Darknet Diaries - 132: Sam the Vendor

Episode Date: April 4, 2023

Sam Bent, a.k.a. DoingFedTime, brings us a story of what it was like being a darknet market vendor.Learn more about Sam at https://www.doingfedtime.com/.SponsorsSupport for this show comes from Akamai Connected Cloud (formerly Linode). Akamai Connected Cloud supplies you with virtual servers. Visit linode.com/darknet and get a special offer.Support for this show comes from Thinkst Canary. Their canaries attract malicious actors in your network and then send you an alert if someone tries to access them. Great early warning system for knowing when someone is snooping around where they shouldn’t be. Check them out at https://canary.tools.

Hey, hi, I'm Jack, and I'm back. I took a three-month break. I really needed it, but it's springtime now. So yeah, it's time to come out of hibernation and get back to work, so let's do this. Oh, and from now on, you can expect new episodes of the show to come out on the first Tuesday of every month. In this episode, we get into a story

about darknet marketplaces, and that means listener discretion is advised. We're certainly gonna get into drugs this episode, and who knows what else. So let's just say this one is rated R, and this is your warning. These are true stories from the dark side of the internet. I'm Jack Recider.

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BlackHillsInfosec.com. So let's start out with your name. So what do you want to be known as on here as well? Because you may want a moniker or something. Oh, no. So my name is Sam Bent. It's a matter of public record. Also, I'm also known as Doing Fed Time Online and Killaby.

That was my hacker alias for a while. And also 12189082, which is almost like talking to Jean Valjean. But that was my Fed number. So yeah, I got a couple of aliases. Okay, well, maybe that gave the story away a little bit, but whatever. Now you know, Sam spent some time in federal prison. And honestly, sometimes when I talk with criminals on this show, I get a little nervous and have to lay down some boundaries.

I'm assuming your criminal spree is over, but I do not want to know about any future things you may be cooking up that may be illegal because it puts me in an awkward spot. Definitely not. Just us, even if i had i mentioned something to you uh federally you are literally part of a conspiracy now and you can get uh up to 10 years so i i take it very seriously um even like when i was incarcerated i would have guys who would walk up to me and they'd be like oh when i get out get out, I'm going to sell Coke right this time. I'd be like, listen, man, get the fuck away from me.

What is wrong with you, dumbass? You're guaranteed to come back. It's like, I don't want to hear anything about any of that. So I absolutely understand that. That's great that you have that mindset of, don't try to involve me in anything. Okay, so when Sam was in his 20s, he was living in Vermont and was getting good at computers. And he had a job fixing computers for a while.

And then he started a little business doing computer repair for other people. Now, as Sam got more into technology, of course, he noticed and heard things like Silk Road and Darknet Marketplaces and Tor and Bitcoin. Because when you're a tech enthusiast, you go and you check these things out. I'd had this exposure to cryptocurrencies and to the Darknet in general for a long time because I had been in information technology and cybersecurity. I did a lot of residential work mainly, but that was always kind of my thing. I loved computers. I remember when Silk Road came out, honestly, I thought it

was a scam. I thought it was a bunch of feds that ran it. It was just a big sting operation. And then as time went on and I learned a little bit more about it, you know, I realized it wasn't. Silk Road was a website on the darknet that let you buy and sell drugs, among other things, illegal drugs. And the whole thing was anonymized, so it protects buyers and sellers. That way the police would have a hard time finding who the users were. An interesting use of technology. But Sam didn't really care about Silk Road at all. He was not interested in buying drugs from it

or selling drugs on it. So Sam was in his 20s and had a girlfriend for 10 years that he was living with. And like, because we were arguing about peas, my daughter got like, you know, because I had two stepdaughters and a son and I had made them dinner. And when I had given them dinner, my ex was like, oh, you gave her too many peas.

And I was like, I don't think so. You know, and she was like, you know, and she's like, oh, well, you know, you obviously did. Look at the plate. And I was like, well, it's the same amount of scoops. And she's like, you know, you're an asshole. I'm a logician. Like, my personality type is INTP, so I'm a logician. So, you know, I don't really get emotionally invested in it.

So I was like, I disagree. I think you're wrong. It's the same amount of scoops as the other kids got. So it really aggravated her. And she basically told me, she was like, I cheated on you seven years ago. She was a super miserable person for those seven years because her guilt aided her. And she would take that out on everyone else. And she would basically never be home.

And when she was, she was just a nightmare to deal with. So when she ended up telling me that, I was like, awesome. This is my chance to basically tell her to go to hell. And I used that opportunity to break up with her. But living in rural Vermont and doing like these small computer jobs, I definitely didn't make a ton of money. It was my own company. It was called Worldwide Computer Consultants.

It was a startup. And just like, I didn't have a ton of money. So I was like, well, I need to make money. Like if I want to move out and I want to have a good house for my children to live in, I need, you know, at least 200 grand. Okay, so we've all been in this situation, right? Where life throws us a curveball and suddenly we need money. Maybe not 200 grand, but still I can relate to being in a bad spot where money can fix a lot

of my problems, but I have no idea how I'm going to get it. Not only does he need money, but breakups are hard to go through, especially after being with someone for 10 years. And sometimes when we break up with someone, we have a tendency to go back to our old ways. So what were Sam's old ways? Prior to living in Vermont, I had lived in Rhode Island. And prior to living in Rhode Island, I lived in Massachusetts. So like, you know, most people, they move, you know, from these states for whatever reasons, economic reasons, job opportunities, right? So I was in Massachusetts.

I caught my first case. It was assault and battery with intent to murder. Jeez, dude. I don't know the full story of what happened here. Partially because Sam never told the police everything either. Like, what I do know is that he was 17 at the time and there were two other guys who were also part of this. Everyone ran and Sam was the only one who got caught.

Anyway, this landed Sam in jail for a while. And while he was there, he was sent to the SHU a few times, solitary confinement, one for possessing a lighter because he's a smoker and one for making a knife to defend himself in case another inmate attacked him. In this period of his life, he was a drug user. And when he got out of jail, he even got charges for possessing marijuana. And he got into some more serious drugs and moved out of Massachusetts to Rhode Island. I had been in Rhode Island for a while. And when I lived in Rhode Island, I sold,

it's been way over the statute of limitations at this point, but I sold coke, powder cocaine and weed and stuff. And I moved know, I moved up to Vermont because I was like, I was tired of doing that kind of stuff. Because, like, it's a rough life, you know? It's no joke. So I moved up to Vermont. When I moved up to Vermont, I got my high school diploma. From there, I continued on.

And with my education, when I came up to Vermont, I couldn't turn a computer on. Like, if you were like, turn this, you know, turn this computer on, I wouldn't be able to I continued on. And with my education, when I came up to Vermont, I couldn't turn a computer on. Like, if you were like, turn this computer on, I wouldn't be able to turn it on. I couldn't reformat one. I couldn't defrag a hard drive. I couldn't do anything. I didn't know anything about it. So I spent the next 10 years educating myself about computers and technology.

