My Top Secret Meeting With One of the Silk Road's Biggest Drug Lords

S.J.B.

S.J.B.

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My Top Secret Meeting With One of the Silk Road's Biggest Drug Lords
Jake Hanrahan
Vice
April 15th, 2014

Dread Pirate Roberts captained a ship that many thought was unsinkable. But when the FBI seized the original Silk Road on the 1st of October, 2013 and arrested the alleged kingpin – 29-year-old Ross Ulbricht – the online drugs empire began to capsize. Its hundreds of thousands of customers scattered across the deep web, and up to seven known Silk Road vendors were identified and arrested.

As the chaos unravelled into the mainstream and stories of Dread Pirate Roberts’ (DPR) alleged murder-for-hire antics made headlines, one prominent Silk Road drugs syndicate sat in their European safe-house with a ton of opium and a decision to make – would they cut their losses and disappear into the ether while they were still ahead, or keep their lucrative online drugs network running in the midst of all this extra attention?

The displaced drugs syndicate, known on the deep web as The Scurvy Crew (TSC), decided to go back to work. For them, back to work meant laundering Bitcoins, vacuum packing drug parcels and jumping the Moroccan border with bags stuffed full of uncut drugs. Silk Road may have died a sudden death at the hands of the authorities, but as one of the highest rated vendors before the FBI shut-down, The Scurvy Crew saw its demise as an opportunity to diversify.

After six months of negotiation, via encrypted email and several phone calls from throwaway SIM cards, the boss of The Scurvy Crew agreed to meet me. He told me he would explain to me the inner workings of his deep web drugs venture, from its humble beginnings to the near million-pound profits it now apparently generates. Known to me only by the pseudonym "Ace", the boss claimed to represent a new breed of drug dealer.

“I don’t do this just for the money,” he wrote to me via email. “I like to provide a premium service.”
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Read the full story here.
 
^weird in what way?

thnx sjb, I enjoyed that article immensely (and while it may be inappropriate to say so, it was good publicity for 'their crew' since names were named ;) )
 
groups make a name for themselves to get a positive reputation and then when everyone fully trusts them a lot of times they just rip off a huge amount of people at once and disappear

reappear a little while later under a different name, and who would be able to connect the dots?

rinse, lather, repeat

same thing goes for the site operators
 
The article was a great piece of writing by the journalist but a very stupid move by the vendor. They were already in the position to receive a lot of attention due to the size of their operation, their reputation and their method of acquiring product, an article (let alone one in fucking Vice, of all places) is going to multiply that attention exponentially. He came off as a smart enough guy (and he had the perfect example in DPR), you'd think he'd know that attention is what leads to bullets and/or handcuffs in his line of work.



Still, good read - I wonder how long it will be till the followup piece which announces that he's either dead or in the hospitality of one penal system or another, if anyone bothers to write one.
 
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subotai said:
groups make a name for themselves to get a positive reputation and then when everyone fully trusts them a lot of times they just rip off a huge amount of people at once and disappear

reappear a little while later under a different name, and who would be able to connect the dots?

rinse, lather, repeat

same thing goes for the site operators
Click to expand...

you say that as an absolute when it's anything but.
 
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