Over the past six months, “fans” of this Web site and its author have shown their affection in some curious ways. One called in a phony hostage situation that resulted in a dozen heavily armed police surrounding my home. Another opened a $20,000 new line of credit in my name. Others sent more than $1,000 in bogus PayPal donations from hacked accounts. Still more admirers paid my cable bill for the next three years using stolen credit cards. Malware authors have even used my name and likeness to peddle their wares.
“Flycracker,” the administrator of thecc.bz crime forum, hatches plan to send drugs to my home.
But the most recent attempt to embarrass and fluster this author easily takes the cake as the most elaborate: Earlier this month, the administrator of an exclusive cybercrime forum hatched and executed a plan to purchase heroin, have it mailed to my home, and then spoof a phone call from one of my neighbors alerting the local police. Thankfully, I had already established a presence on his forum and was able to monitor the scam in real time and alert my local police well in advance of the delivery.
This would-be smear campaign was the brainchild of a fraudster known variously online as “Fly,” “Flycracker,” and MUXACC1 (muxa is transliterated Russian for “муха” which means “fly”). Fly is the administrator of the fraud forum “thecc[dot]bz,” an exclusive and closely guarded Russian language board dedicated to financial fraud and identity theft.
On July 14, Flycracker posted a new forum discussion thread titled, “Krebs Fund,” in which he laid out his plan: He’d created a bitcoin wallet for the exclusive purpose of accepting donations from other members. The goal: purchase heroin in my name and address from a seller on theSilk Road, an online black market that is only reachable via the Tor network. In the screenshot pictured above, Flycracker says to fellow members:
“Guys, it became known recently that Brian Krebs is a heroin addict and he desperately needs the smack, so we have started the “Helping Brian Fund”, and shortly we will create a bitcoin wallet called “Drugs for Krebs” which we will use to buy him the purest heroin on the Silk Road. My friends, his withdrawal is very bad, let’s join forces to help the guy! We will save Brian from the acute heroin withdrawal and the world will get slightly better!”
Together, forum members raised more than 2 bitcoins – currently equivalent to about USD $200. At first, Fly tried to purchase a gram of heroin from a Silk Road vendor named 10toes, an anonymous seller who had excellent and plentiful feedback from previous buyers as a purveyor of reliably good heroin appropriate for snorting or burning and inhaling (see screnshot below).
Flycracker discussing the purchase of a gram of
heroin from Silk Road seller “10toes.”
For some reason, that transaction with 10toes fell through, and Flycracker turned to another Silk Road vendor — Maestro — from whom he purchased a dozen baggies of heroin of “HIGH and consistent quality,” to be delivered to my home in Northern Virginia earlier today. The purchase was made using a new Silk Road account named “briankrebs7,” and cost 1.6532 bitcoins (~USD $165).
Flycracker ultimately bought 10 small bags of smack from Silk Road
seller “Maestro.” The seller threw in two extra bags for free (turns out he
actually threw in three extra bags).
In the screen shot below, Fly details the rest of his plan:
“12 sacks of heroin [the seller gives 2 free sacks for a 10-sacks order] are on the road, can anyone make a call [to the police] from neighbors, with a record? Seller said the package will be delivered after 3 days, on Tuesday. If anyone calls then please say that drugs are hidden well.”
Last week, I alerted the FBI about this scheme, and contacted a Fairfax County Policeofficer who came out and took an official report about it. The cop who took the report just shook his head incredulously, and kept saying he was trying to unplug himself from various accounts online with the ultimate goal of being “off the Internet and Google” by the time he retired. Before he left, the officer said he would make a notation on my report so that any officer dispatched to respond to complaints about drugs being delivered via mail to my home would prompted to review my report.
FOLLOWING THE MONEY
I never doubted Flycracker”s resolve for a minute, but I still wanted to verify his claims about having made the purchase. On that front I received assistance from Sara Meiklejohn, a graduate student at the University of California, San Diego who’s been analyzing the role of bitcoin and anonymity on the Silk Road. Meiklejohn confirmed that the bitcoin wallet linked to in Fly’s forum thread was indeed used to deposit two bitcoins into a purse controlled by anonymous individuals who help manage commerce on the Silk Road.
Meiklejohn and fellow researcher Damon McCoy, an assistant professor of computer science at George Mason University, have been mapping out a network of bitcoin wallets that are used exclusively by the curators of the Silk Road. If you wish to transact with merchants on the Silk Road, you need to fund your account with bitcoins. The act of adding credits appears to be handled by a small number of bitcoin purses.
“All Silk Road purchases are handled internally by Silk Road, which means money trades hands from the Silk Road account of the buyer to the Silk Road account of the seller,” explained Meiklejohn, author of the paper, A Fistful of Bitcoins: Characterizing Payments Among Men with No Names, to be released in October 2013 at the ACM Internet Measurement Conference in Barcelona, Spain.
“These accounts aren’t visible on the bitcoin network though, so the only thing we can even hope to see by looking at the public transactions is when money goes into and comes out of the set of addresses that represent the collective account balances of all silk road users,” Meiklejohn wrote in an email to KrebsOnSecurity. “By manually tagging a handful of silk road addresses (via direct interaction) and then bootstrapping using the heuristic I described to label many more (around 250,000 in total), we are able to achieve this second goal by identifying addresses in the network that are ‘owned’ by silk road.”
In short, we can see that Flycracker’s Krebs Fund wallet was used to deposit 2 bitcoins into a bitcoin wallet controlled by those who maintain the Silk Road marketplace, but we can’t say for certain whether he used that credit to make a purchase.
