![]() ![]() A week before the site's disappearance, German police arrested the leaders of one drug ring that operated on the site and seized 700 pounds of narcotics from that single bust alone. The site, which was online for just over a year, was by some measures the largest-ever drug market on the dark web, with 34,000 total drug listings at its peak. The DHS didn't respond to WIRED's request for comment, but it's no surprise that Evolution has become the target of a federal investigation. He says the DHS's interest in him may be in part because Z-l had recently publicly promised to send proof of findings about Evolution's administrators to him, though Branwen says he never received any such information. ![]() It's Branwen who has now publicly revealed the subpoena's existence to WIRED. The subpoena's five targets are NSWGreat, a user who had claimed to be an Evolution staffer three other users named z-l, Deepthroat and Evosmith who boasted on Reddit that they were tracking Evolution's administrators or identifying details about them and Gwern Branwen, a well-known security researcher, writer and moderator of the darknetmarkets forum. (Reddit doesn't even require an email address to sign up.) All five targets of the subpoena were involved, to varying degrees, in the Reddit discussion of that black market's abrupt disappearance two weeks ago, in which two top administrators apparently absconded with millions of dollars worth of bitcoin belonging to Evolution's buyers and sellers.Īccording to a copy of the subpoena shared with WIRED by one of the forum's moderators who was named in the document, the DHS seeks information that includes the names, IP addresses, dates and times of site visits as well as other data that Reddit likely doesn't possess, including the users' phone numbers and financial data. ![]() The subpoena appears to be the first hint of a federal investigation of the recently defunct massive online market known as Evolution, which sold drugs, weapons, and stolen financial details. And they're telling Reddit to cough up a few of those users' real-world identities.Įarlier this month, a Baltimore Department of Homeland Security (DHS) Immigration and Customs Enforcement agent sent a subpoena to Reddit demanding that the site turn over a collection of personal data about five users of the r/darknetmarkets forum. At any given moment, hundreds of redditors are browsing /r/darknetmarkets, many brazenly discussing anonymous online sales on the open internet. Over the last year, Reddit's "dark net markets" discussion forum has grown into one of the central fixtures of the online drug scene. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |