DNM-related arrests, 2011–2015

4 Australians were arrested for trying to buy guns from US LE-controlled seller “weaponsguy” February - March 2015_11ya, searches also turning up “Four illegal firearms, ammunition, two clandestine laboratories, precursor chemicals, methamphetamines, pseudoephedrine, steroids”. One of these was 26yo Auckland man Buddy Lipczynski was arrested ~2015-02-27 as part of the US “weaponsguy” sting; while out on bail, around January 2016 he was re-arrested for possession of “methylamphetamine” (presumably methamphetamine).

A longtime steroids vendor “Diamonddweller” (active on SR1, SR2, Evolution, and finally Agora) sold a variety of substances sourced from the “Diamond Pharma” underground lab (shipping from somewhere in the eastern EU), but went silent (including his Reddit account) around March 2015_11ya. A Redditor who has dealt with them claims it was a team of 2 men, that the Diamond Pharma website is likewise silent, and they sometimes wrote in Danish. On 2015-03-12, Danish police announced a historic arrest of 2 men in Copenhagen with searches turning up anywhere up to 1000kg of substances, the end-result of an investigation sparked by customs intercepts of packages shipping out internationally in September 2014_12ya to meet “an extensive illegal trade of anabolic steroids on the Internet” sold on “both open and closed forums”. Given the timing and niche product and other similarities, I agree with the Redditor that this Denmark bust was highly likely Diamonddweller.

An unknown number (<10) of European buyers were arrested for buying guns from the US LE-controlled seller “weaponsguy”, sometime between September 2014_12ya & May 2015_11ya.

On 2015-01-29, German police searched several locations & arrested 5 Germans for gun sales (especially for machine gun sales); a media article focusing on one of them mentions his appearance in a Vice documentary about Internet sales of guns over presumably the DNMs. (It’s unclear if or how the other 4 are involved.) The next day the Agora gun (and auto/semi-auto gun) seller Dosensuppe went on vacation, leading to questions on the Agora forums about whether he, MaxMustermann or PROJEKTIL was the arrested man. Dosensuppe replied on 2015-03-11 that he had not been arrested but was going on vacation for his personal safety; he did not respond to requests for a PGP signature or posted or sold since. Given the Vice connection and the rash of German/Dutch arrests 2014–2015_11ya, it seems highly likely that this was either Agora or Evolution associated, and of the few gun sellers, Dosensuppe fits the best. Confirmation of 32yo man Christian L’s arrest in October 2015 came later, for selling ~65 weapons, and was sentenced to 5.5 years jail; his arrest stemmed from a November 2014_12ya Customs intercept of a gun order at an airport and, presumably, backtracing.

On 2015-08-06, 3 Indian men (J Manikantan, Debyendu Roy, Jag Saipravesh) were arrested after a police informant bought from them drugs (“Ecstasy, LSD, charas and ganja”) which they had purchased on Agora and were selling to “students of reputed engineering colleges in the city”.

On 2015-08-26, two Irish men, Richard Sinclair & Kyle Hall, were raided, turning up MDMA/marijuana/diazepam/LSD and customer records of >£204,000 in sales, and other items. Sinclair turned out to be the former SR2/TMG/Agora seller “JerseyCow”, who had officially retired some time previously but had apparently resumed direct-dealing of MDMA with a few old customers in England with stealthed jigsaw puzzles; Hall was in a quasi-partnership with Sinclair as the seller “No1Benzos”. (Media: 1, 2, 3.)

The Dutch SR1/SR2/Agora LSD/MDMA/ketamine seller “HollandOnline” was arrested 2014-12-26 a policeman (possibly part of the ongoing investigation of HollandOnline by Dutch police) observed a drug transfer between two men, one of was HollandOnline from Ijmuiden. Then later, on 2015-03-09, the other man (likely HollandOnline’s supplier) and a business partner of his (the Amsterdam & Utrecht men) were also arrested.

Two men, aged 42 and 25, were behind the vendor alias ErKran. They vended on Agora, Evolution, Valhalla and allegedly on Flugsvamp and Nucleus too. According to an article (English translation), Swedish Customs discovered packages heading into the country that contained significant quantities of drugs. The initial package was seized and they proceeded to notify the police, who then started to discover that many packages were going to multiple addresses throughout Gothenburg. Each package was addressed to a non-existent company in industrial areas where ErKran was able to easily pick them up. After police discovered which address was used most frequently, a sting operation was set in motion. When the 42-year-old man showed up to empty the mailbox, he got arrested. Police claim he was carrying 160,000 Sek ($18,652 USD), a handgun and a small quantity of drugs. A 25-year-old male was then picked up and taken in to questioning where it was discovered that their operation had been running from a warehouse outside Gothenburg. Inside the warehouse police found and seized computers, drugs, packaging materials and an automatic weapon. With the seized computers as evidence, investigators learned about their online vendor alias ErKran. The 42-year-old is also implicated in another case in Sweden where school-kids on a forest excursion stumbled upon a cache of drugs. The teacher notified the police who, at the time, were apparently unable to link anyone to the crime. Apparently the 42-year-old is a suspect in that matter now.

On 2014-12-11, the American Ryan Andrew Gustafson was arrested in Uganda for counterfeiting money (press release; complaint; docket; Agora forums); he was the seller “Willy.Clock” who had sold on Evolution until banned and then Agora & his own site. He had been uncovered after an American user of his counterfeit currency was detected, the packages sent by Willy.Clock profiled, his fingerprints found, the reshipper located in Uganda, and then an undercover deal set up; he was deported from Uganda to the USA on 2015-12-03 to face trial in the USA as well. In addition to Gustafson, Zackary L. Ruiz (“Mr. Mouse”), Jeremy J. Miller (“Sinner”) and Michael Q. Lin (“Mlin”/“Mr. Casino”) were also arrested in the USA.

35yo Perth man Steven Kennedy was arrested around 2014-09-05 when an order of marijuana from Canada was intercepted by Customs; after an apparent knock-and-talk, he admitted everything and pled guilty.

An unknown number of UK buyers (<10) were arrested for buying guns from the US LE-controlled seller “weaponsguy”, sometime between September 2014_12ya & May 2015_11ya.

Jeffrey Paul Lloyd was arrested on 2015-03-26 after a search turned up a cache of weapons (knives, an axe, crossbow, pepper spray, a pipe gun, and 9mm & shotgun ammo), most or all of which had been purchased on Agora, and was sentenced to 6 years. The tipoff was said to be that “The court heard the Metropolitan Police was monitoring the websites” and “The different details were provided to the Met Police by a seller in Germany as a customer had purchased prohibited ammunition and firearms”; it’s unclear if this means that another weapons-seller on Agora was a UC, or if a seller had been arrested and kept customer details and who that seller might be (currently no weapons-associated seller arrests in Germany are known for March 2015_11ya).

In mid-2014, the Agora guns & weapon seller “weaponsguy” began receiving complaints of packages not arriving & being a scammer; in November 2014_12ya, he returned from a vacation, got the complaining buyer to vouch for him, and resumed selling guns & related equipment. I have identified “weaponsguy” as the ATF-controlled account which did undercover sales to Justin Moreira in March-April 2015_11ya, in which case it seems likely to me that weaponsguy followed the same lifecycle as Dark_Mart and other FBI-controlled accounts on Evolution and was busted sometime around or after the complaints began, cooperated and his account began to be operated by LE (ATF in this case). An Australian press release writes “In September 2014_12ya, the HSI investigation led to the identification of a 33-year-old man in Montana for the operation of the online alias account…In September 2014_12ya, HSI agents commenced a covert operation using the online alias account.” (HSI, NCA, and the Australians have declined to comment on my identification of the seller as weaponsguy.)

In June 2016, the guilty plea of 35yo Kansan Michael Andrew Ryan (“Brad Jones”/“Gunrunner”) was made public (case #5:15-cr-40050-DDC-1; press release; indictment; parole charge; plea agreement; docket), his federal case unsealed on PACER, and sentencing scheduled for September 2016; he pled to charges from June 2015_11ya of using 2 straw buyers, his ex-girlfriend Allison Mitchell and a Marlo Martin, to buy guns, and shipping a number of guns internationally to customers in Ireland, Scotland, & Australia, as well as possession of a firearm while on out release, and was sentenced to 52 months in January 2017. Given his age, Midwest location, business, countries he sold to, and charges dating to after weaponsguy was likely busted, I identify Ryan as weaponsguy, although some aspects do not match up (for example, Ryan’s initial pleas and request for jury trial, despite the presence of some sealed files on PACER, is hard to reconcile with him cooperating and turning over his Agora account to be used to entrap buyers). The press release & indictment are unspecific about which DNM he used, or how he was caught, and the plea agreement specifies use of BMR without any mention of Agora/weaponsguy, so I could be wrong.

In January 2015_11ya, Austin Frembling was arrested in Fresno, California, for buying $3k of MDMA off Agora from a Canadian seller (press release; complaint; docket; previous record). His package was intercepted by Customs (possibly due to inadequate stealth), then a controlled delivery was done to his PO box.

On 2015-01-30, 48yo Alabaman Michael Albert Focia (complaint; media; press release) was arrested for sales of firearms on BlackMarket Reloaded (as “iWorks”) and Agora (as “RTBArms”); an undercover purchase by the ATF in August 2013_13ya yielded a handgun which they traced back to the original owner, who remembered the license plates & phone number and other details of the man who he’d sold the handgun to, as well as a UPS clerk, and by November 2013_13ya had yielded Focia’s name/address/etc. A subsequent undercover purchase from Focia on Agora yielded fingerprints on the packaging which matched fingerprints already known for Focia. A pro se defense failed and he was convicted of most charges 2015-06-19, and was sentenced to 4.25 years in November 2015_11ya. (Interestingly, Focia may have almost escaped: BMR shut down shortly after the first agent de-anonymized Focia, which stymied several other BMR investigations, and the second agent seems to not realized that the Agora seller he was investigating was the same as the earlier BMR seller until the fingerprints came back as a known match. Changing pseudonyms may interfere with investigations, but is no panacea.)

Case unsealed as to Michael Albert Focia pursuant to U. S. Marshal notice of arrest (jct, ) [2:15-mj-00021-SRW] (Entered: 01/30/2015_11ya) Arrest of Michael Albert Focia (jct, ) [2:15-mj-00021-SRW] (Entered: 01/30/2015_11ya)

On 2015-04-02, the Massachusetts man Justin Moreira (“jd497”) was arrested for ordering a handgun & silencer from an ATF-controlled seller on a DNM (press release; complaint). The complaint does not specify the market or seller, but some careful searching reveals that the market was Agora and the seller was highly likely to be “weaponsguy”, who seemed to have been arrested and flipped possibly in November 2014_12ya, running a gun sting afterwards with several sales on Agora (but that feedback could have been padded). The Australian press release implies that there may have been up to 9 other arrests in the USA, and narrows the date down to September 2014_12ya.

