By CCN: The Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) has busted several people accused of running the Deep Dot Web, a website that provides access to illegal dark web marketplaces and websites. According to several reports, the feds worked in partnership with Europol and law enforcement authorities in Germany and the Netherlands over a period of two years, before making a number of arrests in...
By CCN: It appears safety standards for criminals on the dark web are shrinking quickly. Following a series of raids in both Germany and the United States, American and European officials have succeeded in taking down what they call one of the world’s “largest online criminal trafficking operations.” The problem is it took authorities two years to take down the bad guys, paving the way for...
By CCN.com: Just one month after a coordinated global law enforcement operation executed a sweeping takedown of dark web drug dealers, rumors are swirling that a popular dark-net market has allegedly attempted a major exit scam. According to a thread on the Dread Forum, a Reddit-like website for dark web users, Wall Street Market (WSM) has likely exit scammed, absconding with as much as $30...
By CCN.com: The Manhattan District Attorney’s Office indicted three men for allegedly laundering $2.3 million in crypto by using debit cards pre-loaded with bitcoin and withdrawing large amounts of cash at ATMs in New York and New Jersey. The trio was also charged with operating bogus storefronts on the dark web that sold illegal drugs, including counterfeit Xanax tablets, the DA’s...
By CCN.com: As CCN previously reported, Canadian Matthew Phan has been fighting to keep his cryptocurrency holdings out of the hands of the government after his arrest in 2015 and subsequent conviction. Phan’s argument was tenuous: he argued that not all of his crypto stash came from drug sales and that he should be allowed to keep his altcoins. The judge in his case has finally ruled on the...
A middle-aged Scottish man has been sentenced to five years in prison for using bitcoin to purchase illegal firearms on the dark web. According to local police, David Mitchell, a 48-year-old from Edinburgh paid for a 9mm handgun, magazine, 150 rounds worth of ammunition, and a suppressor from the United States using about $2,750 worth of bitcoin (roughly 0.74 BTC at press time). Bloomberg reports...
A DuPage County, Illinois judge has ruled that a woman charged with paying $10,000 in bitcoin for a Dark Web hitman to have her former lover’s wife killed must continue wearing a GPS monitoring device as the case goes on. 32 year-old Tina Jones of Des Plaines, Illinois has been arraigned on four counts of solicitation of murder for hire, two counts of solicitation of murder and attempted...
Once again in the world of cryptocurrency, we have a mystery on our hands. A $720 million sleeping giant has woken up after four years, with $100 million moved to Bitfinex and Binance over the course of ten days at the end of August. The bitcoin wallet contains 111,114 BTC or 0.52% of the total supply. The sudden movement of these dormant funds could have a disruptive potential in the market...
As bizarre as it sounds, a marketplace for crowdfunding paramilitary mujahideen, those engaged in jihad, has been discovered on the dark web. Accessible only through using the Tor browser, SadaqaCoins is very different from your average crowdfunding marketplace. Donors can send funds in the form of Bitcoin or Monero to help pay for 4×4 pickup trucks, .50 caliber bolt action rifles and...
Circle Invest, the blockchain start-up application, has added Montero to the list of digital assets available on its platform, the firm said in a blog post on Monday. Montero becomes the second privacy focused coin it has added in a row. In April Circle Invest introduced ZCash onto its platform saying traders and users were now able to undertake purchases and investments in the coin. “You will...
Australian federal authorities have pinned multiple charges on a 32-year-old Brisbane woman for purchasing illicit drugs from the United Kingdom, using bitcoin. ‘People shouldn’t assume the dark web is invisible to Australian agencies’ warned Australian Border Force (ABF) Queensland regional commander Terry Price while announcing details of a joint-investigation with the Australian Federal Police...
Litecoin, according to a new report published by Recorded Future, is now the second most popular cryptocurrency token on the Dark Web. The report undertook a longitudinal analysis of digital communications avenues available to users on the dark web and found that nearly 30 percent of Dark Web vendors accept Litecoin. Report Findings Whilst Bitcoin remains supreme, Recorded Future undertook a...
The US government has been approved by a federal judge in Utah to auction off 513 bitcoin and 512 Bitcoin Cash seized from an investigation into Aaron Michael Shamo, a dark web dealer. 8.5 Million Sale In the upcoming weeks, the government is expected to sell all of the assets seized after the arrest of Shamo, including a Ford F-350 pickup, BMW 135i, and the millions of dollars worth of bitcoin...
A British model who was drugged and held captive for a week in Italy where she was threatened to be sold on the dark web if her agent didn’t pay $300,000 has been set free. The unnamed 20-year-old woman is reported to have been drugged with ketamine and put into a suitcase by 30-year-old Polish-national Lukasz Herba on 11 July, who resides in the U.K. According to The Telegraph, the model...
Convicted dark web vendor Chrissano Leslie, 26, was sentenced last Tuesday and will likely be deported after his release. His defense framed him not as a big drug trafficker, but a street-level dealer who just so happened to sell heroin, fentanyl and other drugs thanks to the dark web. Prosecutors portrayed Leslie as standing on a high tech street corner on a sophisticated online marketplace...
The dark web is not nearly as social a place as the world wide web, researchers find. Researchers recently conducted a comprehensive charting of the dark web, starting with the central hubs of “.Onion” domains, and created an algorithm to scan links from each site. They found 7,178 sites. 25,104 links connected all of these sites together. Those sites which did not have links incoming could not...
Police charged a Cottage Grove, Minn. man with second-degree intentional murder for killing his wife, linking him to a Dark Web plot to pay for her murder before poisoning and shooting her and staging the death as a suicide, according to the South Washington County Bulletin in Cottage Grove, Minn. Bail was set at $1 million for Stephen Carl Allwine, 43, who was held in jail after he...
The Dutch public prosecution office is looking at three pending cases involving the digital currency bitcoin and money laundering in 2017. In a report from Financieele Dagblad, a Dutch daily newspaper, the public prosecution department is aiming to tackle money laundering by cracking down on the issue that the country is facing. The first case to be heard will take place on February 6 involving a...
Ross Ulbricht was allegedly the man behind the notorious dark web Marketplace Silk Road. CCN reported when his trial begun back in 2015, and when it led to a sentence of life in prison as he was convicted of owning the “Dread Pirate Roberts” (DRP) account in the marketplace. According to Motherboard, Ross’ attorneys claim to have discovered new evidence that someone used the Dread Pirate Roberts...
Breitbart is not happy with Glenn Beck. The tea party talking head, Beck, insinuated in a radio program that Stephen Bannon, Donald Trump’s new presidential campaign CEO and former Breitbart News executive, threatens enemies lives and hires assassins on the dark net. Beck, who supported Ted Cruz during the Republican primary, said Bannon might use “the Dark Web” for illegal activities, including...
Investigations in the aftermath of the recent terror attack in Munich which saw nine people killed in a Munich shopping center on Friday will now see darknet markets under the scanner. Speaking to journalists today, Holger Muench, the chief of Germany’s Federal Criminal Police (also known as Bundeskriminalamt or BKA), has stated that the emergence of the darknet as a trading platform will see...