So Sam's old ways was a lot of drug-related stuff, and even running from the law. Sam has learned a lot since then, specifically that there are now online drug marketplaces. Old Sam was about to catch up with new Sam. Silk Road, the leading darknet market, was raided and shut down by the feds in 2013. But this didn't make darknet marketplaces go away. No, Silk Road was replaced with like four other markets, and people just flocked to those. And when Sam was going through this breakup in 2017, a popular market at the time was Hansa. And Sam was particularly fascinated by this site.

So he spent long nights reading through many listings and posts on there, trying to learn as much as he could about darknet marketplaces. So like, I had hopped on their site and I was on their site for a while and I started making posts. Like, how I ended up

establishing my name was just helping as many people as I could and calling out the people that I knew were scammers. So, you know, you had a ton of people, obviously, that are on that forum or any darknet forums that are trying to get people to conduct transactions with them outside of the escrow system. So, you know, someone's like, oh, like I'm looking for this vendor, he had pound, he had a pound of weed, hypothetically, he had a pound of weed for 1200 bucks. You'd see, you know, some shark come in and be like, oh, I like, I have his weed and I bought it in bulk and I'll sell it to you for 600 bucks a pound. And like, this guy is just a random person. Like you're never going to get anything. He's just, he's there to rob you. He might even

be a fed and he's just there to try to get your address. And he'll rob you too, but he'll get your address too. So I used to call those people out. If you said that to someone on the forum, you're like, oh, I can beat his price. And you don't have that vendor star or you can't prove that you're a legit vendor. You can't provide a signed PGP message saying you're vendor X, Y, and Z from this market, then I'd be like, dude, you're a fucking fraud. You're trying to rip this dude off. They used to hate that because I would call them out. And I made 5,000 posts in a month on Hansa. And that was

how I established my name. Hansa came out with a policy where they were like, listen, you can't you can't post on our forums unless you're a buyer or a vendor. At this point, Sam was neither a buyer or seller. So I was like, son of a bitch. So there was a there was a big Carter. He was like, listen, man, like, you know, I know like you like being on the forums, you do a lot of good. He was like, if like if you, you know, are you going to buy something that way you can stay on the forums? And I was like, well, like, I understand, you know, I understand Bitcoin and all that. But like, I'm not completely sure yet that if I hop on like local Bitcoins that I can buy Bitcoins and have it be completely anonymous. And for me, that's a major risk. To me, it was like, you know, it's not worth the cost of being able to post in the forums. So I was like, oh, it's a bad hit. Like I'm not going to be able to post in the forums. And he was like, no, man, like I'll send you some Bitcoin and just like buy a technically

that was my first purchase on the dark net was a stolen credit card. So he had sent me the money for it. I had bought it off him as two happy times. And then once I bought it, I was now a buyer so I could talk on the forums. So I'm like, yeah, I solved that problem. You know, that's awesome. So I sent him like his stolen credit card number back. I was like, here, man, I don't need this.

I'm not going to do anything with it. Like, I'm good, you know. So I was like, sweet. Now, you know, I can post on the forums, though. So I kept posting on the forums. And then, you know, about a month or so later, it was like I wanted to become a vendor. So I go to like become a vendor. And like he was like, hey, listen, man, like, you know, if you want to become a vendor. And he was like, hey, listen, man, if you want to become a vendor, I'll front you that 200 bucks to do it. Because I know you don't want to go buy Bitcoin.

And you call me paranoid about it. I was like, yeah, all right. That's awesome. I appreciate you sticking your neck out. It's 200 bucks. And he probably makes that in an hour. But I thought that was really cool. Hansen required something like $200 be paid

if you wanted to create a vendor account. And now that he had this, Sam was all set to start a new chapter in his life as a darknet market vendor. He didn't jump right into it though. He was very cautious about everything. For one, he knew a lot about OPSEC, or how to remain private online, from his knowledge of cybersecurity and computers. But then, having spent months reading thousands of posts on Hansa, really helped him get embedded into the darknet market culture. And this is a tough culture to pierce. There's little trust in some areas and a lot of trust in others, which makes it feel like you're part of a criminal family at times.

He had made friends and connections and started a reputation without even buying or selling a single item. And he made some observations during that time. Number one, nobody uses their real name on the dark net. In fact, everyone is trying hard to hide from their real identity. Number two, you can assume everyone is a criminal or a federal agent. And three, the feds are actively looking to take down the criminals, and he would pay attention to all those methods on how the feds were catching people.

So other people's missteps became his rules to live by. Do you remember what you sold at first? Yeah, so it was moonshine and cannabis. But where were you getting the cannabis? I was growing it. So I had imported seeds from the EU. I had gotten some Master Kush seeds and I refined them. And I'd studied, so I'd studied botany for probably about 15 years. So I learned, like I taught myself

about like macronutrients, micronutrients, deep water cultures, scroggs, like all this kind of stuff, aeration and nutrient deficiencies and how to tell nutrient deficiencies in plants. So I had learned all this stuff and I had wanted to cultivate cannabis for the longest time. Yeah. How'd it go on Hansa? How was your first dip into the vendor pool? Yeah. So I want to say on the first week, I made about 300 bucks. And then the second week, it was probably about $500.

So it was definitely, it was a slow start. But had I not spent that month making those posts, I would have had no sales. His big idea was that he really wanted to be the manufacturer and seller. His theory was that this is how you can maximize your profits. So I'm like, you know, if I'm the manufacturer and I'm the retailer, my ROI will be insane. So like with my moonshine, like I could spend $10 to $14 and I could turn that into $100

at a minimum. And then if I made apple pie brandy from that, multiply that by five. And that was my return. It was like, you know, 500 bucks. Now, Sam was trying to be business savvy, too. Trying to find ways to cut costs. Like, shipping supplies can easily start adding up. So, like, for me, one thing I came to find out was that USPS on their website, you can order free supplies. Right. So like like if you want bubble wrap, like instead of buying bubble wrap from Amazon with your credit card, having it sent to your house and going through a ton of it, you can order envelopes from USPS or pick them up in person.

Right. And now you don't have a credit card purchase, you know, for one less of your shipping supplies anyway. And then I would take, I would order like generic catalogs that were really big, like Granger that had 500 to like 2000 pages in them. And I would tear out the pages, crumple them up into a ball and throw them in them. And I would tear out the pages, crumple them up into a ball and throw them in there. And I would pack it. So like, there's no packing peanuts.

So now I don't have to buy that on Amazon. You know, like I would make sure that my expense, because you know, whatever you're sending out, that's one end that you can get popped. But like you buying supplies is just as dangerous, right? So all you have to factor in all those things. And like, you know, if you can factor those things in and make sure that they have no overhead, even better, you know, because now you're more profitable.

He also made a lot of very careful steps just to get onto the handset darknet market. Like when you get on social media, chances are you just turn on your phone or your computer and you're already logged into the site just like where you were before. But you don't want to do that with darknet marketplaces. Because suppose you get caught by the cops and they take your computer and open it and they can just see that you're logged in as a vendor on the site.

And that's some smoking evidence that they'd have on you. So Sam would try to hide his tracks so that it looked like he was never even on a darknet marketplace to begin with. For one, he would never use his home internet connection to do illegal things online. He lived up on a hill, and so he pointed his antenna down the hill towards the neighbor's house and was able to figure out a way to get onto their network. And he used the Tails Linux operating system, which has some extra security features. But the thing about the Tails operating system is that it gets completely wiped every time you reboot or shut down and has no memory of what you've done before. Which means every morning when Sam needed to log in and check his orders, he would have to reload Tails and re-enter his PGP key and his Bitcoin key and do all that in order to authenticate and do business on the site.