On 2015-05-14, SUNY Oswego college student Dylan C. Soeffing was raided and arrested for reselling marijuana & Xanax locally he had bought off Agora from “MoodyMayhem” & “Benzoman”. A May 2016 FinCEN award to the investigators confirms that Soeffing was discovered by review of ‘suspicious activity reports’ filed by the banks & financial institutions he used to deposit cash into & purchase Bitcoins: “Specific banking transactions conducted by the subject were traced to the purchases of virtual currency and then to the Dark Web market.”

As part of the Willy.Clock investigation leading up to his arrest in Uganda, at least 3 Americans were indicted on 2015-04-01: Zackary L. Ruiz (“Mr. Mouse”) of Nevada, Jeremy J. Miller (“Sinner”) of Washington, and Michael Q. Lin (“Mlin”/“Mr. Casino”) of Pennsylvania. They seem to have worked with Willy.Clock or been part of his non-DNM private forums and so are not DNM arrests.

19/20yo Washington men Boden Gregory Bridge & Tristan Simpson Brennand were arrested in December 2015 (PACER: 2:15-cr-00384; docket); an informant reported about Brennand selling on Agora & Evolution after importing from Germany & India, leading to intercepts of some of the DNM sales and eventually the arrests.

The prosecution & conviction of the SR seller Paul Leslie Howard (“Shadh1”) was to related to a Customs interception of his large imports from Netherlands/Germany according to the judge’s sentencing verdict and then a July 2012_14ya search.

Another Australian seller (unknown which one, possibly “DownUnderDan” or “DopeBoyAus”), Christopher Owen, was pulled over by police on 2012-04-27 while driving to the post office to mail shipments, the drugs found, his house searched, and was sentenced to 5 years (discussion).

Sometime in August 2012_14ya, the MDMA buyer Ryan West, who resold locally, was raided and eventually convicted of 4 charges.

2 unnamed teens made the mistake of ordering marijuana, MDMA, and amphetamines from SR1; their parents turned them in & they were charged in September 2012_14ya.

A 2012-11-07 Australian article claims 30 interceptions a month in an area, but mentions nothing specific about arrests. A December 2012_14ya article quotes Customs claiming a 40% increase in seizures, but then quotes a SR seller as claiming a doubling or quadrupling of Australian buyers (hence, implying the interception rate has halved or worse). Estimating total number of Australian users is difficult, but the 2012_14ya Global Drug Survey reportedly found 184 SR purchasers in its sample of >6600 Australians suggesting a risk of arrest or publicity <5⁄184 (and incidentally, remembering this is a biased sample and the South Australian recent illicit drug use rate is ~14.9%, it suggests a very loose upper bound of all Australian SR users of 23000000 × 0.149 × 184/6,600 < 95,541).

The teen Preston Bridge died accidentally after falling on 2013-02-16 after taking “synthetic LSD” (probably NBOMe) bought by a friend on Silk Road; the friend was prosecuted & sentenced to 12 months’ probation on 2014-06-09.

On 2013-02-19, Samuel Ryan Ludwig was arrested & bailed after a search of his home prompted by a package intercepted by Customs on 2013-02-15. (The search turned up MDMA, LSD, ketamine, methylamphetamine, and amphetamine.) That was one of ~7 packages intercepted October 2012_14ya - February 2013_13ya; 5 more, containing drugs, laser pointers, and safrole oil would be intercepted February-March 2013_13ya, and additional MDMA & laser pointer packages would be intercepted, triggering another search of Ludwig’s residence while he was out on bail and a second arrest 2013-08-22.

Also on 2013-02-19, Patrick Franzini was arrested after a search related to 3 customs interceptions November 2012_14ya - February 2013_13ya of methamphetamine & MDMA sent from Netherlands, Canada, & China. The search turned up pseudoephedrine, DMT, and ketamine; Franzini cooperated, providing additional information like his SR1 account (he had made a total of 19 orders).

On 2013-06-20, an Australian man was arrested after a CD of safrole oil (a MDMA precursor) imported from Indonesia; this was part of an investigation triggered by Customs intercepting 4 Indonesian packages of safrole oil. The Indonesian seller was later arrested in Indonesia.

On 2013-02-21, Lee James Matthews’s home was searched and he was arrested. ~2 of 21 packages had been intercepted, and the search turned up MDMA, cocaine, methamphetamine, & amphetamines from his 93 orders, most of which he resold locally.

Reportedly (2013-07-01), a June 2013 Parcel Post sting seized 140 packages/$8m & “Six of those arrested were Silk Road members.” These 6 arrests are currently unknown aside from 1 likely being a safrole oil buyer. (Possibly 5, if one assumes that Adam Bunger’s BMR Australian customer is included in that count and the quote is slightly inaccurate.)

As of July 2013_13ya, there was “at least one criminal prosecution in WA [Western Australia] that involves Silk Road”, and WA police estimate “47 active Australian-based sellers who use Silk Road”; that prosecution may have been “A 26-year-old man, who was charged with attempting to possess drugs from the site, was fined $1,000” as of 2013-08-10.

An Australian investigation starting in January 2013_13ya arrested two fake ID manufacturers on 2013-09-10; coverage does not mention SR, but a Redditor plausibly identifies them as having been the fake ID seller “Ausid” who stopped selling on SR in March 2013_13ya.

At some point in mid-2013 (“just months before it [SR1] was closed down”), the Australian man Luke Hanley was arrested after 2 packages of 25i & 25c (and possibly an amphetamine package) were intercepted by Customs, and pled guilty in 2014.

In August 2013_13ya, a 18yo South Bunbury, West Australian male Jackson R. was charged with heroin (actually DMT) & 2C-e possession; in an account on FB then reposted on Reddit, he explains that he had ordered the DMT off SR1 from a Czech seller (the media coverage claiming it was heroin being wrong) and his parents turned the package in to the police after it arrived, with the subsequent police search turning up his 2C-E as well.

The former Silk Road moderator/employee SSBD/Symmetry was arrested in Brisbane on 2013-12-20 (indictment).

In Barratt et al 2016, reporting about a series of anonymous interviews conducted over TorChat 2011–2014_12ya with SR1 users, they mention one Australian user claimed to have been arrested:

…Tapering down drug use after a honeymoon period was not only triggered by the practice of ‘portion control’ and/or satiated desires, but also by other life events. For example, P1 (21-25 yrs, USA) explained “After last semester I’m more interested in grades than highs” and P4 (21-25 yrs, Australia) described how “I’d rather buy a flight than a gram of coke”. In the case of P25 (21-25 yrs, Australia), who was buying large amounts from Silk Road and dealing from his home, a police raid resulted in supply charges, which led to a tapering of drug use and cryptomarket activity.

The age bracket and when they concluded interviewing suggests that this SR1 user was arrested before 2014_12ya, and there are only around two known arrests in that age bracket and period for SR1; combined with background knowledge that only a small fraction of buyer arrests are ever reported (see discussion of completeness of the arrest table), it is highly likely that this arrest is not otherwise in the table.

A Launceston, Tasmania man was sentenced to prison during 2014-03-23–2014-03-29_12ya due to possession of 25i & BDMPEA partially (?) bought on SR; it’s unclear how or when he was caught.

The Victorian authorities report confiscating “several million dollars” (₿24,518) in Bitcoin in 2013_13ya after a December 2012_14ya search & arrest of Richard Pollard, who resold MDMA/cocaine/ketamine/fentanyl/etc (eventually sentenced to 6-7 years); through online accounts, it seems likely he was “1StopOz” who was noted as disappearing before January 2013_13ya and given a journalist’s comment that “The court heard Pollard ran a ‘one-stop shop’”. (The coins were planned to be auctioned off by June 2016.)

In September 2015_11ya, Daniel Andrew Atkinson was sentenced to 8.5 years for MDMA sales on SR1, with no details on arrest date or cause. A commenter claims this was the seller “Meanwhile In Australia”/MIA and he did cash-in-mail transactions, which are notoriously dangerous. (The “Meanwhile in Australia…” SR1F thread (silkroad1-forums-anonymous/2013-10-15/Market/Rumor%20mill/2012.10.21_0556am%20==%20Meanwhile%20in%20Australia...%20==%20thread_56466%20==%20by%20MeanwhileinAustralia.html) confirms he shipped internationally as well.)

On 2013-11-04, 2 men were arrested (media: 1; 2; 3) for selling opium, MDMA, & amphetamine, as well as, apparently, 6 of their customers - others may have been arrested outside Austria but no mention of those. Based on a forum thread & seller profile, I’ve identified this as the SR1 seller “Blackjack021”.

The aforementioned Tessellated claimed “we have not even once had a report of anyone having any legal trouble or ‘love letters’ from our product. On several occasions customs has opened our package, not found the product and sent it intact to the buyer.”

In May 2012_14ya, the high-volume cocaine Canadian seller “moveitnice”/“MiN” mentioned postal delays and then disappeared; according to buyers in the forum discussion, moveitnice accepted Western Union and the recipient of the WU payments matched the names in the arrests of a family of 4 Ottawans for mailing cocaine which was announced by the RCMP on 18 May. (My search of Canadian court records was unable to find their case; possibly their case has been publication-banned or discharged.) Gawker mentions rumors they may have been busted because they accepted payment via Western Union.

On 2012-08-02, British Columbia resident James Fowler was raided after an investigation started in May 2012_14ya based on an anonymous tip that he was selling drugs online and subsequent “electronic surveillance”. The raid turned up marijuana, psilocybin mushrooms, guns, and computer evidence of his online sales through “different websites, including his own”. La Moustache has identified Fowler as the SR1 seller “warweed” due to a BitcoinTalk.org account with a shared email address and other details (such as warweed’s announcement of being arrested in August 2012_14ya).

Also in August 2012_14ya, neighbors tipped off Calgary, Alberta police about drug sales in a house; the raid also turned up a garage for producing DMT, and Shawn Casey was arrested & charged 2012-08-22. He has been identified on Reddit (1, 2) & SR1F as the Calgary DMT seller “Trojan”.

4 people were arrested in Germany 2013-07-04, apparently by tracing another drug seller’s supplier with repeated orders which were sent from the same spot by the couriers (and were easily busted), and then to that SR seller-group “AfterHour” & possibly payments via mail (German coverage: 1, 2, 3, 4; partial translation). The leader cooperated and was sentenced to 4.83 years, with lesser sentences for the others.

Simultaneous with the AfterHour bust, the SR1 seller “Pfandleiher”/Sascha F. was also arrested by German police. The original investigation triggered by another seller’s wrongly-addressed package and then a general postal investigation led to AfterHour and Pfandleiher.

On 2016-01-11, 2 brothers (30/32yo) from Fürth were sentenced to 4 years prison stemming from an arrest in “early 2015” related to an inspection of a package; they had apparently been buying on SR1 and AfterHour 2012–2014_12ya, making ~40 orders of marijuana/amphetamines/MDMA/cocaine for their consumption & local resale.

