DNM Recap: July 17th
Posted by: DeepDotWeb
July 17, 2015
The last week or two had quite some happenings, here is a short recap of the most important news from the previous week / 10 days:
Lethal Weapon Listings Are Prohibited From Agora
Agora Market has taken action to stop all lethal weapon listings from the marketplace. The admins have posted a PGP message to the website that every user can see. It says that lethal weapon listings will be prohibited from the Agora marketplace starting from the 15th of July. The admins state that the reason behind this action is that they don’t think it is worth for the users to buy weapons on the website. “Shipping weapons is hard, they are expensive and stimulate both scamming by dishonest vendors and honeypot listings by agencies looking to find buyers who might wish to obtain such weapons illegally from us.” This part of the message sums up precisely the whole reason why they have taken a stand against the selling of weapons on their marketplace.
By not allowing lethal weapons to be sold on the marketplace, Agora Market could be able to generate less heat from three-letter agencies giving the website more time to continue doing its stuff.
FBI Seizure Of A Child Porn Website With More Than 214,000 Users
The Federal Bureau of Investigation has successfully taken action against a popular child pornography website that had nearly 215000 users. “Website A”, as the law enforcement authorities call the pedophile site, had precisely 214,898 members who have been sharing listings and messages that contained pictures and media of child pornography.
Child porn has been always a big issue for both the law enforcement authorities and the darknet community. For the LE, it is a huge issue since (obviously) child pornography has always been one of the most severe crimes that somebody could commit. In addition to that, these websites are sharing CP on the internet, which could make child porn more accessible for people. The LE wants to avoid this at all costs and they use high resources for the battling and seizing CP websites.
Alabama Man Sentenced To 15 Years For Darknet Gun Sales
Montgomery man, Michael Focia has been convicted for 15 years in federal prison for conducting two unlicensed weapon sales on the darknet. He was selling the firearms on Agora Market and Black Market Reloaded, where the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF) special agents have contacted him and ordered the two handguns. The reason why Focia got caught was not just only because he was selling the guns to ATF agents, but he also has left his fingerprints on the package that contained the weapons.
New Zealand Student Convicted For 7 Years For Importing Drugs From The Darknet
20 year old Dunedin student has been sentenced to 7 years for importing a “supermarket of drugs” from a Deep Web marketplace. Daniel Patrick McKechnie was sentenced on 18 drug related charges in the Dunedin District Court. The value of the drugs that have been imported to the country by McKechnie are estimated around $167,000. The drugs that were included in the sentence were MDMA, cocaine, methamphetamine and LSD.
One of McKechnie’s friends, Mitchell Charles Connor-Dagg, also a 20 year old, was sentenced to 3 years for helping McKechnie in the import process of MDMA and methamphetamine. The police reported that the drugs were imported to various PO boxes around Dunedin that were opened using fake identification documents on fake names.
DarkNetMarkets.o-r-g Hosting Phishing Links To DNMs
We have made an article about DarkNetMarkets.org earlier on, a clearnet website that has been hosting phishing URLs to the biggest deep web marketplaces. The admin of the site used a quite smart technique to host the links, the links appeared to be accurate, however, if you hovered over to one of them using your mouse cursor, it showed the URL of a phishing website.
The DNM Reddit community claimed that they have managed to take down the website for a day or two by reporting the domain to the hosting company. However, the website has been up and working again in the last few days.
We advise all of our readers to stay away from the website and to NOT click on any of the links.
Gwern: Archives of ALL Dark Net Market Released
Gwern released all his DNM scrapes: a 50GB (~1.6TB) collection covering 89 DNMs & 37+ related forums, representing <4,438 mirrors.
It can be downloaded as a torrent; for some torrent clients, the torrent may not work for various reasons, in which case you can download everything directly from the IA. But for all the other details, see my writeup on the contents – Reddit discussion can be found here
Updated: 2015-07-17