But here's another problem. Having possession of those two private keys would prove to the feds that he's the vendor on the site. So he needed to protect those keys very well. And he stored them both on a little USB flash drive. I would have my flash drive that I would always keep on me. And I kept it on me because first off, you have to figure I'm a moonshiner. So there's 170 proof alcohol around me at all times. So it's possible for me at any time to take this flash drive out of my pocket, pour 170 proof alcohol on it and light it and hopefully melt it to a point

where it can't be recovered. But really, obviously, that's not a guarantee. It's not like I have thermite sitting around, even though that was an idea of mine at one point. Also, because he lived up on a hill, he could watch and see if anyone was coming for quite a ways away. I would do regular perimeter checks.

So like, you know, probably four a day, I would walk around. I would look through almost every window in the house and just kind of look at what was going on outside. You know, was there a car parked down the street? And there were times where, like, I saw a car parked down the street. Yeah, there's a ton of stuff. Like, I wouldn't have a cell phone. If you had a cell phone, you somehow knew me and I knew you well enough

where I trusted you enough to come to my house. Your cell phone stays in the car. Dang. Things get really intense when you're a darknet market vendor. Friends aren't allowed to bring cell phones to your house. And you have to always have a plan in the back of your mind on how to burn the USB stick

that you're always carrying with you all the time. We're going to take a quick commercial break, but stay with us because, despite all this planning and safety precautions, something goes seriously wrong. This episode is sponsored by SpyCloud. With major breaches and cyber attacks making the news daily, taking action on your company's exposure is more important than ever.

I recently visited SpyCloud.com to check my darknet exposure and was surprised by just how much stolen identity data criminals have at their disposal. From credentials to cookies to PII. Knowing what's putting you and your organization at risk and what to remediate is critical for protecting you and your users from account takeover, session hijacking, and ransomware. SpyCloud exists to disrupt cybercrime with a mission to end criminals' ability to profit from stolen data. With SpyCloud, a leader in identity threat protection, you're never in the dark about your company's exposure from third-party breaches, successful phishes, or info-stealer infections. Thank you. What about which carrier to use? Oh, for packages?

Yeah. USPS only. Why? Because it's run by the federal government, which means they require a warrant to open it. If you ship DHL, UPS, FedEx, any of those, or private companies, they can open your package at will. Whereas with USPS, they require a warrant and they need reasonable suspicion with probable cause in order to apply for that search warrant and have a federal judge sign off on their ability to even open that package.

Okay, so for the government to open your package, they need reasonable suspicion and probable cause. Hmm, so what's government to open your package, they need reasonable suspicion and probable cause. Hmm, so what's that? What does the government think a suspicious package looks like? Well, this is obviously something Sam wanted to know. Making a package safe to ship was actually, it's kind of difficult because they try to make it as generic as possible so that they can classify almost any package as suspicious. So like if you use quote unquote too much tape, what's too much tape? Well, that's arbitrary. It's up to them. So like if you use too much tape, if you have a fake return address,

if you have a handwritten address, if it's not an official USPS box, right? Like all of these, you know, a fraudulent return address, a fake sender address, like all of these things culminate to create a suspicious package. And then pairing them together makes it so you can add up these individual variables to, you know, make it something where now you can say you have probable cause and plead that case to a federal judge and hopefully give him, you know, he'll grant you a warrant to open it up. Now, when you have all these packages that you need to ship out, it becomes a big task. You can't just hand them all to the mail carrier who's coming to your house. You need to somehow anonymously send them without

a way for them to be traced back to you. So like a public mailbox on the street corner might be good. You could just put the stamps on it and put it in there, but that's kind of hard to do when you've got a bottle of moonshine that you're trying to ship. But the thing is, is you just don't want to put all your letters in one mailbox either, or make one mailbox the one that you always use. And Sam was already really busy making moonshine, growing cannabis, and packaging everything up and dealing with the orders. I don't have time to ship packages. So I had reached out to my cousin. So I contacted my cousin, who at the time lived in Rhode Island and she worked at a dead-end job.

And I said, hey, listen, I got a plan. Do you want to come up for a weekend? And I'll talk to you about it. And she drove up that weekend and I told her, because I'm not going to talk about selling drugs on the internet over the phone. I told her about it and I said, listen, how it'll be is I will pay you a certain percentage,

5% of whatever I'm shipping out, 5% of that profit margin for that package is yours. Plus a standard fee, we'll do like $5 a package, plus the percentage, plus gas money, all the expenses, car payments. And we had a spare bedroom. So if she wanted, she could live there. So she had very well taken care of. Plus unlimited alcohol, moonshine, weed, shrooms, ecstasy, acid, like basically whatever you want, you can take. So that was kind of the arrangement that I had. And then she would go and I would, in the morning, I would wake up, I would check my orders,

I would print out addresses on thermal labels because thermal labels don't use micro printing, which means my IP address won't be on that label. Okay, so I want to pause here and just do a little fact check. It's true that printers typically put some dots on every page they print. These are almost invisible and these dots mainly go unnoticed by most people. And this is presumably to track the paper back to which printer printed it. But it's not exactly certain what information is encoded in those little dots. I don't think your IP address shows up in it, but it's more like a little signature of which printer it came from.

And I think this is to help law enforcement trace counterfeit money to see if it came from the same origin. So while it's probably smart to not use a printer that does this, I'm not sure how effective this step was to actually hide his tracks. For me, I bought a thermal printer. Because with a thermal printer, it doesn't use ink, it uses thermal paper. And there's no micro printing with those. So in the morning, I would wake up, I would print out, like let's say

I'm sending you half a pound of weed. I print out your address and on the back of it, I write half a pound of weed. I package up a half a pound of weed. I have it sealed up in my clean room. I have my fake return addresses, slap it on there. And I slap destination address on that box. And I throw away the backside of the label, which says half a pound. So one of the things my cousin was concerned about, she was like, if I'm sending out these packages and the FBI fingerprints them, they'll see my fingerprints. I was like, yeah, it's true.

It's not false. It's true. And she was like, well, that's kind of an issue, right? I was like, no, because at the end of the day, if you're at the post office and you touch a box, you still have plausible deniability, right? Now, if your fingerprints are inside one of those, the plastic that seals the drugs or on the inside of the box,

not so much. So for me, I would seal the package because I'm working with it on the inside of it. I would seal it and I would have two or three pairs of latex gloves on. I bleached the area that I did it in on a regular basis to make sure there's no, you know, DNA. Like there's a ridiculous amount of stuff that kind of goes into this and then actually packaging it up.

