5,200 orders valued, in total, at $1M. Over a ~2 year period. That's it? Hardly seems like much of a story. Particularly since Tor is of limited use when your system depends on electronic payment systems.
With a conservative estimate of 3x markup on product (seems way high, especially if these guys were just middle men), $20 shipping (national, Fedex) and 0 hosting costs they're making 192-(64+20) = $108 per order.
$108 * 5200 = 561,600 / 2 / 8 = $35,000 per person per year, or $16 an hour if it was a full-time job.
Considering that anyone with the skills to set up an anonymized marketplace site should be able to find work that pays far more than $16/hr this seems like more an ideological exercise or hobby than a money-making cartel.
Whether or not you consider it to be worth spending probably $3m+ on investigating, trying and imprisoning these 8 people is another ideological question...
I believe they were using bitcoins to anonymize some transactions.
The hardest thing for a regular consumer I would think would be finding a drop point. Drugs and things sent through the mail would be fairly easy to track to a consumer who could then be charged for possession.
I don't think these guys used bitcoin, I think you're thinking of silkroad (another tor based drug network that wired wrote about a while back). As far as I know silkroad is still operating - although I don't have tor set up so don't know.
Assuming they found them in the mail during transit using xray or some other method since they were in canada, shipping to US goes through customs which has special rules allowing that, then they can look at who is receiving the package and then they get them to squeal on who the dealer was.
Yea it's certainly a complicated situation for both you and the police to figure out. The problem is I don't think I'd trust them to not try to strong arm you into confessing and saying who it was, assuming you did order them even if they couldn't prove it.
