Topix2 administrator was arrested in Scotland during Operation Onymous

Paid for it with my card, though it was a dedicated box with multiple VPSs hosted on it for various clients. Connected to it through a proxy, and actually when I was found I was living in another country, not registered at any address.

I made no profit, the site was not-for-profit and geared around safety and trust. That said the police found 9BTC on the machine on a different VPS and just went and kept it, I'll be trying to get that back as it was just for arbitrage trading.

Couldn't have cared less about the raid, they smashed down my door and I thought I was being robbed (nobody was in police clothing, I hadn't even considered a police raid a possibility). First thing I said to them was "You could've knocked…" since they ruined my door!

I actually thought they'd come after me for drugs in general, they kept asking me if I had needles anywhere, they thought I was some big fish and I had to go speak to some "secret agent" type special police force at one point, they seemed to think there's a network of darknet drug site owners that all know one another.

Honestly my biggest downfall was that I simply didn't expect it. I was caught by the FBI, when you have a site that makes no money, is geared around safety, is primarily a discussion topic community and has in the order of 5-15 users on it per day you don't expect to be targeted by the FBI, Interpol, the German police and the Scottish police.

Way overkill. Obviously the Scottish police that fed info to the tabloids want to make themselves seem big and important and to deter others, in reality the Scottish police did the boring grunt work (going through bank records, visiting people I'd paid via bank transfer (in one instance calling my friend), travelling around the country interviewing people, attempting to unlock my phone) after being spoon fed my name from the FBI/Interpol.

How they found me I don't know, that information hasn't been forthcoming, obviously. Maybe they checked bank records of who paid for the bare metal server that hosted the VPS that hosted the site but how did they know to target that server?

/r/DarkNetMarkets Thread Parent