In early October 2015_11ya, a former SR1 marijuana buyer was, despite no package interceptions & always using PGP, prosecuted & fined for his 2013_13ya SR1 purchases (and, oddly, 1 Outlaw Market order) from, among other sellers, the SR1 seller “Natural Weed”, a man named “Tobias Wald”, who apparently had been arrested at some point prior and turned over seller records which were then linked to order information on the SR1 server image provided by the FBI.

On 2013-08-05, 3 men (Ryan Thomas McManus, Ryan Milligan, Connor Devenney) who were the seller “sonicdrone”, were arrested in Ireland, and they were sentenced in April 2015_11ya; they had been selling a variety of drugs but principally cocaine, mephedrone, MDMA, marijuana, 2C-b, & LSD. How they were caught is unclear, but surveillance of a “virtual mailbox facility” they used to receive packages seem to have played a crucial role, possibly sparked by a failed attempt to mail 60g of marijuana to a Canadian customer. (Media coverage mentions another pseudonym, “blackwater86”, which is the name a mostly-unused SR1F account and not another seller as far as I can tell; possibly it was used in ordering from their American & Chinese supplier.)

On 2013-12-20 (indictment), the former SR administrator/moderator/employee “Libertas” (also of Silk Road 2) was arrested in Wicklow, Ireland but apparently made bail and continues to fight extradition with hearings initially scheduled for late July 2015. He pled guilty in the USA, and was sentenced to 6 years in July 2019.

DeepDotWeb reports (personal communication) that at the beginning of 2013_13ya, a small Israeli buyer of multiple drugs off SR1 (unknown seller) was arrested & sentenced to six months.

On 2015-08-10, DDW published “The Story of an Italian Unlucky Cyber Pusher”, which claims to be the memoir of a small Italian SR1/BMR seller “Fuckthepolice137” who sold internationally 2012–2013_13ya primarily marijuana & MDMA along with some sildenafil. He was arrested at the end of June 2013_13ya; Italian customs had intercepted packages to another bigger Italian drug trafficker, who was then arrested, and their emails with him were found, leading to his own raid & arrest.

In April 2013_13ya, 6 Dutchmen were arrested for MDMA sales on SR; the arrests stemmed from a car search turning up thousands of pills in 2012-11-22 and then a raid of their manufacturing location 2013-04-05 (one commenter speculates they were the missing MDMA seller “MedicalM”).

On 2013-10-09, following a month of wiretapping & Blackberry observation, 2 Dutchmen (the seller “XTCExpress”) were arrested while making MDMA pills & charged (Daily Mail), ultimately receiving 4-5 years.

The MDMA seller “SuperTrips” (profile; DoJ announcement; complaint; charges) was arrested on traveling to the USA in August 2013_13ya to meet a SR1 reseller, “UnderGroundSyndicate”/“BTCMaster” (who was arrested with SuperTrip’s help in October). US Customs intercepted >100 packages mailed by SuperTrips, built up a profile, found fingerprints on the packages, checked the Netherlands’s fingerprint databases & found a match, detained SuperTrips when he attempted to enter the USA, seized & searched his laptop’s files (illustrating the lack of civil rights at borders), he admitted selling during an interview, and eventually reached a plea agreement. His arrest was rumored on forums, and DPR2 of SR2 specifically alluded to SuperTrip’s arrest in late 2013_13ya/early 2014_12ya that “it was quite boring the third time law enforcement decided to use the ‘SuperTrips’ moniker and claiming to be him as a free man, when I know just as well as ICE where he is now”, although the case was only publicly announced in April 2014_12ya.

An unnamed Australian student’s MDMA from SR1 (bought for local resale) was intercepted by Customs sometime in 2012_14ya and he was, at a minimum, interviewed, but the 2012-07-11 article makes no mention of additional penalties. A New Zealand Customs officer who highly likely used SR1 (although he denies ordering, saying he had been researching it for his job) was charged with possessing & “supplying” methamphetamine but this “was uncovered during police inquiries into another crime”, with the resolution unclear.

Isaac Patiari Teaukura Maki’s MDMA from the Netherlands was confiscated by Customs on 2012-06-28 and his house visited, whereupon he admitted guilt to the officers and unsurprisingly was arrested & convicted.

A NZ article claimed 80 interceptions a month with 7 arrests January-July 2012_14ya or 1 arrest a month (suggesting each interception has a risk of leading to an arrest of ~1/80; the risk per order then depends on how many of the 52m items were drug packages), specifically: ‘“There have been approximately 80 intercepts a month [from] people we believe have utilized the Silk Road enterprise,” Day said. In cases linked to Silk Road from January to July, 13 search warrants were issued, 15 further properties visited and 7 arrests made.’ Since both the Customs officer & Maki were arrested in that January-July 2012_14ya period (Simon Lim falls outside it), that leaves 5 arrests unaccounted for.

What seems to be a third NZer, Simon Lim, was arrested sometime in 2012_14ya, pled guilty in October 2012_14ya & was sentenced to 18 months probation in 2013-02-07 for buying cocaine, methamphetamine, LSD and others off Silk Road.

On 2013-04-23, a student Benjamen Patrick Belmont importing cocaine, MDMA, & LSD from Netherlands & UK for resale had packages intercepted by Customs, leading to a search, guilty pleas, and then sentencing in February 2014. (That article also estimates 52m items passing through Customs in 2012_14ya with 1.4k intercepted as drugs.)

Two NZers were searched 2013-08-01 (Matthew Benjamin Collins & Jared Arthur Underwood), turning up a variety of drugs they had imported from the UK & Netherlands after September 2012_14ya from “encrypted internet sites” (given the timing, SR1), apparently for local resale given the pill presses mentioned.

In September 2013_13ya, 3 NZers (Michael David John Kitto, Andrew James Furness, Gareth John Edlin) were convicted of importing MDMA & cocaine from Germany & the Netherlands, after a search warrant on 2013-07-03

Another NZer, Dylan Terry Richardson, was sentenced December 2013_13ya for importing methamphetamine in August 2013_13ya (intercepted by Customs) leading to an arrest on 2013-09-03

And a fourth NZer’s (Andrew Trevor Harrison) 2 MDMA & NBOMe shipments from Netherlands & Canada were intercepted in September 2013_13ya by Customs, leading to a search of his house & sentencing in April 2014.

On 2013-12-11, another 3 NZers were arrested over various orders of “small quantities of LSD, Methamphetamine, MDMA (ecstasy), Class C analogue powders and the psychoactive substance NBOMe” from unspecified DNMs “such as ‘The Silk Road’”. (Inasmuch as Silk Road was busted 2013-10-02, they may have actually been ordering from a replacement such as Sheep MarketPlace.)

In April 2014_12ya, the NZ man Peter James Grossett was convicted after 2 packages of methamphetamine from Canada were intercepted in September & November 2013_13ya; the search had also turned up LSD and marijuana. (The article mentions he bought from another market after SR1 shut down, but not which one - it could have been Sheep or TorMarket or BMR given the broad time range.)

In December 2014_12ya, the SR1 MDMA/marijuana buyers Daniel Wayne Fowler & Lisa Marie Clark were sentenced after an investigating beginning with customs intercepts of German/Belgium packages in September 2013_13ya (1 2).

A 2015 NZ Herald article reports some aggregate information from Customs:

Cocaine catches increased from five in 2011–12 to 54 in 2013–14, LSD from three to 85 in the same period, and Ecstasy 85 → 139. Mr Berry said the interceptions were generally smaller amounts, and did not indicate a similar increase in overall quantities being seized across all entry points to the country. About 2.4 million items of mail come into New Zealand every month.

On 2013-06-27, police reportedly stumbled on a suspicious man who dropped a package of pills and searched his trailer, discovering amphetamine, MDMA, & spice; this was the base of operations for the two men running the SR1 account “Speedsweden”, which had made 500 sales (police writeup/translation, media article). The second one seems to have gotten off, however.

2 Swedish men Jimmie Michael Juhlin & Mohammed Farid Aref Barham (the seller “SweExpress”), were arrested 2013-10-08 for selling marijuana, their packaging having apparently been profiled & their postal center surveilled (court sentencing document, Flashback discussion); two users on Reddit noted that SweExpress ceased mailing orders a week before the SR raid.

The 54yo Canadian man Roger Thomas Clark (“Plural of Mongoose”/“Variety Jones”/“VJ”/“cimon”) was arrested in Thailand on 2015-12-03 after a complaint was filed in 2015-04-21 for extradition to the USA; as the SR1 seller Variety Jones, he had sold marijuana seeds and other materials, and as cimon, from December 2011_15ya - October 2013_13ya he was deeply involved in helping Ross Ulbricht run SR1, assisting in source code audits, management of servers & employees, and giving Ulbricht much advice (eg. he suggested the “Dread Pirate Roberts” pseudonym to suggest the possibility of multiple DPRs, and pushed for Curtis Clark Green to be killed after Green was arrested & then his admin account used by Carl Mark Force IV to loot bitcoins from the SR1 servers). The sheer extent of cimon’s involvement in SR1 was documented during Ulbricht’s January 2015_11ya trial with excerpts from Ulbricht’s journal, chat logs, and spreadsheets, leading to a great deal of surprise that cimon had apparently escaped unscathed, unlike many of the other SR1 employees, and especially considering that La Moustache identified cimon as Roger Thomas Clark shortly afterwards and even further, hacks of DPR’s abandoned email accounts (due to unredacted passwords in the evidence exhibits for the Ulbricht trial) pointed to Clark as cimon and another Thai expat as the SR1 developer “Smedley”. The complaint further reveals that Clark’s photographic ID, like other SR1 employees, was stored on Ulbricht’s laptop, and that Smedley was cooperating & had identified Clark.

The American man Mike Wattier (also a Thai expat associated with Clark) was identified as the SR1 programmer “Smedley” and began cooperating sometime between October 2013_13ya and 2015-04-21.

Cambridge man Callum Fay was arrested 2012-06-28 after UKBA intercepted an Indian package of cocaine and a search warrant was executed after delivery; Fay possessed cocaine, MDMA, methamphetamine, many packaging materials such as 20 internationally-addressed packages, and to have sold a great deal (£29,000) of bitcoins previously. He was re-arrested 2015-03-24 for ketamine, heroin, and methamphetamine. Given the Bitcoin volume and addressed packages, Fay was clearly an unknown SR1 seller.

A Reddit user claims in June 2014 to have been importing MDMA into the UK from the Netherlands off SR1 for personal consumption & resale through friends for ~6 months; sometime before 2013 a package of 100 pills was detected by customs and he accepted delivery, leading to his house being searched; he was then convicted (in large part due to text messages on his phone & emails on his computer) and given a suspended sentence.

