I’ll be heading off to prison next week, due to some Silk Road shenanigans from the past.
By: Krüger Cryptographical Smoothing
Tags: Bitcoin, Crime, Cryptocurrency, Blockchain

How did I get caught?

Like you probably can imagine, a mere tip is not enough for the police to imprison anyone. But in my case it was more than enough to launch a substantial investigation, which was allowed to burn through a large amount of resources.

A few months after the tip was received my phone was tapped 24/7, I was under surveillance several days a week by undercover agents.

Furthermore the police drove around my neighbourhood with Stingray’s in hopes to discover more cell phones in use by me, as they suspected me of using phones that were not registered in my name.

Actually they were wrong on that suspicion (at the very least🙄), I only used one phone, but the lack of evidence gathered from them tapping my phones had them puzzled. They couldn’t figure out how I stayed in contact with my suppliers, and other helpers.

I actually thought that was really weird, this investigation was ongoing in 2016 and you’d think they had heard of Wickr, Telegram, Signal and the likes by then.

Simply put, the reason for them not hearing me speak about criminal actions on my regular phone line was because I had several encrypted apps on my phone that allowed for encrypted communications.

Some worked better than others, and some did not work at all, which I would later come to learn (the hard way).

In addition to regular undercover surveillance, phone taps, and the use of Stingray’s (which I believe were illegal for police to use at that time) — I was also subjected to the police entering my apartment, without my knowledge, for an unknown amount of times over the timespan of 2–3 months.

When inside my apartment, they installed even more surveillance equipment, some of which I’m 100% positive were illegal at the time, amongst others a physical keylogger installed to sniff out any passwords I used to log on to a stationary computer in the office part of my apartment.

That keylogger would later be responsible for me getting fucked.

Long story short, they got me good, and after sparing no resources on the investigation itself — they didn’t hold back when they authored the charges against me either.

What did I get convicted for?

The police were not modest when pressing their charges against me, they had been receiving some criticism from the press over the last couple of years for being unable to act on darknet drug vendors. So when they needed it the most, along came I as a perfect target for them to state an example.

Without going into specifics, I can share that I finally got convicted for trafficking about 50 kilograms of cannabis (both weed and hash) and around 1 kilogram of Cocaine (the regular kind, not crack).

For this I received a sentence of just over 6 years, and I will begin serving this sentence in a few days. Actually though, due to time served in custody (while the police were investigating the case further after my arrest) I will have closer to 4 years left to serve. So I won’t be gone for a total of 6 years from now…. but it’s going to be a while until I get back online.