
The Dark Web’s Top Drug Market, Evolution, Just Vanished - nmc
http://www.wired.com/2015/03/evolution-disappeared-bitcoin-scam-dark-web/
======
ams6110
"You knew what I was when you picked me up," said the snake as it slithered
away.

~~~
joshstrange
For those not getting the reference
[http://www.gballard.net/lifes_lessons/girl_rattlesnake/](http://www.gballard.net/lifes_lessons/girl_rattlesnake/)

~~~
ProAm
Or the Scorpion and the Frog [1]

[1]
[http://www.aesopfables.com/cgi/aesop1.cgi?4&TheScorpionandth...](http://www.aesopfables.com/cgi/aesop1.cgi?4&TheScorpionandtheFrog)

~~~
efng
I had only ever heard the scorpion version, never the snake. I MUCH prefer the
scorpion version because it focuses on the scorpion and not the frog.

The scorpion dooms himself by his own nature, where as the girl is merely
trusting and punished for it.

~~~
thaumasiotes
According to
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Frog_and_the_Mouse](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Frog_and_the_Mouse)
, you can find each moral in Aesop, with the frog and the mouse teaching that
evil destroys itself and the farmer and the viper teaching that you're a fool
to hope for anything but evil treatment from evil. Presumably, you'd target
the first lesson at people you wanted to shape up, and the second one at the
excessively giving.

On a different note,
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Scorpion_and_the_Frog](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Scorpion_and_the_Frog)
is only listed in WP's "apocryphal" subcategory of Aesop's fables, dated to
1954. What's it doing on "www.aesopfables.com"?

------
downandout
Not to add insult to injury, but these people posting on Reddit complaining
about the money they have lost are opening themselves up to massive prison
sentences. Reddit is a US site; all it takes to arrest everyone posting is to
subpoena Reddit, get their IP's/emails/whatever, then raid their houses
looking for drugs and whatever other contraband the police can find.
Complaining publicly that you lost money on a site whose sole purpose was to
sell illegal items is plenty of probable cause - especially with several
implied death threats and people saying they may be killed over missing funds
right in the thread. The feds will be all over this.

Not that they shouldn't complain somewhere, but maybe keep it on the darknet
sites.

~~~
stordoff
I'd presume they are posting to Reddit cia TOR, so I doubt subpoenaing Reddit
would give much new information.

~~~
downandout
I thought about that, but you never know. There are other bits and pieces
available...email, which might lead to a real IP via another subpoena if the
person isn't careful, ad/tracking cookies, etc. I would guarantee you that
some of these people aren't being that careful with their clearnet activities.

~~~
NegatioN
Would it be worth investing those kind of resources into tracking lower-tier
sellers or buyers though?

~~~
downandout
Well....reading the thread, there are people claiming that drug gangs are
going to kill people (both the owners of the site and people who are going to
come up short paying their suppliers), at least one person seriously talking
about suicide, and another saying that he has contact info for the owners. I
can't say what resources they will put into it, but there are a ton of law
enforcement red alerts and more than enough probable cause in that one thread
to subpoena Reddit.

------
pavel_lishin
I don't understand why vendors would keep a lot of bitcoins on the site,
instead of withdrawing them as quickly as possible.

This guy apparently had 300BTC/$85k on there!
[http://np.reddit.com/r/DarkNetMarkets/comments/2zeuxo/compla...](http://np.reddit.com/r/DarkNetMarkets/comments/2zeuxo/complaintwarning_evolution_admins_exit_scamming/cpijggd?context=4)

~~~
codesuela
Escrow, funds are only released once the buyer confirms that he received the
shipment. If you have a ton of outstanding orders, you are going to have a lot
of funds frozen in escrow.

~~~
ForHackernews
I thought the whole point of bitcoin was that it was peer-to-peer with no
chargebacks or centralized middlemen?

~~~
Karunamon
A side benefit, but I wouldn't say the whole point. There are some cases where
middlemen are necessary - the difference being that they're a lot more
avoidable with BTC than they are in meatspace. (Credit cards, authorities who
rob people carrying large amounts of cash, and so on.)

~~~
lhc-
I'm not positive that bitcoins offer much more protection from robbery than
cash, given the situation here.

~~~
aeykie
They offered protection, though didn't they? Evolution had multiescrow, they
wouldn't have gotten those funds would they have?

------
at-fates-hands
_" NSWGreat described confronting Evolution’s two pseudonymous owners, Verto
and Kimble, who he or she says then admitted they were closing the market and
stealing its funds. “I am so sorry, but Verto and Kimble have f–ked us all._"

With no chat logs, all we go by is this guy's word? What are the odds he was
in on the heist?

Also, this reminds me of when Max Butler did a brute force take over of all
the carders markets and then created his own "super carders forum" by hacking
in and then wiping their databases and then repointing their domains to his.
While this is probably not in the realm of possibilities, if this site does
come back, people had better be very, very weary of who's actually running it.

Lessons learned and all that jazz I suppose.

~~~
gwern
> With no chat logs, all we go by is this guy's word?

You mean, besides the market & forum being down since 8PM yesterday,
withdrawals failing since at least Saturday, no communication from the
operators, at least one other employee saying it's an exit scam, and
blockchain movements of large amounts of funds?

> What are the odds he was in on the heist?

We can't rule out a scenario like NSWGreat expected to receive a cut, but it's
clear that when he went public, he helped some people save money by not
continuing to deposit funds.

------
amyjess
There are people on reddit raising funds to doxx the people who ran Evolution.