After the SR bust in October 2013_13ya, the Devon UK seller of accessories like marijuana seeds/MBB+ packaging/kratom (“PlutoPete”), reported he had been raided & questioned and likely charged with his personal drugs; he was eventually charged in 2015_11ya with “9 charges inc conspiracy and supply class A and B”. 3 more in Manchester were arrested & charged; the description of a three-man seller mailing from Manchester seems to match at least two SR sellers, “JesusOfRave” and “TechnoHippy” (or possibly a “Mangled1”?), the former of whom quickly denied being arrested, while the latter last appeared on the SR forums in mid-September 2013_13ya, he resurfaced on the SR2 forums likewise denying any involvement.

At Peter Ward/PlutoPete’s sentencing, it came out that the second person was Richard Hiley, who was arrested in December 2013_13ya; they had been in partnership to buy & sell marijuana/methamphetamine/cocaine and exchange Bitcoins/dollars. They were sentenced 2016-02-29 to ~5 years each.

26yo Derby man Adam Yates was raided after a February 2014_12ya intercept at Heathrow Airport of 50 MDMA tablets, turning up phone/computer evidence of purchases & local resale of MDMA/cocaine/ketamine back to December 2011_15ya, and was sentenced to 2 years (suspended) in April 2016. The coverage identifies SR1 as his main DNM, but not which one he had ordered from in February 2014_12ya (SR2?).

In September 2011_15ya, the Silk Road 1 buyer of LSD & MDMA Stacy Litz was arrested in Pennsylvania after reselling LSD to an undercover officer; she became an informant.

On 2013-10-28, the Maryland former seller “digitalink”, Jacob Theodore George IV, was charged in federal court (previously convicted of a number of offenses in state courts) for his heroin & methylone (banned October 2011_15ya) sales a year & a half previously (he stopped in January 2012_14ya), and pled guilty (plea agreement), ultimately receiving a sentence of 6 years. The complaint/indictment does not specify what evidence the case is based on, why such a long delay, or why no arrest, and many of the PACER documents remain sealed or unavailable as of 2015-02-23 (so we don’t know the details or how exactly he was cooperating); but based on digitalink’s forum posts and forum discussions of him, it seems he was an extremely careless seller who disdained PGP, retrieved product seized by the Post Office (one forum-user presciently exclaimed in August 2011_15ya, “Oh wow, the idiocy is unmatched! It seems very possible that digitalink will be busted sometime soon.”), told other people who his methylone supplier was, gave his phone number to buyers, and ultimately failed to deliver $3,500 of methylone to a buyer “thoth” who then threatened to give digitalink’s information to the police, possibly resulting in him being interviewed and confessing to everything. An internal timeline of the US investigations says that on 2012-02-01, “HSI Baltimore then revealed [in the meeting] that their informant that told them about the Silk Road in September was just arrested on or around January 17, 2012_14ya for something unrelated and admitted to them then that he was actually a Silk Road vendor”, so it seems digitalink were arrested for offline misbehavior unrelated to his heroin/methylone imports & sales, and only then flipped.

Another filing mentions the alllove account’s use, but the internal timeline goes on to mention several other possible busts:

On October 12, 2011_15ya, HSI Baltimore reported in ROI 13 in general case number BA08NR11BA0004 that in September of 2011_15ya an informant told them that the Silk Road existed and they sold drugs there. No further reports were filed or subsequent cases opened on the website. - …On December 8, 2011_15ya, HSI Headquarters prepared HSIR ID“Digital Currency Bitcoin and the Underground Website Silk Road”. In that report they list 6 HSI investigations that had mentioned the Silk Road, including HSI Chicago and HSI Baltimore. HSI Chicago’s investigation was shown as actively working the website and multiple vendors. HSI Baltimore’s summary was that of only having one report from a CI mentioning the Silk Road existed. The other 4 HSI cases had only mentioned the website from interviews conducted. - On January 03, 2012_14ya, HSI Baltimore SA Gregory Miller opened investigation BA13CR12BA0016 and stated in ROI 001 that on December 29, 2011_15ya, their CI began telling them some details about the Silk Road website. - …By January 13, 2012_14ya, HSI Chicago had over 19 reports, 200 seizures, identified multiple vendors/targets, coordinated POE’s and case information with multiple HSI attaché offices, signed up a CI and had met with the AUSA’s office to prosecute the case. - …In April of 2012_14ya, HSI Chicago developed a new informant and informed HSI Baltimore of development. HSI Baltimore requested access directly to the informant but wouldn’t tell HSI Chicago why they wanted the access or what they wanted to ask the CI. HSI Chicago offered to take any questions and directly ask the CI the questions for them, but they would not allow access to the CI without knowing any topic of questions. HSI Baltimore expressed anger over not being allowed direct access to the CI.

The September 2011_15ya informant seems to have not been a bust given the lack of any followup and to have simply been an informant (someone paid for money); the December report about “actively working…multiple vendors” may refer to investigating them and perhaps conducting undercover buys, not necessarily flipping them (in which case they might be referred to as CIs); the Baltimore claim of a CI dating from 2011-12-29 may seem to be “digitalink” but the date does not tally up with the other entry in which digitalink only offers to flip after his arrest almost a full month later and there are no known arrests near Baltimore in late 2011_15ya (indeed, the only 2011_15ya arrest so far is Stacy Litz from September 2011_15ya, which would be awkward as the CI - ~4 months to begin talking?), so I consider this evidence of an unknown bust in December 2011_15ya; the 2012-01-13 mention of a new CI in Chicago is also not consistent with any known busts and given the fierce rivalry between the Baltimore & Chicago offices (the focus of the timeline), this is likely another unknown bust; finally, the April 2012_14ya mention of another new Chicago CI lines up almost perfectly with the known “dripsofacid” CI used by the Chicago office’s Der-Yeghiayan from his testimony. This leaves 2 unknown busts: the Baltimore CI in December 2011_15ya and the Chicago CI in January 2012_14ya.

During the SR1 trial, the DHS agent Deryeghiayan engaged in purchases “from March 2012_14ya until September 2013_13ya…Using an account obtained from an actual user, with the screen name of ‘dripsofacid’”, which was used for at least one buy in April 2013; “dripsofacid”’s account may have been obtained after an unknown arrest during that time period. (Another LE account was “Mr Wonderful”, who was used in the 2013_13ya “Emailgate” in which he canvassed SR1 employees over Tormail and tried to flip them by offering money and immunity, to which DPR1 was alerted by his DEA informant Carl Force; Mr Wonderful is not a known seller account, and all mentions of Mr Wonderful such as Force’s dismissive comments seem to be imply his contact was done off SR1 and to be a fresh pseudonym, so it does not sound like a flipped buyer or seller to me and so is not included in the table. Similarly, an FBI presentation in mid-April 2015_11ya in the Netherlands had a screenshot taken with the account “Aspire28”, but my searches do not turn up mentions of any seller of that name, so it was probably a throwaway or flipped buyer - impossible to know.)

On 2012-05-05, the Massachusetts Bard College student Mehran Jahedi’s rooms were searched & campus security found “LSD, ketamine, amphetamines, hallucinogenic mushrooms, MDMA, mescaline and marijuana, as well as packaging originating from as far away as China, Germany and Poland”, which he had been reselling locally after sourcing them from the “darknet”, and ultimately received a suspended sentence in 2014_12ya; given the variety, it is almost certain he was purchasing from SR1 rather than any of the other SR1-era markets (BMR/Darkbay/Sheep/Atlantis).

The account of the SR1 clonazepam/marijuana seller “alllove” was used by the FBI in 2012-09-27 & earlier as part of its investigation into SR1, and screenshots taken with it were entered into evidence at Ross Ulbricht’s2015 trial. alllove must have been busted somehow before September 2012_14ya, for his account to have become the FBI’s property, and explaining his abrupt disappearance sometime before 2012-05-19 (remarked upon at the time on Reddit; there may be more accurate timings in SR1F hits for “alllove”) but all other details are unknown. One post-trial exhibit (a Der-Yeghiayan affidavit seeking copies of Mark Karpeles’s email accounts) states that “In September of 2012_14ya, HSI was able to verify that a commission rate exists on the Silk Road by using a Silk Road vendor account and setting a price on a product for sale on the Silk Road marketplace. HSI then logged in to the Silk Road using a different account and observed the same product offered for sale at a higher price than what was set by the vendor. The difference in price matched the advertised commission rates from the Silk Road administrator.”; while this could possibly have been an unknown seller, digitalink, davidd, or alllove (all USA SR1 seller accounts compromised by September 2012_14ya), the former had disappeared off the market by September 2012_14ya, and the last fits best given that we know the alllove account was being used for other parts of the investigation. (The old SR1 seller Grand Wizard says that alllove may also have sold bitcoins for cash in the mail or other fiat; this is an extremely risky occupation and if true, almost certainly how he was busted.)

In December 2012_14ya, a New Jersey buyer was busted for marijuana in a controlled delivery when the package was detected in the mail; he cooperated (no additional penalties specified in article) and 2 sellers (SourDieselMan) were eventually arrested & charged in July 2013_13ya.

SR forum posters have claimed that a DMT seller, cocaine seller, & 2 others have all been busted but apparently for their offline connections and activities (the poster claims the DMT seller had too many people visiting and his neighbors squealed; this was likely the Canadian seller “Trojan”, but the other 3 I’m not sure about).

In “early 2013” (personal communication), an American ordered MDMA from a European seller; IRL activities led to his arrest (he had been reselling locally and one of his buyers was themselves caught & snitched) although the SR1 connection was not uncovered, and eventually he pled to a lesser charge.

In January 2013_13ya, according to the SR bust indictments, a seller & SR employee (“chronic pain”/“chronicpain”/“Flush”) was arrested & charged in Maryland after receiving a kilo of cocaine from an undercover agent; he then cooperated with the FBI in entrapping Ulbricht into ordering a hit on him and then pretending to be dead. He was identified in October as Curtis Clark Green (discussion). Green’s plea-agreement (transcript) was released on 2013-11-07, without any details of his cooperation after his arrest in Utah (although “the U.S. attorney’s office said his computer was forensically examined after it was seized”); interestingly, the plea-agreement notes that the undercover agent did not know the cocaine package was being delivered to the same SR administrator who had helped him find a seller for his cocaine. Curtis Green’s cooperation earned him 2 days imprisonment & 4 years probation.

Also in January 2013_13ya, the criminal complaint documenting the DEA corruption during the SR1 investigation mentions offhandedly that the dirty copes Force & Bridge controlled the account “TrustusJones” as of 2013-01-23; TrustusJones was an East Coast marijuana SR1 seller beginning around February 2012_14ya (forum archive). Curiously, in February 2013_13ya, the account announced on the SR1 forums (thread 2013_13ya theft, except the use of TrustusJones is noted in internal DEA documents, suggesting that the sales were more about busting any SR1 users unwise enough to buy MoneyPak. (The original TrustusJones had even mocked MoneyPak in an earlier thread, based on his SR1F posts, is that he was busted on or before 2012-04-29, and his OPSEC sounded good, it was probably due to the usual mail-tracing approach.