THE DELIVERY
A thin package containing what appears to be packets of some white powder was delivered to my doorstep Monday, a day earlier than Flycracker had told his buddies that it would arrive. The package was hand-delivered by our local postal carrier, sent in a thin USPS Express Mail envelope that was postmarked from Chicago. Inside was another blank envelope containing a May 2013 copy of Chicago Confidential, a weekly glossy magazine from the Chicago Tribune.
On the back of the magazine, taped to a full-page ad for jewelry from LesterLampert, were a baker’s dozen individually wrapped packets emblazoned with the same black and gold skull motif that was on Maestro’s Silk Road ad. I guess the seller in this case was worried that 12 packets didn’t quite meet the 1 gram measurement for which Flycracker and his goons paid, so he threw in an extra one for good measure.
13 packets of what appears to be heroin arrived at my
home via the Silk Road on July 29, 2013.
I wasn’t planning even to touch the individual packages, but curiosity got the best of me. Before calling the cop who took my initial report and letting him that know he could come and retrieve the parcel, I had a look inside one of the packets. But not before donning a particulate face mask and a pair of disposable gloves. Hey, I watch Breaking Bad: Safety first!
Without actually having the substance tested at a lab, I can’t say for certain whether this is talcum powder or the real thing. The cop that came to collect the package said he had a drug field test kit in his squad car but then discovered he was out of the heroin tests (I’m not sure what that says about the heroin problem in Northern Virginia, but I digress). Frankly, I’m willing to give the seller the benefit of the doubt, given that Maestro currently has glowing feedback from almost 100 other buyers on Silk Road. Nevertheless, if I receive any testing results from the local police, I’ll update this blog post.
It’s not every day your enemies deliver drugs to your door.
I’m pretty sure they don’t teach you about this stuff i
n journalism school (not that I went or anything).
Just who is this Flycracker mischief maker? That will have to wait for another post. Stay tuned.
Update:
The Man Behind The Shadowy Illicit Drug Market, Silk Road
Update:
The Man Behind The Shadowy Illicit Drug Market, Silk Road
It's not every day federal authorities get to bust a case like this. It involves millions of dollars, illicit drugs and a would-be assassin, all of which allegedly were bought and sold on the Internet, in a shadowy online marketplace known as the Silk Road. On Tuesday, federal authorities shut down that site and arrested 29-year-old Ross Ulbricht, the man they say is its mastermind.
Ulbricht, a.k.a. "Dread Pirate Roberts," reportedly was at times sloppy about covering his tracks, attaching his name, photo, and personal e-mail address to Silk Road business. That is how federal authorities eventually tracked him down and arrested him, according to the criminal complaint.
We should mention that Silk Road isn't a marketplace everyone could easily get to. It exists away from the World Wide Web, on the encrypted Tor network, in the "deep" or "hidden" web that's only reachable by using anonymizing software. But if you got to Silk Road, it was the largest online marketplace for illicit stuff, where everything from fake ID's to guns and drugs was available.
"It's kinda earned the reputation as the eBay of drugs. I think for a lot of people that's shocking that with a few clicks you could have heroin sent to your door," says Brian Krebs, a cybersecurity researcher and former reporter for The Washington Post. "I don't think it's a good idea. But, that's the reality of the Internet we live in today."
Krebs was first to post the news of the federal bust of Silk Road.
On the Silk Road site, users rely on the online currency Bitcoin to buy and sell illicit goods and services. But if you try to reach the Silk Road now, you'll get this message from the feds: "This hidden site has been seized by the Federal Bureau of Investigation, ICE Homeland Security Investigations and the Drug Enforcement Administration."
In the criminal complaint against Ulbricht and the Silk Road, the FBI says that the website generated some $1.2 billion in sales between February 2011 and July 2013. It alleges that Ulbricht himself earned nearly $80 million in commissions since the site's launch.
"It really was a marketplace and what the FBI has done is they've taken an invisible marketplace and made it visible," said Mary Galligan, a consultant at Deloitte and the former special agent in charge of cybercrime in the FBI's New York office. "Right now, there are a lot of people around the world saying, 'What did I do, what did I do on the Tor server, especially if I did illegal activity, and who knows about it?' So it's a really significant technical achievement by the U.S. government and the FBI."
Ulbricht is a University of Texas grad who lived in San Francisco and called himself an "investment adviser and entrepreneur." The FBI says he ran Silk Road for more than two years. He is now in custody in San Francisco, charged with money laundering, computer hacking and drug trafficking. According to court documents, he was involved in an even crazier plot — murder for hire.
"One of the services that's available on the Silk Road is hitmen," says Krebs. "You could hire somebody to take out a rival."
Prosecutors say Ulbricht tried to do exactly that — hire someone to assassinate a rival who he feared would out him — for the Bitcoin equivalent of $150,000. Ultimately, there's no evidence anyone did get killed.
"People tend to think that the Internet is different than real life. It really just tends to reflect what's going on in real life," says Krebs. "And in this case, with the Silk Road at least, you have a lot of overlap between the Silk Road and the Internet."
Once Ulbricht's profile became visible, so did his social media tracks. He even recorded an interview with his best friend for the oral history project StoryCorps (which is regularly featured on NPR), and talked about his immortality.
"I think I might live forever, in some form, by that time. I mean, technology's changing so fast," Ulbricht said.
Even if he doesn't live forever, his notoriety could outlast him. Feds seized nearly $4 million worth of Bitcoin in shutting down Silk Road. It's the largest Bitcoin seizure to date.
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