Jesus... a whole lot of shadowbans are going to happen once the admins wake
up. Maybe even some subreddit bans.

~~~
gwern
Nothing's going to happen. This happens every time a big market like Sheep
goes down - a lot of people who knew better start talking big online and
huffing and puffing and bluffing, along with the occasional scam 'send me BTC
and I'll track down the admins!'

------
jpatokal
One Evolution (ex-)staff member claims that 130,000 BTC (~$35 million) were
stolen:

[http://www.deepdotweb.com/2015/03/18/interview-with-
nswgreat...](http://www.deepdotweb.com/2015/03/18/interview-with-nswgreat-
evolution-staff-member/)

------
joeyspn
Aaaand its gone... and I bet with gazillions of the user's bitcoins (this is
becoming a classic)

~~~
ChuckMcM
Although it takes a certain amount of guts to steal from drug dealers. They
don't generally bother with suing you in court to recover their funds :-)

~~~
MichaelGG
If "drug dealers" can find you, then so can LE. If LE can find you, you're
cooked already and shouldn't be playing.

------
tlrobinson
So why haven't markets that utilize Bitcoin escrow transactions taken off yet?

~~~
dshankar
"The site gained users’ trust by offering a feature known as “multi-signature
transactions,” designed to prevent exactly the sort of bitcoin theft its
administrators are now accused of."

Seems like the site's differentiating feature was multiparty escrow
transactions but weren't used often due to hassle?

~~~
ertdfgcb
Pretty much, yeah. It was available but not very many people used it.

------
Lawtonfogle
>While other sites followed the original Silk Road’s ethos of selling only
victimless contraband

While human sacrifices may not be a literal ingredient of drugs, calling it
victimless ignores a whole lot of problems caused by drugs. Buying pot from
your friend who grows it is victimless. But fueling any black market, even one
that avoids identity theft, means you are supporting the marketplace that
provides service to drug traffickers of the sort that kill people or that
delivers highly addictive drugs that ruin far more than just their user's own
life. Yes, bad government laws have made these problems much worse and are
preventing truly safe victimless market places that uses locally grown and
produced drugs sold in moderation, but the black market is not victimless.

~~~
hackuser
The drug cartels brutally murder thousands and commit many other crimes --
they are as brutal as ISIS in many ways -- they undermine and oppress entire
countries and ruin large parts of American cities. Many organizations such as
the Taliban and Hezbollah fund themselves via the drug trade.

Some people boycott companies over political issues; how many of them still
buy drugs? Every user I know, to whom I've mentioned this issue, insists their
drugs come from a friend who produces it at home. But somehow the drug cartels
earn billions and have worldwide distribution networks.

~~~
exprE
Prohibition laws created the drug cartels. You don't see distillers killing
each others in turf wars, quite simply because it would be highly destructive
to their possibility of operating on the right side of the law.

To end the "wars" regarding drugs, you must end the war on drugs. Legalize
everything. It won't eliminate drug abuse, just like legalizing alcohol didn't
eradicate alcohol abuse, but it removes all the compounding effects caused by
the substances being illegal by themselves.

Besides, legalizing is, from a moral perspective, the only right way to act.

~~~
_broody
Agreed. And then deal with it the same way you do with tobacco and alcohol,
with social campaigns to raise awareness of the issues of addiction. We have a
working model here for legal drugs that are just as bad or worse.

~~~
blumkvist
Working model? LOL.

------
nmc
Recent HN posts of related Reddit comments:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9224517](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9224517)

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9225154](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9225154)

------
pakled_engineer
Brokering narcotics and everything else to the entire world is an
unsustainable business you have no safe country to flee to if caught or outed.
Surprised these black markets don't just focus on one foreign market from
their stronghold in Abkhazia or something.

~~~
nyolfen
setting up with iranian hosting might be a plausible way to go about it

~~~
meepmorp
And a great way to get yourself some terrorism related charges when you
inevitably fuck up and leak identifying information.

------
ChartsNGraffs
Perhaps I don't understand Bitcoin well enough, but wouldn't these guys out
themselves the instant they try and spend them because of the public
transaction history?

~~~
mcintyre1994
There are tumbler services, no idea how well they work or how many are
compromised but in theory it seems like it could work.

~~~
Phlarp
I'm surprised we haven't seen more theft and fraud with the tumblers. I used
one out of curiosity about two years ago and the experience was basically to
fill out a super shady looking webform, send the coins to the address it gives
you, and then pray like hell that they come back out the other end.

~~~
DINKDINK
The CoinJoin proposal[0] by Greg Maxwell provides transaction-history-tracing
erasure capabilities. JoinMarket[1] is a market driven approach to incent
CoinJoin mixing

[0][https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=279249.0](https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=279249.0)
[1][https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=919116.0](https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=919116.0)

------
limorelbaz
The original article on wired magazine now returns 404, but we're starting a
discussion about this on [http://www.peerlyst.com/discussions/the-dark-webs-
top-drug-m...](http://www.peerlyst.com/discussions/the-dark-webs-top-drug-
market-evolution-just-vanished-wired-com)

Peerlyst is a community of 17K+ security professionals, discussing 25 areas of
security (content security, cryptography, identity management, privacy etc).
Once joining, you get a feed relevant to your areas of interest.

------
ForHackernews
[http://www.reddit.com/r/sorryforyourloss](http://www.reddit.com/r/sorryforyourloss)

------
curiously
well looks like these thiefs selling their bitcoins will push down the
prices....almost 40 million dollars they've stolen, how the fuck do they
expect to cash out without getting caught?

~~~
joeyspn
Probably they're already doing it. I was wondering why the plunge in price
during the last 24h, and then I found this thread. We were in our slow-but-
steady way to recovery and bam! now back to downtrend. Always the same
history. Shit happens...