In February 2013_13ya, there were two cases of Americans being busted in Florida and Louisiana by signing for MDMA in what is called a “controlled delivery”; the simultaneity, drug type, & amount immediately led to speculation that they were both ordering from the SR MDMA Canadian seller “luckylucianno” who was previously having issues with order interceptions, which was confirmed when one of the arrested men posted on the SR forums warning away others and relevant threads were deleted by forum moderators (although a moderator claimed the Louisiana bust was unrelated to SR or the Florida bust).

Sometime in March 2013_13ya, an Alaskan buyer of heroin & cocaine apparently received a controlled delivery, and received felony charges; he cooperated in the ongoing investigation of his seller, “NOD”, according to the indictment for NOD.

An otherwise-unknown female buyer from NOD seems to have been similarly arrested in April/May according to the TSG article on NOD.

On 2013-03-21, the large Californian marijuana group seller “SourDieselMan” replaced their profile page with the message “i am down forever” (last forum comment was 2013-03-18); SR users noted that on 19 March, a series of marijuana-related raids were executed in California near where SourDieselMan apparently shipped from, and speculate that SourDieselMan may have been arrested in them (though two users say SourDieselMan was either banned by SR over selling Bitcoins for cash in the mail or traced via this, an activity attested to in the review thread). Additional July news coverage revealed SourDieselMan to be a group, 2 members of which (Matthew Gillum & Jolene Chan) were arrested & charged with marijuana & finance-related charges. The complaint says the investigation started in August 2012_14ya due to the large sums of cash in mail, did a controlled delivery to a SR marijuana buyer in New Jersey in December 2012_14ya (he cooperated), flipped one of the SourDieselMan members, and went from there; for additional details, see the PACER court records and the filings for Gillum & Chan. Gillum was sentenced to 9 years.

On 2013-04-12, a South Carolinian man (the seller “Casey Jones”, judging by forum search hits and his posts) had ₿11 (then $935) confiscated via a drug law provision (Hughes blames it on the “actions of one of his house guests” and an additional Bitcoin seizure casts a little doubt on the charges); he was arrested in June 2013_13ya and triply charged in Charleston with distribution/possession of marijuana/clonazepam/DMT/methylone but he did not seem to be selling marijuana on SR and the available court records do not indicate whether he is being charged due to offline or online drug dealing, but the mention of “two undercover drug buys…in April” imply he was selling off-SR and may have been caught that way.

On 2013-04-26, 2 Iowan men, Adam Lawin & Benjamin Walker, were raided for importing MDMA from the UK & Belgium (press release; sentencing). Customs interceptions of their packages beginning in 2012_14ya were followed by a local undercover buy, which triggered the raid.

During May 2013_13ya, a teen in Indiana was arrested after his mother informed on him. I also know of another case involving an American who was convicted after a controlled delivery of LSD mailed from the Netherlands; his package was likely detected.

A complaint filed 2013-06-13 against a David Lawrence Handel charges him with distributing methylone, 2C-E, and 2C-C; no full complaint is available and it is apparently sealed. Handel is known to be SR-related because the edgarnumbers complaint says so. La Moustache suggests that Handel was the research-chemical seller daviddd, based on davidd’s sales volume, public silence since the right time, a rumor that he had been arrested, the coincidence that davidd listed 1kg of methylone for sale just like the LE-controlled Digitalink & edgarnumbers seller profiles had, and a suspicious attempt by the davidd attempt to send a ‘free sample’ to a SR1 moderator. This identification as the SR1 seller davidd was eventually confirmed when Handel pled guilty in 2015 (plea agreement; sentencing order). He had been the target of several undercover buys by the Maryland Marco Polo task force which led to his profiling & identification; he was arrested after picking up a package from post office, was carrying a gun, apartment was searched, and wound up handing over his SR1 seller account.

On 2013-06-28, the seller Sheldon Kennedy (“edgarnumbers”; profile) was raided in Nebraska (he had sold methylone among others on SR, and guns on the short-lived Armory); he cooperated (turning over his customers’ addresses), was eventually officially arrested 2014-02-19, and his case was unsealed the next day (complaint), finally being sentenced to a reduced two years. He had been busted after “digitalink” turned over all his customers’ addresses in November 2011_15ya, which included edgarnumbers’s address; he was then targeted for undercover buys and confirmation that he was a drug & gun dealer through his lack of visible income, Gmail & Amazon accounts, Facebook & Google+ profiles, interviews at his local post office & debit card records of many postal purchases, and a return address. (Kennedy turns out to be the SR1 seller mentioned in an article on the Internet sex-cam site Chaturbate.)

In July 2013_13ya according to DHS agent DerYeghiayan’s testimony, the Texas seller and then SR1 employee “CaptainMal”/“scout”/“cirrus”’s account was taken over by law enforcement and the account used to infiltrate SR1 and later SR2; she was likely arrested at some point before that in June or July 2013_13ya on some charge (possibly relating to her activity as a seller selling bitcoins, although an LE agent may have implied she got in trouble for something unrelated to SR1 and offered to flip); a later account by D-Y states that Scout was caught when she made the mistake of accepting a free toy from Dutch SR1 seller “Nomad Bloodbath”, who had been tracked through mail & flipped earlier. Cirrus has been suspected long before as there were only a few suspects for the UC who was reported in October 2013_13ya as chatting with Ulbricht as he was arrested, but the hard confirmation came when the evidence list was leaked 2014-12-19.

On 2013-07-11, two young Algoma, Wisconsin men, J.J. Savoie & S.J. Paape importing MDMA from Germany (mugshot) - possibly from Afterhour? - saw their package detected by Customs and received a controlled delivery.

Also on 2013-07-24, the Wisconsin SR1 buyer Ryan M Petersen was searched over an intercepted package of MDMA from Belgium, after his friend he was using as a drop had been searched after an earlier 2013-04-26 CD (he then cooperated). He eventually reached a plea bargain (court records #2014CF000288)

A New York man Nicholas C Moffitt was prosecuted in August 2013 after selling Suboxone in person, having his mail monitored, and then his store (with drugs on the premises) raided; he pled guilty

Also in August 2013_13ya, the large Dutch MDMA seller SuperTrips was arrested (forfeiture; press release; plea agreement); profiling of his packages and fingerprints provided enough grounds that when he tried to visit the USA, he was detained at the airport, his unencrypted laptop examined and all his records found (including all buyer addresses), whereupon he confessed & began cooperating (helping bust his collaborator UnderGroundSyndicate in October 2013_13ya). (His account would be used by a DHS undercover agent until SR1 was raided 2 months later.) He was sentenced to 10 years prison.

Also in September 2013_13ya, a Vermont student Sid Hammer was charged with drug possession; he had purchased them off SR for local resale, and was reported to police through complaints of “smells of burnt marijuana”.

In October 2013_13ya, the founder of SR, Ross Ulbricht, was arrested in San Francisco and charged with a laundry list of crimes; he was ultimately convicted and sentenced to life without parole. Logs from his laptop implicated a college friend, Richard Bates (“baronsyntax”) in helping program SR1 and buying some drugs; this was used as leverage to force Bates to testify against Ulbricht in his trial. Reportedly there were, besides NOD, Ulbricht, 4 UKers and 2 Swedes, “at least half a dozen other arrests currently in the works” (a promise fulfilled subsequently).

Simultaneous with the SR bust, a Washington state man & his girlfriend, the seller “NOD”, was charged with heroin selling (complaint, docket, interview) with some leniency since they cooperated after their July bust & was sentenced to (a perhaps surprisingly low) 5 years. A pseudonymous Redditor claims to have been a customer of NOD, among other sellers, and to have been searched, arrested & charged on 2013-10-08, with (apparently) another pseudonymous Redditor reporting state charges & posting his indictment. (Interestingly, NOD may have done an interview for the Drugs Inc. TV series somewhere around March 2013_13ya.)

The Florida seller “UnderGroundSyndicate”/“BTCMaster” Angel William Quinones (profile, plea agreement) was arrested near-simultaneously with DPR thanks to the cooperation of his partner/supplier, the Dutch seller SuperTrips, who had been arrested when he earlier tried to fly into the USA in August 2013_13ya with an unencrypted laptop after having been identified through latent fingerprints on packaging.

The NY seller of clonazepam/hydrocodone/heroin “deezletime” (profile), Michael Duch, was arrested on 2013-10-01 as well, ultimately reaching a plea deal on 2014-12-10, in time to testify in the Ulbricht trial. In exchange for his testimony, he was sentenced to 2.5 years in July 2015 (most already served).

On 2013-11-21, the seller “MDpro” was arrested in Delaware (seller profile, forum discussions, forum posts, BMR posts under her real name) and charged in federal court (PACER web data, complaint/filings), ultimately sentenced to 2.5 years; based on the complaint, it seems her fatal mistake was either using tracking on her shipments through an account registered in her real name or putting valid return addresses on her shipments to a PO box registered to her real name, which allowed the undercover buyer to find her and compile the extensive case against her. Among her many security mistakes included accepting shipments from other sellers to her apartment addressed to her partner (and partner in crime).

On 2013-12-17, 4 members of the methamphetamine group seller “hammertime” were arrested in Oregon as well as 3 others charged (PACER, indictment; more coverage; trial; plea agreement; sentencing for two). The leader, Jason Weld Hagen, was ultimately sentenced to 3 years; the cited reason for such a light sentence was concerns over the Force/Bridges SR1 corruption scandal.

On 2013-12-19 (indictment; girlfriend’s report), the former SR administrator/employee “Inigo” was arrested in Virginia.

On 2014-01-26, the Bitcoin seller “BTCKing” (SR1/2) & an accomplice at BitInstant were arrested in Florida & NY (respectively) after an IRS investigation (indictment); BTCKing offered a service in which he sent buyers a bank account number to deposit cash to (which he then converted into bitcoins via BitInstant), then transferred bitcoins to the buyer on Silk Road. He was arrested after an undercover agent (starting in August 2012_14ya) made purchases, received the bank account information, and obtained his bank records; the case was further cemented by using the SR messages from the FBI’s copy of the servers (apparently BTCKing did not believe in using PGP), the home IP embedded in BTCKing’s emails with BitInstant (BTCKing used Safe-mail.net but apparently did not connect over Tor), and his accomplice’s Gmail emails & chats obtained. (Ironically, BTCKing had declined Dread Pirate Robert’s July 2013_13ya invitation to join him in creating an “Anonymous Bitcoin Exchange” by pointing out his vulnerability to investigation: “All LE has to do is go to the bank and ask who is the Trustee of RMF Trust and BANG… They will seize the funds and me.”) He pled guilty and was sentenced to 4 years

In late May 2014_12ya, the SR1 oxycodone/hydrocodone seller “CALIGIRL” (profile), Matthew Jones, was arrested in Dallas, Texas (press release, criminal complaint & excerpts, PACER), pled guilty, and was sentenced to 5 years & ten months. An undercover agent had made 2 purchases through SR1 and 6 over Bitmessage after the SR1 bust; CALIGIRL did not vary packaging methods or drop off location, allowing his packages to be profiled, traced back to a sorting facility, where the agent discovered they were all dropped off at a single postal box. In addition, on the last purchase, the agent social-engineered CALIGIRL into accepting part of the payment to his personal bank account. This all fed into a comprehensive investigation of CALIGIRL’s life which drew on information from (but likely not exclusive to): Facebook; Amazon shopping logs and IP; #bitcoin-otc IP & transactions; Local Bitcoin transactions; domain names and telephone; cellphone apps (Ding) usage & callers & IPs; Post Office photos (from automated postal machine); the landlord for his post box; travel records; electronic toll records recording movements of his car; hotels he stayed at (he used places he stayed or was near as return addresses); and financial records from: Xoom (and IP addresses), Wells Fargo, JP Morgan Chase, Western Union, & MoneyGram. There are currently no known controlled deliveries or arrests of CALIGIRL customers (possibly the SR1 bust eliminated most of his business).