So let's say I'm packaging up just an ounce of weed. I'm taking a sandwich bag. I'm putting the cannabis in there. I'm sealing it up, getting the air out as best I can. And then I'm taking that and I'm wiping it down with rubbing alcohol with a new pair of gloves. I would stick it inside a vacuum seal bag. I would vacuum seal that bag and then I would dip that whole bag in a solution of rubbing alcohol, let it dry off. Then I would seal it in another bag. And then the last bag that I would seal it in would be what's called a visual barrier. And a visual barrier is just a, it's a vacuum seal bag that's a solid color so you can't see through it. So I would vacuum seal this last

bag and off my thermal printer, I would print off a label that says organic dried fruit and I would slap it on that visual barrier. Now, if I hand this to you, you look at it and you squeeze it, it feels like dried fruit, but you can't see it because the visual barrier. So if law enforcement or a postal employee was curious about what was in a box and stepped on the box to look inside of it, like, oh, it was an accident. We stepped on the box by accident. You can step on this box all day and that visual barrier is not going to, it's a visual barrier. So you could literally open the box and what you're seeing is just this thing that says organic dried fruit. You have to open this box and cut through this two mil thick plastic in order to get the other plastic out. And even then it's still so opaque that you can't see what it actually is. So you have to go through all these layers to

see what it actually is. Now, the reason I would do that is because you have a thing called permeation. So I can take a pound of weed. I can put it in a bag. I can stick it in a PVC pipe and I can stick it in a block of concrete, stick that block of concrete in a gas tank. And if I leave it there for long enough, a drug sniffing dog will smell that smell of that cannabis through the metal of the gas tank, the gas in the tank, the concrete, the PVC pipe, and the plastic bag, because it permeates out, right? Because nothing in this world is actually solid. It's all held

together by atoms, but nothing is technically solid, right? Even the inside of an atom is, you know, comprised of basically nothing, right? But empty space. So permeation goes through everything and anything. Some substances, it takes longer. Now, mind you, I don't have to put it in concrete or steel or any of this crazy stuff that you see, like a lot of the cartels do that, that are shipping, you know, large quantities because at the end of the dayels do that, that are shipping large quantities. Because at the end of the day, I use two to three day shipping. And it's sealed in four layers.

So it doesn't have time to permeate those bags in order for a dog to be able to smell it. And I can assure you there's no microscopic residue on the outside of it because I've changed my gloves and I've killed whatever it is with rubbing alcohol and completely cleaned it multiple times on that same package. Okay, there's one more precaution to take around the shipping labels. So every three packages would have a different return address. Because one of the alerts for law enforcement is a fraudulent return address

so i had to find a database of legitimate return addresses and like you know me like if like you're an honest guy right like you're an honest citizen you're nine to five guy you don't break the law you're not you, you know, you're not evil that I know, you know, like, so like, I didn't want to send out, you know, a bunch of Coke with Jack's return address. Because if I did that, you know, it might not be the best thing. Like department homeland security busts down your door at 6am. You miss work or someone tells your boss about how they saw you getting raided, you lose your job. You know, what are you going to say? Oh, I didn't do it?

Everyone says that, you know? And like the stigma, the trauma that your kids are going to have, like, you know, all that kind of stuff that goes hand in hand with it. So like for me, I needed a list of people that I could find. And like my solution for that was looking at the sex offender registry and finding like level three sex offenders, the worst sex offenders, and, you know, but reasonably sure that kids didn't live at and that if this guy got raided, I really didn't care because I have no sympathy for chomos, that's what they call them, federal prisoners, child molesters or pedos as they call them on the dark net and everywhere else.

So I was like, at the end of the day, like, you know, it was a great list to have because no matter where I'm shipping from in the country, there are sex offenders. And I didn't feel guilty about using them for my nefarious purposes, you know, because at one point they had used someone else for their nefarious purposes. You know, I just kind of saw it as karma. Now, this is when he'd hand over the packages to his cousin, and he told her to ship these out. But there were certain rules that he told her to follow. Each post office, at a maximum, would have three packages going out. Right. So, you know, if we were shipping nine packages that day, she would probably be visiting three or more post offices.

So our maximum was three packages per post office. So she would go, she would, you know, ship out these packages from these three different post offices. She would get receipts and she would bring them back and I would cross off the name of that town. And then the next day I would pick a different county, right? And that's how I rotated. But it's also how I ensured that I did not visit

that same post office for at least six months. Because I figured, you know, if the feds are going to, the feds, let's say we ship out this package from this post office, the feds catch it. And they're like, well, we didn't get any video footage. Like, so we're going to set up shop. We're going to do surveillance. That's what they do, right? We're going to set up surveillance at this location. Have fun because we're not going to be back for six months. How big is your budget? You know, we're not sending out, you know, five gallon buckets of fentanyl. In fact, like the most dangerous, the most harmful drug that I shipped, I think, was alcohol. Other people would say it was powdered cocaine. I think, honestly, I think alcohol is worse,

even though it's legal. But, like, I didn't sell heroin. I didn't sell meth. I didn't sell fentanyl. I tried not to sell drugs that I thought took people's souls. I tried to sell what I consider to to sell drugs that I thought took people's souls. I tried to sell what I consider to be party drugs. And again, people be like, you know, that's that's you're just trying to, you know, rationalize your bad behavior.

And you could absolutely say that I wouldn't contest it. I wouldn't say it's wrong. You know, that's what it is. But at the end of the day, like. For me, that was my moral line, you know? And I was proud of myself for even having one because there's a lot of guys that don't, you know? It's always fascinating to me to see what moral lines people draw in the sand and don't cross.

You'd think being a criminal just means, fuck the rules, be all punk about it. But you just heard being a criminal just means fuck the rules, be all punk about it. But you just heard Sam talk about a lot of the rules that he follows to stay safe and secure. But adding rules just for moral reasons is interesting to me. One was that Sam would only use registered level three sex offenders

as his return addresses because he thought it would be wrong to put a good citizen down as a return address. Another was that while Sam sold a lot of different drugs, there were some that he wouldn't sell, the ones that took your soul away from you. And he also didn't want to sell to kids, but he had no way of checking that. Well, so that's the thing, right? Everyone's anonymous. It's kind of like if I sell a knife on Amazon, how do I know you're over 18?

And that's the thing. Doing this as your job, you really do need a moral code because the stuff you see on these sites gets dark fast. And some things that are for sale will really make you question where you stand on a lot of stuff. Like, should there even be a market where you can buy and sell

anything? Stolen items, counterfeits, forbidden items, poisons, weapons, and of course drugs? Sam was only involved with the drugs part. All of us have an inherent right to our own bodies. If you want to go eat McDonald's for the rest of your life and, you know, become 400 pounds and die of a heart attack, you're free to do so as an American, you know. And I'm of the belief that if you want to do drugs, you should be free to do so. As an American, you have a right to put whatever you want in your body. Unless someone else owns your body, no one has a right to tell you what to do with it. It's like me telling you, you can't wear your glasses over your eyes.

