy in that country who has the highest reputation in marketing that drug and I would order it for him and Like, you know, sometimes the profit margins would be insane like I know with acid From gamma goblin I could grab it for about five cents a hit and sell it for about 10 to 15 Locally on the dark net it would usually be around four, but again, it was still an astronomical return I'm on investment and with something like acid. It's a piece of paper So I smelled to it. So it's very easy to do Hi, what platforms did you use to launder the Bitcoin to Monero? And then how did you vet those platforms? So when I did it the one thing I'd like to remind you is like when I was doing all this was years ago So originally it was changely. I really liked changely There's another one shape shift IO any service that I would use I would try to investigate them as much as I could and I had learned that shape shift was really open to the DOJ and I just wasn't for that. I didn't really see too much about changely So I liked I liked using them, but again like anytime I would visit their site. It's gonna be through Tor anyway, you know Thank you