On 2014-11-05, Marylanders Tom & Amanda Callahan (SR1 Bitcoin seller/exchanger “JumboMonkeyBiscuit”) were raided by the Baltimore task force (see exhibit B of Bridges, and “United States v. 50.44 Bitcoins”) for money laundering. The SR1 server image had been used to identify a PO box that JumboMonkeyBiscuit used for their Bitcoin-for-mailed-cash sales, registered in their name, which in conjunction with an October 2014 intercept by USPS of $10,000 cash (they apparently had moved on to other DNMs but it is unspecified which). Their case came to light as part of the investigation of dirty cop Shaun Bridges, who stole some of the seized bitcoins.

On 2015-05-28, charges were announced against 30yo Louisiana man Beau Wattigney for being the SR1/2 “PurpleLotus” seller of counterfeit coupons (complaint; press release; media); he pled guilty and was sentenced January 2016 to 3.4 years prison. PurpleLotus had retired well before May 2015_11ya; the complaint says only that he was caught in part based on “forensic analysis of images of servers seized during the dismantlement of Silk Road 1, the Federal Bureau of Investigation (‘FBI’) was able to recover, among other things, transaction histories and private message communications associated with Silk Road 1 users.” and also quotes a (unencrypted) PM from PurpleLotus to a buyer explaining how to use counterfeit coupons. A Redditor claiming to be SR1 seller RXMan says that he remembers trading prescription pills for coupons and that PurpleLotus provided, via unencrypted PMs, the name Beau Wattigney & a mailing address.

On 2014-09-26, the 21yo South Australia man Ryan James Norman was arrested while picking up a package from the post office after Customs intercepted a shipment of ~5000 doses of 25i-NBOMe from Canada; he was sentenced in September 2015_11ya to 3.5 years. It later emerged that he was a seller on SR2; I have identified Norman as the SR2 seller “MagicAU” based on similar products and MagicAU vanishing from SR2 during 2014-09-26–2014-09-28_12ya, immediately after Norman was raided, and MagicAU’s relatively young vendor age which matches the descri

During April 2015_11ya, a 40yo German man in Würzburg was arrested for purchases of MDMA, cocaine, amphetamines, cannabis & “synthetic” drugs totaling kilograms off of SR2 (he does not seem to have been a SR2 seller, indicating he was a local reseller) and earlier markets starting in 2012_14ya. The investigation appears to have relied FBI forensic analysis of the seized SR2 server’s PMs (he, like many, apparently had not been using PGP in communicating with his sellers) and also German customs intercepts of several orders.

In late January 2014_12ya, a Canadian man T.S. & Indonesian woman L.A. were arrested after a package of MDMA (100 Superman pills) from the Netherlands (which she had ordered from “pillbay” on Silk Road 2) was intercepted by customs & his West Jakarta residence searched; they were sentenced to 10 & 5 years respectively.

On 2014-11-05, as part of Operation Onymous, 2 men (Neil Mannion & Richard O’Connor) were arrested in Dublin, Ireland, uncovering drugs (MDMA/LSD/marijuana)/Bitcoins/address-lists; the Irish investigation began after information was received from a foreign agency. They were probably the seller “TheHulkster”, based on volume, location, & drugs. (Media coverage: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8.)

During the 2014-11-05 busted of SR2, the authorities announced 6 UK arrests, but no details have emerged since besides the basic description given to the press (were any of them Budworx or Top_Gear_UK?):

The NCA described the six British arrests as “significant”, adding that a large amount of computer equipment has been seized at all the addresses searched and will now be forensically examined. The six—a 20-year-old man from Liverpool, a 19-year-old man from New Waltham in Lincolnshire, a 30-year-old man from Cleethorpes [Lincolnshire], a 29-year-old man from Aberdovey in Wales and a man and woman, both 58, also from Aberdovey, have all been bailed after being interviewed.

The “19-year-old man from New Waltham” turns out to be Alex Middleton (“MaximusDecimus” on SR2), who sold methoxetamine/MXE & Xanax & 4-MEC internationally; he pled guilty in June 2015_11ya and was sentenced to 2 years 4 months in September 2015.

In February 2015_11ya, charges were announced for 5 people:

A 29-year-old man from the UK was also charged today, a National Crime Agency spokesperson told me. His 11 charges include the possession of four stun guns which were disguised as other weapons; conspiring with Peter Ward to supply a quantity of cannabis; and another charge of the importation of cocaine. Another three people were charged with drug offenses. They are 29-year-old Cei William Owens, charged with supplying Class A and B drugs; and 59-year-old Robin Clinton Bradshaw and 58-year-old Elynedd Ann Owens, each charged with possession of Class A and B drugs. They are all residents of the Aberdovey area of Wales.

One of the 5 was PlutoPete, whose case was already known; the second person is some sort of connection to PlutoPete and is a new case; and the last 3 were noted to line up with the mentioned ages & locations of 3 of the original 6, apparently indicating that one was a seller and the other two were a buyer. Cei Owens (“Johnny Alpha”) pled guilty & was sentenced to two years for sales/possession of “cannabis resin, herbal cannabis, MDMA and psilocybin”. Of the original 6, this seems to leave 3 unaccounted: the 20-yo-Liverpool, and the 30-yo-Cleethorpes.

The 20-yo-Liverpool was revealed in April 2019 to have been none other than StExo/Dread Pirate Roberts 2 (DPR2) himself, having been eventually caught up by the SR2 bust & cracking of his encrypted files, although the exact details of his OPSEC failures remain unclear:

The NCA investigators linked White first to the StExo identity in part by following financial and bitcoin transactions in the early days of the account’s creation. “We effectively got him from his day one, week one, of activity on Silk Road,” Chowles said. Chowles explained that included tracing a loan from payday loan company Wonga in White’s name, which was then sent to cryptocurrency exchange Mt. Gox, which then transferred bitcoin funds to the StExo account on Silk Road and paid for some items on the site. Other evidence included receipts for items seized from other Silk Road vendors addressed to White, and White being in possession of bitcoin wallets associated with DPR2. John Williams from the Crown Prosecution Service (CPS) told Motherboard in a statement that White “received an income that allowed lavish spending with no credible explanation.”

The case has not been straightforward, however. Chowles said the NCA had challenges with White’s use of encryption. The agency was eventually successful, in part because of gaining access to a password manager which contained the unlock phrase for one of White’s encrypted laptops. The whole process has also taken years. According to a source familiar with the case, the investigation data didn’t arrive in the UK until June 2016, and the FBI didn’t provide full copies until December 2018. Motherboard granted the source anonymity to speak more openly about a criminal case.

21yo Leeds man Luke Fairless was arrested 2014-10-10 after a search of his house was triggered by a MDMA order being delivered to the wrong address and the occupant complaining; the search turned up MDMA, LSD, diazepam, DMT, & mescaline, and he was sentenced in 2016 for importing.

In early May 2014_12ya, the SR2 seller “Xanax King” (Jeremy Donagal) & his associates were arrested (DEA press release); he ran a very large operation with multiple employees, purchased ingredients using Western Union & wire transfers to China, “sold drugs locally, distributing Xanax tablets, GHB, and steroids”, some sort of clearnet website (xkloves.us, content removed in lieu of a now-defunct Tor hidden service), and had at least one “confidential informant” in his organization (see the anti-bail letter), who was handling their SR2 orders at the end according to a media report (some buyers reported being asked to resend their PGP-encrypted addresses).

The fall out from XK’s bust has been substantial: the anti-bail letter claims “In addition to the nine defendants in this case, evidence gathered from Defendant’s enterprise led to the arrest of nearly 60 other people throughout the country”. Several of his customers received controlled deliveries and have been arrested as well. 2 controlled deliveries on 28 May picked up 4 men in Bloomington, Indiana (Carlos Matthew Allen, David Christian Feigel, Paul Furto, & Andrew C. Dickey). Kory D. Kreider in New Orleans, Louisiana whose pickup of a package was surveilled managed to evade arrest on 29 May but was arrested a few days later using cellphone records & Facebook data. Some other CDs in late May/early June 2014_12ya are highly likely to be XK-related. In Naperville, Illinois, Brian Patrick Noone was arrested on 2014-05-30 after a search warrant yielded 600 Xanax pills, apparently based on “a tip from a federal task force about drug trafficking in Naperville”. In Nashville, Tennessee, 3 people (Demarcus Blue, Markuite Matthews, & Adrevious Rayner) were arrested after a CD on 2014-05-29 of 5000 gel cap Xanax pills sent by a “An alleged drug ring” shipping from California and the mailer “was taken into custody at the end of last week”.

On 2014-11-05, as the final piece of Operation Onymous, the operator of Silk Road 2, Blake Benthall / “Defcon” was arrested in San Francisco (press release; complaint). It is highly likely that the undercover agent Cirrus had enabled the locating of the SR2 server, which Benthall apparently had rented under his own name (possibly at his employer Close’s hosting), after which his Bitcoin spending (on a Tesla) was noted and surveillance correlated Defcon’s activities with Benthall’s; after being arrested, he “did admit to everything”.

On 2014-11-06, David & Teri Schell were arrested in California for selling marijuana and marijuana wax (complaint, PACER); additional coverage indicated they were investigated after “discovering an Internet Protocol address was accessing the Silk Road 2.0 site” and then PO box surveillance nailed them. The DoctorClu case reveals that the seller portal for SR2 had been used to de-anonymize a few IPs (but not many), implying that an undercover agent (presumably Cirrus) had inserted a de-anonymization exploit similar to the previous Freedom Hosting exploit. They were probably the SR1 & SR2 seller “CaliforniaCanibas” (profile).