You have to wear them on your forehead. Who am I? I have no right to your property. Who am I to tell you what to do? So that was kind of like my contention on that whole thing. This is a libertarian way of looking at the world. Libertarians want to maximize autonomy and minimize the government's involvement in your life. Ross Ulbricht, the creator of the first big darknet

marketplace, Silk Road, was a libertarian too. He had to be in order to run a marketplace like Silk Road. He thought people should be allowed to make their own choices of what drugs they can buy, even if they're illegal drugs. But then weapons started showing up on Silk Road. And it really made Ross take a long, hard look into his soul to figure out what rules should be around weapons. And he ultimately decided that it's going to be prohibited to sell anything whose purpose was to harm or defraud. So Silk Road didn't allow weapons or child sexual

abuse material or even stolen credit cards on the site. And again, I find it very fascinating what criminals won't touch due to ethical reasons. I could never run or operate or even admin a darknet marketplace. I'd get stressed out, turn old and die in like one week. Just this week in my town, there was a warning poster I saw stuck in a bathroom of a coffee shop downtown, and it said, look out, there's a bad batch going around. Make sure to carry Narcan and test your drugs. It's talking about fentanyl. And just this week, I saw in my town, there were two fentanyl-related deaths. One guy found dead in a bathroom, and the other overdosed in a jail cell.

See, fentanyl is an opioid, a painkiller. But it's 50 times more potent than morphine, and it's just incredibly powerful. But because it's so potent, people can easily take too much and die, which is a problem on its own. But what's scary to me is people don't always know they're taking it. One darknet market vendor was simply selling Xanax and oxycodone. Now people buying this stuff think that's what they're getting. But no, this seller was lacing the Xanax and oxycodone with fentanyl. So if some dad who just had tennis elbow or something needed some heavy duty

painkillers, he could wait a month for a doctor visit and then get a prescription and then go to the pharmacy and get it. Or he could just order it on a darknet marketplace and have it in four days. But that's dangerous because he could get one laced with fentanyl and run a huge risk of overdosing on it. And we hear stories of people dying from fentanyl and run a huge risk of overdosing on it. And we hear stories of people dying from fentanyl all the time. And this is why it's important to test the drugs you get. There are fentanyl strips that you can get where you can test to see if the drug you bought has fentanyl in it. And this is why I could never be a darknet market admin if I knew there were

people lacing deadly things into drugs that shouldn't be there and killing people, I'd feel obligated to figure out who the hell that person was that sold it. And that guy who was selling that laced oxycodone got arrested and was put in prison for 20 years. And he is very likely responsible for a few deaths. So some vendors on these darknet marketplaces really don't give a fuck. Despite all the illegal stuff that Sam was doing, it's good to see that he wasn't misleading his customers or lacing them with deadly ingredients.

And he had rules that he was following. For me, it was like no international shipments, no selling stuff that, you know, heroin, meth, fentanyl, things that kill people. And, you know, not ripping people off, giving them the best quality product that I could source on a global scale. Okay, so one thing that you should be clear about from the beginning if you're going to be a darknet market vendor is you need a goal

because things can get crazy deep down in the darknet. And if you're not clear of what you're doing down there, you could get swept up in the undertow. My only goal with this was to make like 200 grand. Because like in Vermont, you could buy a house for relatively cheap. You can find a cheap house for like 100 grand. So I was like, I buy a $100,000 house and I have $100,000 left,

which will let me pay the taxes and live off of it for long enough until I can find something to keep me afloat permanently. But it was like between my cousin's fee that I paid her and having to like upgrade my cannabis setup and upgrade my alcohol and pay for shipping and, you know, kind of evolve with the business. I always found myself always reinvesting. So like, if I sold something, I made 800 bucks off of it, I would be like, all right, 400 bucks is going to be for shipping fees. And the other 400 of that is going to be for gas money for my cousin to ship $400 worth of stuff, hopefully. So I made enough to make a profit.

But between my cousin and my ex, who I was still living with, I never got to that $200,000 line. Now, I did get to a point where towards the end, your money starts to come in exponentially. So the first week was like 300. Second week was probably 500. And then I had weeks where it was nothing. And then you have weeks where you got Bitcoin.

And guess what? Bitcoin dropped 20% in value. So now you got to hold that till it goes back up at least to that, at least 20%. And like, I'm not a millionaire. I don't have a lot of money. So like having that being held, it kills you. I learned about Sam because he gave a talk at DEF CON last year. And in his talk, he had a clear warning for others.

Don't drink and type. Yes, absolutely. It's more dangerous than drinking and driving. Absolutely. What's the danger here? What happens is that complacency. So you get comfortable at a certain point with me, just like me and you might know each other for years in IRC, right?

And then you get wasted one night and, you know, I call you by your handle and you say, oh, no, man, it's cool. Just call me Jack. Right. And it's like, you know, in that situation, but on the dark net, right? Where like, I very well could be a Fed. Now I know something. I know an identifying piece of information about you. And maybe I've seen you say something a certain way that's unique to a certain area. Now I know what your first name is and around about where you are. And as time goes on,, there'll be more information leaks

that I can capitalize on to figure it out. And that's why I said, to answer your question, that's why I said don't drink and type because whatever complacency you have is exponentially increased, which means the chances of you basically being a data leak on yourself increases exponentially with that.

What kind of payment were you accepting? So yeah, Bitcoin. Bitcoin only. Yeah, that was it. Okay, so washing money is what I want to know. What did you do to cash out? Super easy. Yeah, that's probably one of the easiest things to do.

I think the simplest way to cash out is with drugs. And people are like, what the hell? So it's super easy. Like, you know, here's the thing, right? Like around where I live, like a really good, good, good, good ounce of weed might run you like, you know, 225, 250. So on the dark net, like I can go and buy 30 bucks an ounce. Like my cash out would be like, buy a bunch of his weed. And anyone that I knew in my area that I knew was like a social butterfly, you know, and I knew we keep their mouth shut. I would turn around and I would say, hey, man, listen, you know, I will sell you, you

know, a pound of this weed for sixteen hundred bucks and I'll give it to you up front. Now, that's one hundred bucks an ounce. Again, the typical price in that area was $2.25, $2.50. This guy can turn around, sell ounces for $1.50, undercut everyone by almost $100 and make a good amount of money. And he didn't have to put up any money. And he would be able to do that and come back with that in like a week to two weeks. So I'm getting cash from all different sources. His theory was that if this person got caught,

they wouldn't snitch on him because he was giving them good deals. Besides using this method to turn his cryptocurrency into cash, he also would exchange his Bitcoin for Monero, which is more private than Bitcoin and harder to track. And then he'd cash out his Monero. Okay, so at this point, he's posted a lot to forums

and is a buyer and is a seller on some markets. And he's becoming well-known and even starts working for one of the darknet markets. Specifically, he was doing dispute resolution. So basically, when you would have a customer who would dispute a sale and you would have a vendor who would either agree or dispute it, then I would manage some of the, sometimes on some of those markets, I would manage those disputes and I would be the one to decide, like, do you get a refund?

Do you not get a refund? Do you get a percentage of a refund? Like how is that figured out? And we would do that by looking at, you know, obviously the reputation of both the buyer and the seller. But we would also look at, like, the account age. We would look and see if, like, they had accounts on other darknet markets, how reputable they were.

On top of doing that, because he was so involved with the community, one darknet marketplace asked if he wanted to do PR for them. And he took that job. It was a small job, didn't pay much, but since he was already very active in the forums and stuff, he could just keep an eye on any negative posts about his marketplace, and he would try to make that seem more positive.

