Another dark net drug dealer arrested the net: the bottom leads to the dark "Silk Road", after all, the evil can not escape the legal hammer

Recently, according to CoinDesk, another dark-net drug dealer was arrested and admitted to using bitcoin as a drug payment method to achieve money laundering purposes. Nearly 3,200 transactions were completed on the dark network using Bitcoin , and his name was confiscated after the arrest. The next $4 million in funds including Bitcoin.

This is not the first criminal to use Bitcoin for dark-net trading. After all, as early as the last century, the dark net has begun to move around, and the real dark-net into the public eye is also the "Silk" born in 2011. road".

Bitcoin and Silk Road

As the most "brand value" in the dark network and is hailed as the dark version of Taobao and the black market Amazon, there is no limit to the commodity, and the transaction is 100% free. It is only the creator of your platform. Ross Ulbricht took a very oriental name, the Silk Road.

Because of its free-trading model that is not subject to government regulatory review, the Silk Road quickly became a place to trade drugs, guns, and even hired killers. At the same time, Bitcoin , which is anonymized, decentralized, and more easily manipulated than the French currency, and is not easy to trace, was just born and was selected by the Silk Road.

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If the Silk Road is a paradise for criminals, Bitcoin is an important support point for the operation of heaven. Indeed, in the most frequent time when Bitcoin was used as the means of payment for the dark network , bitcoin prices rose from $0.00025 in 2010 to $31 in 2011 in just one year.

The Silk Road has also risen rapidly due to bitcoin. According to Forbes, the annual revenue of the Silk Road has reached 30 million to 40 million US dollars, and more than 200 million US dollars of transactions are through bitcoin. From a certain angle, it can even be said that the Silk Road and Bitcoin have grown up by complementing each other's needs.

Even now that Bitcoin has already been valuable, there are still many people who believe that a dark net like the Silk Road is the value of Bitcoin.

Sin will pay the price

However, the blatant underground trading of the Silk Road has already attracted the attention of the US judicial department. However, the use of bitcoin transactions was difficult to track, so that it took the FBI nearly three years to arrest Ross Ulbricht.

For the three-year tracking of Ross is also very dramatic, from the surface is the network confidant is actually a undercover agent to follow the temptation to play the attention of the couple to pay attention to the arrest process, there are many details on the Internet.

In 2013, Ross was officially arrested, and at the same time the Silk Road was seized. After the seal, the FBI controlled nearly 144,000 bitcoins in the Ross account. But the criminals did not stop doing evil. The head of the Homeland Security Investigation Bureau pointed out that after the Silk Road was closed in 2013, cybercriminals still sought other ways to continue their criminal activities and clean up their illegal digital currency.

For example, the dark-net drug dealer Hani who was arrested earlier was like this. After the Silk Road was seized, Hani still used cryptocurrency to clean up the profits he earned through illegal channels of more than $19 million. Although Hani claimed that these bitcoins were obtained by mining himself, the fact that Hani had pseudonym Pharmville to sell illegal products on the Silk Road has been gradually revealed.

The criminal incidents of using bitcoin to launder money are endless, and many people are also in conflict with the cryptocurrency industry. After all, the relationship between Bitcoin and the Silk Road has always been controversial and diverse.

But is Bitcoin really only used by criminals for money laundering? Cointelegraph has reported in the report that as of early July, Bitcoin has reached $515 million in illegal activities, but at the same time it only accounts for 1% of total bitcoin transactions.

to sum up

In fact, the argument that cryptocurrency can only be used for money laundering has long been overturned. Earlier, Messari.io also published a research report on the ratio of French and Bitcoin used in fraud, and the results show that bit in the dark network transaction. For every dollar spent on currency, the corresponding amount of legal money laundering is as high as $800.

(Image courtesy of AMBCrypto)

Of course, neither criminals nor criminal acts will escape the hammer of the law. Just like US Attorney General Geoffrey S. Berman’s assessment of the capture of the dark-net drug trafficker Hani,

"Today's arrest is also a warning to other criminals who sell drugs on the dark net. They can't remain anonymous forever, especially when they legalize their illegal proceeds."

Criminals will eventually be arrested, and the currency is also illegal . The cryptocurrency is not a shield for the perpetrators. Bitcoin itself is not wrong, the wrong person is the illegal use of bitcoin.

Author: Cross-country rabbit

Source: Block wave

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