In “last fall” (Fall 2014_12ya), US Air Force cadet Nathaniel Penalosa’s dorm room was searched and a military investigation into his sale of drugs to fellow students at the USAF academy, including LSD, molly/methylenedioxy-methamphetamine, and modafinil. He had ordered them via mail from Silk Road 2 His court-martial began around August 2015, leading to the expulsion of 3 other cadets, and he accepted a plea-bargain for 3 years.

In November 2014_12ya, 37yo Louisiana man Michael Munro Junior was arrested for importing Xanax & oxycodone bought on SR2 since March 2014_12ya, and sentenced to 1.6 years.

The Washington man Brian Farrell & SR2 staffer “DoctorClu” was arrested 2015-01-20; his IP had been uncovered in July 2014_12ya accessing the SR2 seller portal, like CaliforniaCanibas, by CMU researchers and the information turned over to the FBI. The local police investigated by post-office checks and then interviewing him & his roommate on 2014-12-22; the roommate spoke freely about Farrell’s drug use and online connections and the next day even provided some of Farrell’s drugs to the police, allowing a search warrant to search the house and uncover Farrell’s prescription drugs on 2015-01-02, at which point he confessed everything & to helping run SR2 as the employee DoctorClu and was then arrested (the charges being upgraded from local pill charges to federal conspiracy charges; complaint). He was sentenced to 8 years in June 2016.

Michigan psychedelics buyer Michael Carlton Paiva was arrested in 2016 due to being identified in Operation Onymous as a SR2 buyer for MDMA/25i-NBOMe/DOM/DMT/LSD/Al-LAD/mescaline/“liquid mushrooms” and was sentenced to 30 months on 2017-03-09. Given the involvement of SR2, being a buyer, and the long delay, he may represent another arrest due to unencrypted PMs.

A Canberra, ACT teen was given a suspended 4-year sentence in November 2015 over his local resale of marijuana, MDMA, cocaine, & LSD bought off an unspecified DNM using Bitcoin; his first package was detected by Customs in September 2014_12ya, as were 6 packages after that, leading to a raid in May 2015_11ya.

In February 2015_11ya, two Belgian men from Genk & Maaseik were arrested for sales internationally of methamphetamine/amphetamines/MDMA, possibly due to the fake stamps they were using to save money (similar to the earlier German RedBull case). The first was sentenced to 2 years prison, the second to 0.5 years probation.

In October 2016, a 25yo Belgium man and three accomplices were arrested (DeepDotWeb article) for selling amphetamines under the online vendor name Evilution. The vendor used a local computer shop as a return address and six packages got returned to that address because of insufficient postage. Since the shop owner reported the returned packages to law enforcement, an investigation started. Fingerprints found on the examined packages belonged to Stijn Victor, who has been arrested previously for drug crimes. He mainly sold synthetic drugs and amphetamines, amounting to a total of 1878_148ya transactions. During the arrest, law enforcement also seized 4000 bitcoins. Victor’s lawyer claims that parts of it came from legal programming jobs that his client did years ago as well as additional Bitcoin trading not linked to his vending activities.

In December 2014_12ya, 3 men in Northern Cyprus/TRNC were arrested while trying to pick up a package of marijuana sent from Canada (in a CD, although no signatures were involved).

In November 2015_11ya, it was announced that 9 men 19-24yo from Forcheim, Bamberg and Herzogenaurach had cumulatively been arrested who had made ~70 purchases of marijuana, MDMA, LSD, amphetamine from the DNMs for local resale; the case probably began when the first was arrested and flipped.

In July 2016, 3 German men were charged with converting/modifying/selling guns “on Darknet sites”, selling pistols & rifles. These conversions may be connected to the 2016 Munich shooting by 18yo Ali Sonboly, the Glock handgun for which is reportedly a ‘reactivated theater weapon’ (for which the firing pin had been removed or receiver cut?) which Bitmessage chatlogs indicate had been purchased over the ‘darknet’ in some fashion; however, chatlogs are not usually employed in purchasing off a DNM like AlphaBay, and later coverage indicates a different 31yo man had met Sonboly in person for the gun & ammo sales.

A 41yo Berlin man was sentenced to 4 years in September 2016 for selling handguns & ammunition; a misdelivered package was intercepted, apparently prompting some undercover purchases backtraced to him, followed up by bugging/surveillance. It’s unspecified if he was one of the 3 charged in July 2016 or if he operated on a DNM.

2 men were arrested as part of a Bitcoin carding ring in July 2016.

An Israeli man Weitzman was arrested ~2015-01-04 after a “darknet” package containing cocaine was detected by a sniffer dog at Customs.

An Israeli teen was arrested ~2015-01-12 (translation) after a package of marijuana was intercepted by Customs at Ben Gurion Airport; the media coverage specifies he had bought that package & 13 others off the DNMs, but not which one or the seller.

On 2015-02-06, a man was arrested in Kerkrade for selling drugs on “the so-called dark Web”, and the search seized drugs & bitcoins.

On 2015-03-03, 2 men & 1 woman were arrested and searched, uncovering a marijuana grow operation; they been selling bitcoins for a total of €440,000 (a sum too large to be explained as anything other than DNM sales).

A NZer was arrested in April 2013 over multiple very large orders from an online site, which may or may not have been SR1.

An 2013-12-11 NZ police press release reported the arrest of 3 Wellington men for “small quantities of LSD, Methamphetamine, MDMA (ecstasy), Class C analogue powders and the psychoactive substance NBOMe” which had been “ordered from on line suppliers such as ‘The Silk Road’”; no further details are available.

A 2014-06-21 Dominion Post article says that “A series of drug raids in a police operation spanning Porirua, Tawa, the Kapiti Coast and Hutt Valley and central Wellington resulted in 21 arrests over the past week [2014-06-15–2014-06-20_12ya]. Six of those arrested now face serious charges related to the alleged im” (This is a revised figure from the earlier article on “Operation Python” which had mentioned that “Six Kapiti houses were raided and five arrests made as part of a large police sting targeting internet drug importers.”) I currently do not know the specifics of those 6 arrests or have any NZ cases in that date range.

On 2014-08-11, the 22yo polytechnic college student Nicholas Peter Heatley was arrested for importing LSD/MDMA/Ritalin/marijuana for resale locally after customs interceptions January - August 2014_12ya, sourced “from Germany and the United Kingdom via the internet” (clarified in later coverage to have been the “Dark Web” and so presumably one of the markets). (He was sentenced in December 2014 to 4.5 years prison.)

Customs reports in May 2015 that

In 2014, Customs intercepted more than 1300 class A and B drugs under the Misuse of Drugs Act; a rise of more than 25% from 2013_13ya. While no drugs were intercepted in Dunedin in 2013_13ya, last year cocaine, MDMA, LSD and methamphetamine were all intercepted in the city. By the end of April this year Customs had carried out more than 400 interceptions nationally, and found ephedrine (which can be used in the manufacture of methamphetamine) and methamphetamine in Dunedin…“We know with one job they brought in $50,000 dollars worth - that’s one import.”

2 23yo NZ Dunedin university students were raided on 2015-11-16 after customs intercepts, uncovering cocaine, MDMA, LSD, & “prescription drugs” which they resold locally; likely DNM related because one police officer quoted warns “students using the Internet to import drugs”.

A Redditor reports being busted 2015-01-29 in Norway after a package of LSD from the Netherlands which he bought from LucyandMolly (who sells on Agora/Evolution/Nucleus) was intercepted by customs; he received just a knock-and-talk but confessed his guilt.

On 2015-06-09, the arrest in the “previous days” of 4 men aged 29-31 from “Oslo and Skien” was announced by Norwegian police (media: 1, 2, 3, 4). They apparently had been selling marijuana and unspecified other products on the Dark Web for bitcoins, apparently internationally as well as in Norway; which markets, which sellers, and details on how they were caught were not provided. 2017 coverage of 3 men arrested in Oslo in June 2015_11ya says they sold marijuana on SR1 and other sites, and depended on foreign police assistance (based on seller records/PMs from the SR1 server image?).

In March 2016, former banker & 28yo man Aditya Rajiv was convicted of selling two men’s financial information on the dark web to a “covert internet investigator” who informed police (1); he had also been accused (previously?) of using Paypal to defraud 4 customers in mid-2013 (1).

On the Bungee54 forums, a customer service representative said on 2014-10-20 “Within the last 4 month there were 2 buyers that reported incidents with feds - none of both within the last 10 weeks. 1 was in a Scandinavian country and resulted in a fine for the client…None of both orders were above 25g”. Which country or when this MDMA buyer was arrested & fined is unclear.

Swedish police (pg19) claimed in February 2015_11ya: “Swedish police work actively at identifying vendors. A large chunk of the Swedes who sell drugs on DNMs have been caught, and nearly half of the known nicknames believed to be Swedish have been caught, either by local drug police or by cyberpolice.”. It’s unclear what they consider “known nicknames” and no specific numbers are mentioned, but it could indicate that more Swedish sellers have been arrested than are publicly known.

A 2015-05-22 police article is more specific: “Swedish police has identified 12 of the 20 biggest Swedish vendors on Silk Road (out of 100). 8 of them has already been charged.” 4 Swedish sellers are currently known to have been arrested: Speedsweden, SweExpress, Livefromsweden, Alexandrus. That leaves 4 missing.

In “August/September 2014”, 22yo Cheltenham man Jordan Richards-Chiverton’s (“Luigi”) order of 13.5g of cocaine from a DNM seller in Costa Rica was intercepted at a postal handling center, and he was CDed at the post office; he likely resold locally, and was sentenced to 2 years.

On 2015-04-14, the UK’s National Crime Agency’s Twitter account announced that:

Our campaign against #DarkWeb criminality continues - 5 men in their 20s charged with drug offences on dark web forums…Manchester men face over 40 charges of supplying drugs globally via #DarkWeb forums

Vice journalist Joseph Cox asked the NCA for more details; this is all they would tell him:

charged with a range of offences relating to possessing and supplying controlled drugs.

• Basil ASSAF (born 1991_35ya) - Bombay House, Whitworth St, Manchester

• Jamie RODEN (born 1992_34ya) - Half Moon Lane, East London

• Elliot HYAMS (born 1992_34ya) - Copperkins Lane, Amersham

• Jaikishen PATEL (born 1992_34ya) - Woodford Ave, Ilford

• Joshua MORGAN (born 1989_37ya) - Chapeltown St, Manchester

All are due before Manchester City Magistrates on 14/05/15

It’s unclear if they were Silk Road related or not - 3 of them may be the still-unidentified 3 Manchester sellers arrested simultaneous with the Silk Road 1 raid in October 2013_13ya, and then the other 2 are unrelated or perhaps accomplices discovered subsequently. (The ages & location do not match the charges announced with PlutoPete, however.)