Now at this point, one of the more popular forums to talk about darknet markets was actually Reddit. The subreddit r slash darknet markets had 180,000 members. And this is where Sam would hang out and see what chatter was going on about darknet markets. One day someone made a post about the market Sam was doing PR for. And the person posting it was going by the name hugbunter, a play on the words bug hunter. Hugbunter found an exposed config file

on the Darknet market site. But he put it on Reddit. He didn't put the actual page. Like he didn't leak anything. He was responsible in his disclosure and he contacted the admins and he was like, hey, like you guys have a IP leak. They just kind of gaslit him.

And they're like, oh yeah, we'll discuss it. Two weeks later, he's like, oh, it's a security issue. And they're like, yeah, all right, whatever. And he was posting about it on Reddit. So I'm trying to chill him out from posting about it on Reddit because I'm in charge of PR. I had went on as a representative and said, you know, yeah, you know, you were able to showcase that because now we can show people how strong our security is, that we also have offensive measures, you know, built in. And you're like, oh, that's not true.

That's not true. Like, we went back and forth and we argued, you know, for a long time. So that's how Sam got to know Hugbunter, by trying to gaslight him over chat messages. Well, over time, Sam got to know Hugbunter more. And yeah, the conversation continued into other things. One thing they talked a bunch about was Reddit. Yeah, just Reddit itself.

Because some users were getting banned from Reddit, trying to sell things right on Reddit instead of a darknet marketplace. And it became a big thing to talk about. Like, how much is Reddit going to allow on their site? I mean, we're talking about illegal buying and selling of stuff here. He had come up with the idea, like, oh, let's mirror and have this forum on the darknet. So worst case scenario, there's a fallback. So the idea was born. Take the Darknet market subreddit and make it sort of a dedicated Reddit-like site on the Darknet. Hugbunter got to work building it.

He coded the site. He did, you know, all of that. And like his job was to be like a background admin. And my job coming on was to be like an admin and actually do stuff on the actual forum because I had a laundry list of credentials of sites that I had worked at before. The site that Hugbunter created was called Dread. They didn't allow users to buy or sell anything, but just let's talk about darknet markets. And they advertised this new site on Reddit to let people know that, hey, there's a

fallback place to go if Reddit goes down. And sure enough, that prediction came true. In 2018, Reddit posted some new rules to their site saying that they're not going to allow users to exchange certain items. And the items forbidden to be exchanged on Reddit were firearms, drugs, sex, stolen goods, personal information, fake IDs, and counterfeit money. Apparently, Reddit had noticed a lot of people were buying and selling these things on their site and took a big move to ban communities who were involved in this. And this resulted in Reddit shutting down the whole r slash darknet markets forum. And this suddenly made the dread forum explode with new users and went on to be one of the biggest forums on the darknet and sam had a front row seat to it

all as the first admin to dread no one ever comes to my house you know um no one comes to my house so like um the only people that ever came to my house were people who knocked on the door and like try to sell paintings. Because again, like where I'm living, it's an affluent area, right? So people would knock on the door, try to sell paintings. Or they'd knock on – like Jehovah's Witnesses would come and knock on the door. So I got a knock on the door. So like it's like 7.15 in the morning. So like, I just got my coffee.

So I'm like, I'm sipping my coffee. I walked to the door and like I opened the door and there's this dude standing there and he's got a bulletproof vest. He's got a badge that's sewn into the bulletproof vest that I've never seen this bag before. And he's holding up a piece of paper. He's like, hi, my name is so and so.

I'm a special agent with the Department of Homeland Security. And this is a federal search warrant. And like I'm sitting there and I'm holding my coffee and I'm looking back at the sky and I'm looking at the 30 people that are behind the sky that have MP5s and ski masks with skulls on them on. And like, um, like this is before COVID. So seeing someone with a mask is weird. You know what I mean? So like I see all these people behind the sky and they're all looking through the windows and all this other nonsense.

And I was like, oh, okay. I guess you want to come in then, huh? And he was like, yeah. I was like, all right. So as he starts walking in, I'm like, listen, there's, you know, there's two adult females. You know, one's my cousin and one's my ex. And then there are three children in the house because like, I don't want them, you know, one's my cousin and one's my ex. And then there are three children in the house because like, I don't want them, you know, they like to play like they're in Iraq. You know,

I don't want them running through, you know, pointing an MP5 at, you know, my sons or my daughter, you know, and like, you know, you know, scaring the shit out of them. Like, I want them to know who's in there. So they're not scared're not scared. Because if they're not scared, they might be a little bit more relaxed when going through. And they were. They were pretty courteous and calm. And that was my first interaction with them. Just as a step back here, kids in the house with a whole drug lab. Yeah, there's no lab.

And it was like the room that I had the cannabis in was separate from the main house. So that wasn't something that they were around. And the packaging and all that, they never went around that? Right, and that was in a clean room. Right, yeah. So they don't see any of that. And all the narcotics that I have were kept in a safe in there. Okay.

All right. So they come through. They see all this stuff? Yeah. So what they do is they raid. They go through. They find this. So, all right.

So moving back a little bit, one thing that my cousin had been worried about was she was like, all right, let's say we do this and we get caught. I was like, listen, if we get caught, it's because I screwed up. I'm in charge of everything. I'm in charge of the security. I'm in charge of everything that goes on. So if something doesn't

go right, then it's my fault. So I was like, listen, if they come and they raid us, like I'll tell them it was all me. Because at the end of the day, why am I not? If I don't, then they're going to put it on everyone. So like when they came in, they searched and they're going through and like they come and they see me like, oh, any drugs in the house? I was like, yeah, they're upstairs. They're in my safe. You know, they're all mine. I'm a darknet vendor. And they were like, what?

And they were blown away. But again, I had an agreement with my cousin prior to this, that if this happened, this worst case scenario, we had a ton of contingency plans. That's part of having good operational security and having good operational security and having good information security policies. It's like, do you have an incident response policy at your work? So didn't we. And this was agreed to prior to anything. So that was the thing. If we get raided, I admit everything was mine. And I did. So listen, I'm a darknet vendor.

Everything's mine. They're like, what's the combination of, I admit everything was mine. And I did. I said, listen, I'm a darknet vendor. Everything's mine. They're like, what's the combination of the safe? Gave them the combo. What do I do? Say no, they're going to open it anyways. The police were apparently unprepared to make any sort of arrests at that point. So they left, created an indictment, and then they set a date for his arraignment. So I go for my arraignment, right?

So now I move out of the house I was in to a different apartment. So the Department of Homeland Security showed up on the day of my arraignment to that old house because they didn't know I moved. They wanted to arrest me there and bring me into court in handcuffs, but I didn't live there anymore. And the geniuses didn't know I didn't live there anymore. And the rock stars they are, they had no clue where I was. So my ex had told them, oh, he moved and this is the address.

And by the time they got to this address, I was already halfway to the federal courthouse to go turn myself into the U.S. Marshals for my arraignment. They said, listen, like in the time that you were a vendor, so I think it was like in total like a year and a half or two years. They were like, in the short time that you were a vendor, you have crawled into more crevices and learned more about this culture and seeped into this culture than we've been able to do in six years. Because in my short period of time, I inserted myself into the community and ended up working with these markets and starting up Dread.

