Is Vendor “weaponsguy” On Agora Is ATF/FBI?

Posted by: DeepDotWeb

April 7, 2015

We won’t normally post something like that, but in this case we think that the evidence should be presented to the users so they could decide for themselves.

Following the case of Hyannis Man who was Charged With Bitcoin Purchase of Firearm and Silencer on ‘Darknet’  and upon further digging into the details of the criminal complaint of the defendant (posted in the previous link) made by /u/gwern who posted a summary of his findings on Reddit – showing “weaponsguy” account on Agora as an account with high likelihood of being the honeypot vendor account who sold the gun to Justin Moreira, the post is brought to you here (Source & discussion):

The prior probability is very low, and rereading it, there’s clear indications that it was not a vendor shop like Armory but definitely one of the DNMs – see pg5-6 where Moreira complains about site uptime, deciding it’s probably not an exit scam, and complains having so much money tied up in escrow and telling the seller that he can get onto the site if he wanted to. Makes a lot of sense if, eg, they were talking on Agora.

EDIT: actually, I think it was probably Agora, and the flipped seller account may be ‘weaponsguy’. Several reasons:

1. Agora confirms that Moreira’s user-account jd497 is already registered there
2. the above complaint, worrying about an exit scam and alluding to major downtime of the market, makes perfect sense if it’s Agora, but almost no sense for Evolution (which was noted for immaculate uptime and speed)
3. I can find no plausible matches on the Evolution market or forum for jd497, Walthers, PPKs, etc
4. besides the Walther, other items mentioned as available from the seller include silencers and AR-15s; ‘weaponsguy’ sells both, and specifically sellers a silencer compatible with at least one kind of Walther
5. ‘weaponsguy’ discusses on his profile how he came back from ‘vacation’ very recently, in November 2014 (no date in the complaint is before January 2015) and his feedback jumps ‘233 days ago’ to ‘133 days ago’; this fits a past pattern with flipped sellers (specifically, Dark_Mart on Evolution had exactly this pattern, of going on vacation and months later returning to active duty). They mention a very interesting problem:
   

   We are back off vacation mode!!! We just had to straighten some very old bad feedback out. The buyer sent a message to administrators verifying that we sent package.

   Would said buyer have been busted and was now cooperating with LE to restore the good name of a flipped seller?</li>

6. ‘weaponsguy’ boasts about how he is the only Agora weapons seller who doesn’t require FE but does escrow; Moreira complains about all the money stuck in escrow
7. ‘weaponsguy’ ships from the US; as the complaint indicates, and the USPS tracking page shows, the fake gun shipment was from the USA (Montana, specifically)
8. ‘weaponsguy’ has a custom order for “JD” (p/hJwPA42kez) for 9.76638799btc, which must be recent; while 9.7btc is bigger than the quoted deposited 8.75btc, this seems like an interesting coincidence, and it’s worth noting that the exact order of jd497 kept changing (the final one seems to be a PPK/S and Ciener silencer, pg6), so the difference may be due to exchange rate fluctuations, extra expense of the final weapon, or jd497 simply already had ~1btc deposited.
</ol>

Still looking for a smoking gun of selling a Walther PK380… My mirrors are not turning up anything definitive, so it may have been a private listing or done informally over PMs since ‘weaponsguy’ implies in his listings that he can get all sorts of things for particular buyers. Still, I don’t have to rely on guesswork here; since ‘weaponsguy’ is an active seller, the Agora admins have even more need to identify the LE account and I can simply ask them whether ‘jd497’ purchased from ‘weaponsguy’ recently in March – if he did, that clinches it and is proof that ‘weaponsguy’ is an ATF/FBI-controlled honeypot and also that my interpretation (weaponsguy flipped in late 2014) is probably right.

(The USPS tracking number, 9114901123086964548791, is still valid and shows the order from Montana, but I can’t find anything about where in the USA ‘weaponsguy’ ships from, and in any case, a UC’s shipment location has no necessary connection with where the original weaponsguy shipped from.)

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…One Thing to add for point #8 is that the current exchange rate for the BTC amount of Agora’s listing p/hJwPA42kez  is exactly 2500$  – Same as the total amount of money paid by “jd497” / Justin Moreira according to page 4 on the criminal complaint.

The Criminal Complaint:


Updated: 2015-04-07