On 2015-07-28, the 47yo man Ian MacPhee was arrested while serving as the drop for the 38yo man Darren Hillyer (“Emma”), receiving a CD over “a Ruger LC9 9mm handgun and 50 rounds of ammunition” that Hillyer had ordered from yet another undercover agent on an unnamed market (likely not Evolution which had closed March 2015_11ya; Agora banned gun sales on 2015-07-15, so that’s possible). MacPhee was fined and Hillyer was sentenced to 5 years in November 2015_11ya.

A 2015-09-29 media article reported that 21yo college student Benjamin Koops had been sentenced after pleading guilty to importing marijuana from the USA through the ‘dark web’, which he resold locally to his friends, being busted after “two packages of cannabis were intercepted by the National Crime Agency and traced to Koops”. It does not specify the market, whether Customs intercepted the packages, or when he was raided.

The 31yo Bury UK man Montgomery Richard Kyle Byrne was arrested sometime in August 2015 in a gas station restroom trying to pay for a Glock pistol & 300 rounds he arranged on the “dark web”; he pled guilty and was sentenced to 6 years in January 2016. Details of the case were not given in coverage, but since it was an offline meeting, it is clear that it was not a Customs intercept and that Byrne was buying from yet another flipped or undercover seller account (not weaponsguy, as that account was closed long before August 2015_11ya).

The 26yo south London man Dwain Osborne was arrested sometime in October 2015_11ya related to an attempt to buy a Glock pistol & ammo (media: 1, 2, 3); it is unspecified which DNM. He was busted because “the dealer who offered to sell him the gun and ammunition was a US agent”. He was bailed but a search in February 2016 turned up cocaine, packaging material, passports & a police uniform, and information on the prison he worked at.

In late October 2015_11ya, 19yo Welsh woman Megan Schadeberg was charged with attempting to buy a Glock pistol, ostensibly for suicide; she told her psychiatrist and he informed the authorities, and was committed in March 2016. (media: 1, 2, 3) She had read up on the DNMs and had acquired Bitcoin and picked a Glock listing on an unspecified DNM, but apparently had not yet pulled the trigger on her order.

22yo Stirling man Mark Dornan ordered 500g of marijuana for local resale from Belgium which was intercepted by Customs and he was raided on 2016-04-08.

In June 2016, Exeter couple Kelly & Ross Brennan were raided after packages of diazepam sent to customers in Ireland were intercepted and traced back to them; they had been buying diazepam (and bank card for fraud) off the ‘dark web’ and reselling them to Irish customers using social media/email.

21yo Smethwick man Moynul Haque ordered a Glock pistol from an unspecified seller “between April 1 and May 10” 2015_11ya; the seller shipped it from Michigan but was already being investigated by LE, who followed him to the post office & intercepted his package, and turned the information over to UK police, who raided Haque, turning up some amphetamine and his computer’s records detailing his order. (media: 1, 2, 3) He was sentenced June 2015_11ya to 10 months.

On 2013-11-25, Brandon Howell was arrested after “a month-long investigation” in North Carolina; he & his partner “imported MDMA from China through an online black market…The two then resold the imported drugs using the online currency Bitcoin, according to police.” It is not clear which seller they were or what market they sold on, but the media coverage mentions Silk Road 1.

On 2014-06-20, the Boise Idaho buyer Jasen Crisp received a CD of a 100g package of MDMA he had ordered from Canada (press release, #1:14-cr-00226-EJL) and cooperated; his lawyer’s sentencing filing writes that he used an “electronic currency” to use the “uncommon means” of ordering on the Internet from “a secret marketplace”, so Crisp clearly ordered off one of the DNMs, but it remains unclear which market and which seller.

On the Bungee54 forums, the customer service account “Santos L. Helperb” said on 2014-10-20, in response to customers fretting over claims of CDs on Reddit, that Bungee54 in the past 4 months had had only two buyer incidents: “1 was a controlled delivery in US around July - buyer had been investigated before. None of both orders were above 25g”. While the drug & timing is similar (MDMA, late June vs “around July”), this US buyer cannot be Jasen Crisp: Bungee54 did not ship from Canada, Crisp did not have a prior record (that I found), and his intercepted MDMA order was >4x larger than this one.

At the same time as Operation Onymous, the FBI raided a home in West Haven, Connecticut ~2014-11-06; it is unknown whether anyone was arrested or what market they may have been associated with. (Speculation so far has only suggested the Agora seller “Nawlins”.)

The FBI also raided a New Orleans, Louisiana 2014-11-06, but similarly nothing is known about the results.

The original Operation Onymous press release boasted of 17 arrests, involving LE from “Bulgaria, the Czech Republic, Finland, France, Germany, Hungary, Ireland, Latvia, Lithuania, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, Romania, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, the United Kingdom and the USA” (“the arrests were scattered over the US and Europe.”); not all of these are market-connected as they could also be related to scam sites, seller shops, or running content sites (doxbins, revenge porn, etc.) and the original releases counted seized websites in the most inflated way possible:

1. Blake Benthall; San Francisco, California USA; SR2 operator

2. ???; West Haven, Connecticut USA; ???

3. ???; New Orleans, Louisiana USA; ???

4. ???; Budapest, Hungary; Hydra operator

5. David Schell; California USA; SR2 seller CaliforniaCanibas (the press release is dated 2014-11-07, and the Schells seem to have been arrested the day before, 2014-11-06, so they are probably included in the count)

6. Teri Schell; California USA; SR2 seller CaliforniaCanibas

7. ???; Switzerland; operator of the scam site “Black Market”

8. ???; Barcelona Spain; seems to have been the operator of a scam site (translation) claiming to sell carding-related goods, perhaps “Super Note Counter” or “Sol’s Unified USD Counterfeit’s” or “Fast Cash!” (all named in the Operation Onymous seizure papers)

9. 6 UK arrests; 3 have been named publicly, and the charges suggest 1 seller & 2 buyers (unknown which)

10. Ireland: 2 arrests

11. France seized 2 servers, and “several” people were arrested in Germany

12. this gives a final total of:

    • USA: Benthall + the Schells = 3

    • Hungary: Hydra = 1

    • Spain & Switzerland = 2 (fraudsters)

    • UK: 6

    • German: ???

    • Ireland: 2

    • 14 known arrests; 3 are missing, but at least 2 must be German arrests, and hypothetically the last could be from any combination of the mentioned participating countries unrepresented in the above list (“…Bulgaria, the Czech Republic, Finland, France, Germany, Ireland, Latvia, Lithuania, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, … Romania, Sweden”) but is probably German as well

On 2015-01-06, the Princeton student Julian Edgren was arrested & later pled guilty after a CD package of MDMA, and was sentenced to 5 years in September 2015 of which he served 0.33 years; warrants also turned up mushrooms/psilocybin, marijuana, LSD, hashish, and Adderall. It is known Edgren had been a The Marketplace customer, but TMP had closed down months before January 2015_11ya after Operation Onymous, so he could not have been using TMP for that order. (The pricing might suggest a Canadian source.)

On 2015-02-23, the South Carolinian man Joseph Patrick Gelli received a summons for a money-laundering charge related to $30k of Bitcoin he had purchased through Coinbase using cash deposited to his bank account (indictment; press release); a search of his home at an unknown point also turned up cash and “marijuana and psychotropic mushrooms” (presumably psilocybin). He apparently had been buying off an unspecified DNM for local resale, but given the money-laundering focus, it seems unlikely that he suffered the usual fate of a customer snitching.

On 2015-03-03, the Indiana University student Andrew Thrall was arrested for importing Xanax pills from Canada which he had bought “online using bit coins” and resold to his fraternity; the investigation apparently began November 2014_12ya, but the media articles did not mention what triggered it (a Customs intercept? or related to the local reselling). The seller & market are unknown (suggested sellers include Quantik, Magicman, & Yacht club).

On 2015-03-26, New Jersey man Michael Regan was arrested in a CD of LSD ordered from the Netherlands.

On the same day, 2015-03-26, Alabama man Ryan Andrew Backer was also arrested after a search turned up the LSD he had “ordered…online from a source in the Netherlands”. While neither order is stated to have been DNM-related, several factors suggest strongly that these two cases are: the simultaneous arrests is unusual but common when a seller has been profiled and multiple packages can be intercepted simultaneously; LSD is particularly difficult to intercept by Customs; both men are young; the quantities are small; Backer’s order is explicitly said to have been online rather than through other channels; and German & Dutch sellers have been having particular difficulty 2014–2015_11ya. (If so, then the specific seller may have been “HollandOnline”.)

In January 2016, the fourth arrest of a bust centering around 4 Shelter Island, NY men was made, involving fentanyl, alprazolam, cocaine and oxycodone through the mail & DNMs, although coverage was vague about whether the 4 men were selling from Shelter Island or were buying to resell locally: “According to the police, those arrests last year came out of an investigation centering on powerful prescription and nonprescription drugs sent to the Island through the U.S. Mail. The investigation also uncovered use of black market Internet sites - the so-called”Dark Web,” or sites difficult to trace - counterfeit currency and the use of Bitcoin, the digital currency, according to the police…In the case against the three young men, more than 25 packages containing narcotics were sent to the Island through the U.S. Mail, including fentanyl, alprazolam, cocaine and oxycodone, police said. Prescription drugs in tablet form were taken into evidence along with non-prescription narcotics in powder form. Electronic messaging and payments, including money orders and other fund transfers, were used to order and pay for the drugs from distributors off-Island, according to the police.”

In March 2016, charges were announced against 3 NY men, 30yo Richard Petix / 20yo Zhe Wang / 20yo Kevin Szura (case 1:2016-cr-00026; press release, complaint, media). Petix had sold Bitcoin to an undercover agent, as he had to Wang/Szura; in an undercover buy beginning 2016-02-29, they admitted using the bitcoins to import MDMA & Xanax from a Canadian DNM seller for resale locally, and were arrested at the second one 2016-03-07.

On 2016-03-17, 22yo Arkansas man Christian Olson was arrested for weekly orders of ~3lb marijuana from California paid in Bitcoin which he resold locally (1, 2, 3).

On 2016-05-03, 20yo Pennsylvania college student Michael Mancini was arrested; a fellow student seems to have informed the police and perhaps his dorm director that he was reselling small amounts of LSD, who then began inspecting his mail, leading to an interception of an LSD order from Hawaii & subsequent search & arrest.

In the UK gun case of Moynul Haque, media coverage mentions that “The court heard Haque purchased the goods from an American man via the dark web, a secretive section of the World Wide Web used for criminal activity. Homeland Security agents were investigating the US citizen, and in April last year followed him to a post office where they intercepted a parcel addressed to Haque’s home in Brasshouse Lane, Smethwick, where he lived with his parents and three siblings.” (specifically, “between April 1 and May 10” 2015_11ya) No further details are known about who this Michigan gun seller is or when they were arrested.

On 2015-10-29, University of Buffalo student Zhe Wang was raided over Xanax sales; after sales to an undercover officer on 2016-02-29, Zhe Wang & Kevin Szura were arrested for MDMA & Xanax (complaint; media).