And I had made myself an indispensable part of the community by contributing. And contributing in meaningful ways. And that's what made me valuable to the community at the end of the day. And they said, hey, listen, someone with knowledge, like we could absolutely use that. And, you know, going forward, we'd like to bring you a laptop and, you know, you can continue taking orders and, you know, vending. You're not actually going to be sending drugs, but, you know, just gathering information. And I was like, man, I'm what? I'm good.

I remember I had been to county before, right? I had been to state prison before. No, I'm set, man. I'm like, yo, are you kidding me? I work with cartels, dude. You know what I mean? I work with multiple cartels. You think I'm going to tell on people?

I'm good. I have a family, man. You know what I mean? I did this for my family. Now you think I'm going to risk their lives to get out of whatever punishment's coming? You're delusional.

I'd die for them. I'd kill for them. They're my family. You know what I mean? So they obviously didn't like that. So Sam and his cousin were able to go back home while the case was being built. And they set a date for when he was supposed to show up in court. At this point, Sam had moved out and was living in a small apartment.

Now, at some point during his time as a darknet market vendor, his cousin introduced him to a lady. Sam and her chatted a lot, online and over the phone, but never in person or even using video calls. They became really close and good friends, flirtatious at times even. And like she didn't know, obviously, she didn't know anything about what I was doing because it would be, I just consider it to be a massive opsec risk, right, to tell her. So like I just told her that like I had a business and I wasn't specific about it. And like we learned a lot about each other as I was like doing my vending and she was completely unaware of it.

And like after I got raided, I lost all my electronics. So I like lost her number. I lost all her info. So I had to go like, you know, find it all. And my cousin was able to do it through her Facebook. And like I remember contacting her and being like, you know, she was like, oh, you haven't talked to me in four days. Is there an issue? And I was like, no, I got raided by

the feds. And it's like those Jews that break up with a woman and tell her that, oh, I'm a spy. You know what I mean? And she was like, like break up with a woman and tell her that like, Oh, I'm a spy. You know what I mean? And she's like, I was like, I got raided by department of Homeland security. They came in 30 deep on cooperation with the state police, uh, like the cyber crimes task force came in and, and she was like, yeah, all right, whatever, Sam, like, listen, if you don't want to talk to me, like you just tell me, I was like, I swear to God, I got raided by the Department of Homeland Security. Obviously, she ended up learning that it was true, that my phone did get taken. And then she ended up moving from where she was living up here with me.

Because I told her, I was like, listen, I have this indictment. I was like, just forget about me. I'm probably going to do 20 years. Because we wanted to get married. We had learned, we had fell in love by talking to each other. And we fell in love intellectually.

I didn't know what she looked like. And I didn't think she knew what I looked like. We had spent two years talking to her. I had hated, I wouldn't take a selfie because of my OPSEC. You know what I mean? So after I got raided, like I ended up talking to her,

I sent her a selfie. Because now like, who's going to raid me now? You know? And she's like, oh, like I know, you know, I know you look like that because like your cousin had showed me a picture of you like a while ago. I was like, are you kidding me?

So I was like, she sent me a picture of you like a while ago. I was like, are you kidding me? So I was like, she sent me a picture of herself and like, and she was like way out of my league, you know, she was like, like, dude, I'm like a three, you know, she's, she's an easy 10. You know, I was like, what, what the hell? She was like, she's like, it's, you know, who cares? She was like, she was like, you're handsome. And I was like, what the hell? She was like, who cares? She was like, you're handsome. And I was like, whatever.

I'm not going to argue with you. I don't think so. I got imposter syndrome. I'm like, no way. But I was like, listen, I'm going to get 20 years. And she was like, just forget about me. We can be friends and stuff. And she was like, I was like, you know, just forget about me. You know, we'd be friends and stuff. And she was like, she was like, listen, it's not all about you. I was like, what? She was like, I love you. Like, I'm not, I don't, I don't care how long you get, you know? And that was, that was pretty incredible for me. But like, it was, I had, I had had people in the past who

had better my life who I said they would stick with me through a prison term. And they didn't. And so, like, I was very leery of it. And that's why I kind of, like, just didn't want her to have to deal with that. I knew how much pain and agony it was going to be going forward. And she did, man. It was crazy. She stuck with me through my everything, through my sentencing, through my actual prison

incarceration, like everything. They moved in together and waited for his court date. Now, of course, Sam is super curious how they caught him. He took so many precautions. Where did he go wrong? So he looked through his discovery, which is the evidence that the feds had on him. And there were three words that he saw on there. Operation Dark Gold. Towards the end, like I found this one vendor on the darknet called Gold, G-O-L-D. And what he would do is he would charge you five to 10% and you would send him your Bitcoin and he would send you cash in the mail.

And I love that system. Nice. A new way to turn your Bitcoin into cash. Just give it to someone and they'll send you the cash in the mail. This bypasses the crypto exchanges who like to collect a lot of your personal information. This went on well for Sam and Gold for a while. But then something happened where Gold got arrested. And the feds asked him the same thing they asked Sam. Hey, you know a lot about this community. Would you like to work for us or go to jail? Gold agreed to work with the feds, which became Operation Dark Gold. So that's when Sam sent him some Bitcoin and he sent Sam some cash.

But this didn't make any sense to Sam. No, this wasn't right. What law did he break here? It's legal to send your buddy Bitcoin and they give you cash for it. There is nothing wrong with that. So he told the feds, there's no crime to exchange Bitcoin for cash. United States Attorney's big thing was, you paid 10% to cash out

your Bitcoin. And that shows criminal intent. And I was like, the one thing I said to my defense lawyer, I'm like, dude, you know there are Bitcoin ATMs that charge 10%, right? Like, it's not,

like, that makes no sense. You know, this still wasn't adding up for Sam. Were the feds just making up crimes to get a search warrant? Because if they did get a search warrant under false reasons, then perhaps this case can be thrown out. So Sam kept seeking answers. So what actually happened was my cousin got complacent. What she was doing is she would go to the post office with, you know, 12 packages. I remember what I said, three packages would have one return address on them. The next three would have a

different return address from a different town. So she's going there with like our agreed upon number was three packages. And now those three packages have the same return address. Now she's going to the post office with 12, 15, 20 packages. And remember, every three packages has a different return address. So she's going there in some cases with, you know, six different return address. So she's going there in some cases with six different return addresses. So they're like, what the hell is this? But again, that is not enough for a warrant. It's suspicious and it's reasonable suspicion,

but it is not probable cause. So what ended up happening was the United States Postal Inspector just cut open a package with no warrant, cut open the visual barrier, cut open the three layers of vacuum sealed, and he found some Coke. And then they used that Coke to apply for a federal search warrant for the house after they followed my cousin back to the house.

So, like, for the longest time, I was angry at my cousin because I was like, you know, you didn't follow the security policy. And now you're potentially costing me 200 years in prison because you were too lazy to drive. Even though you build for it, you were too lazy to do your job and drive to these different post offices. And then I came to the realization that at the end of the day, it's not her fault. It's my fault. I was in charge, right? It was on me to supervise her. And I didn't do a good enough job doing that. And that's why we got raided. So even my OPSEC at the end of the day

and my information security policies were so on point that I would have never had an issue with law enforcement. So to kind of prove that, Hansa went down. Your stuff is all over that database. That was taken over by the feds. They did a massive arrest through that.

Hundreds of people in the U.S. Hansa was European, but they did a lot. Operation Bayonet, yeah. They did hundreds of arrests in the U.S. for dealers, mostly vendors. You weren't one of them. It did hundreds of arrests in the U.S. for dealers, mostly vendors. Yep. You weren't one of them. So that kind of proves that you were, OPSEC was tight. Right, right. And like I had, so I'd gotten, in my discovery, I had gotten times where I looked through my discovery and the feds actually bought drugs off me like 20 times.

They bought Coke. They bought 20 times. They bought Coke. They bought LSD. They bought cannabis. I think the only thing they didn't buy was moonshine. But they bought pretty much everything. And there was nothing from it. There's no fingerprints. There's no hair.

Not even microscopic DNA. There's nothing. And, you know, at the end of the day, again, it was like that smallest little thing, you know, is what caused it. And that was her complacency. And my being overwhelmed, doing all these jobs, you know, having my attention so divided

that I did not do a proper job in monitoring her and making sure that she was doing her job correctly. What ended up happening was my lawyer had applied for what's called the Franks hearing. A Franks hearing is when you can show law enforcement broke the law in order to catch you. This was my security policy from the start. It was like, if you guys are going to catch me, I'm going to make this maze so complicated that you're going to have to jump over a wall in order to do it. And then of course, like it's that whole thing you see like on law and order where it's like, oh, fruit of the poisonous tree. You know, they broke the law in order to do this. So everything's invalidated. And that was another part of my plan. That's why I was ready to admit to it so readily. I knew my rights. I

knew I wasn't under any obligation to talk. I knew that I was better off asking for a lawyer. But I also knew that they would most likely have to break the law in order to bust me. And then if that's the case, and admit to everything and they get everything, everything's got, there's nothing else they can do. If every, if everything from that arrest, from that original search warrant is thrown out, there's no case. Now keep in mind, the feds have a conviction rate of 99%. They don't lose. It's like you playing chess with me. And I tell tell you all my pawns are queens. I'm not going to lose, you know, so that's what it's like playing them. So now I got this Frank's hearing scheduled.

Now, that said, with this Frank's hearing scheduled, a Frank's hearing is very difficult to get. It's super, super hard to get. So the United States Attorney Drescher contacts my lawyer and tells her, I don't want to go to this Franks hearing. So like my lawyer contacts me. She's like, oh, he said he doesn't want to go to this Franks hearing. And I was like, yeah, I bet he doesn't want to go to this Franks hearing, you know?

Like we're going to prove like everything that they did. First off, everything you got was, it was done so illegally. So I guess he told her, he was like, listen, tell him that if he pleads guilty, I'll give him a maximum of 108 months, which is like nine years. So if he doesn't, and we go to this Frank's hearing, he'll get nine of the 10 of his charges dropped, but he won't get his conspiracy charge dropped. And I was like, well, what's he mean? And she was like, oh, did you read your PSR? So a PSR is a pre-sentence report.

It's basically the background of your whole life. So I was like, no. So I went and I looked at it. It was like page 15. And like on that page, it said Geneva's proffer. So when I had first gotten arraigned, after I got out, I got released on my own recognizance. After I got out, my lawyer had called me up and she was like, oh, do you want to come in and do a proffer? I was like, what's a proffer?

And she was like, well, a proffer is like when you come in and you tell them what you did, who you worked for, who like who bought off you, who did what, what vendors that you worked with and what you know about them. I was like, yo, man, that sounds kind of like snitching to me. And she was like, well, we don't call it that. And I was like, well, the people I work with would. No, I'm not doing that. It's a death sentence for not just me, but my family. But aside from that, like, I'm just not on that kind of time. Like, I'm not doing that. That's a death sentence for not just me, but my family. But aside from that, like, I'm just not on that kind of time. Like, I'm good.

You know, I'm not going to put people in a box because I'm scared about being in a box. You know, like, I'm a man. So what I did, I'll accept responsibility for. So he's like, all right. So like when they were like, oh, did you read your PSR? Go read page 15 or whatever. And I went back and I see Geneva's proffer. Immediately I know what a proffer is now.

And I go through it and it says like your cousin proffered on you. She confesses to all this stuff like, you know, oh, like he had me send these packages out. I didn't know what was in the packages. And like, you got a percentage of every, you know, everything that was in the package, you had a percentage of. You know, and like, like you helped me with the labels. Like, what? So it was just completely mind blowing. What I understand a proffer agreement to be is where you admit to what you've done to get a reduced sentence.

With his cousin, the information she provided in the proffer was enough to make it so she didn't get any prison time at all. It was good for her, but bad for Sam. And Sam was upset because he told her to admit to nothing, and he'd take full blame for it. And I don't know what made her deviate from the plan. Perhaps she just wanted to get rid of a guilty conscience. Sam's big plan was if the cops raid the house and take everything, and even if he admitted to everything, he was going to prove to the judge that the cops broke the law to get evidence on him, which would make his case invalid. And he thought this would work because Operation Dark Gold wasn't enough evidence

and the post office opened a package without a warrant. And that was a big deal. If he could prove they broke the law, then he thought it would mean that they would have to throw out all this evidence on him and let him go. But this plan backfired. His cousin told all, giving the prosecutors more evidence. So he's faced with a new decision.

Either get a franks hearing to prove that the police broke the law to bust him, which may or may not go his way, and even if it did go his way, he'd still have a conspiracy charge that could get him 20 to 30 years in prison. Or simply admit to being guilty, take a plea deal, and get a maximum of nine years in prison. Suddenly, the Franks' hearing seemed like more of a gamble,

and the nine years seemed like the better option. So he took the plea deal and admitted he was guilty. Somewhere around this time, his girlfriend and him got married, and they were living together, waiting for the big sentencing hearing. The sentencing day came, and the judge sentenced him to 60 months in prison, which is five years. And during his time in prison, his wife would visit him frequently, giving him hope and encouragement to stay positive.

Sam was due to be released from prison in 2024, but he educated himself in the law library in prison and applied for compassionate release, which he was granted and let out after only serving 18 months in prison instead of the five years he was supposed to serve. And when he got out, his wife was right there waiting for him, happy he was supposed to serve. And when he got out, his wife was right there waiting for him, happy he was out of prison. And after he got out of prison, he wanted to help others fight the law and went back to school and graduated and became a paralegal, which is what he's doing now. He even wrote a book about how to write a compelling, compassionate release motion. And he's also making YouTube videos and blog posts and giving talks about his story. A big thank you to Sam Bent, aka DoingFedTime, aka Killabee, aka TwoHappyTimes2. You can learn

more about him by visiting the website doingfedtime.com or search for Doing Fed Time on YouTube. I'm going to be releasing new episodes of this show every month from now on, so I'll see you next month. This show is made by me, the cowboy coder, Jack Reisider, editing help this episode by Tristan Ledger, mixing done by Proximity Sound, and our theme music is done by the rollerblading Breakmaster Cylinder. Why did the capacitor kiss the diode? He couldn't resist her.

This is Darknet Diaries.