Andy Greenberg, a senior writer at Wired, shares a chilling story of the dark web's 'Welcome to Video,' a site distributing child exploitation material. He discusses how investigators used advanced bitcoin tracing techniques to unmask its operators. Greenberg highlights the emotional toll on law enforcement during these harrowing investigations, alongside the complexities of jurisdiction and the silent struggles faced by the victims. His insights draw attention to the urgent need for legal reform and greater awareness surrounding online exploitation.
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Bitcoin and Darknet Diaries
Jack Rhysider bought one Bitcoin for $600 in 2014.
Selling it in 2017 for $18,000 allowed him to quit his job and focus on Darknet Diaries.
insights INSIGHT
Bitcoin's Value and Anonymity
Bitcoin, like cash, has no inherent value; its worth is based on collective belief.
Its anonymity, though initially a key feature, has been eroded by government regulation of exchanges.
question_answer ANECDOTE
Welcome to Video's Discovery
The UK's National Crime Agency (NCA) discovered Welcome to Video while investigating Matthew Falder.
Falder, a Cambridge academic, blackmailed people into providing nudes and committing abuse.
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Tracers in the Dark explores how cryptocurrency has fueled digital black markets, enabling crime lords to operate more freely. The book follows a new breed of investigators who use technical wizardry and financial forensics to uncover and dismantle these criminal empires. It delves into high-profile cases like Silk Road and AlphaBay, highlighting the cat-and-mouse game between law enforcement and crypto criminals.
Andy Greenberg (https://twitter.com/a_greenberg) brings us a gut wrenching story of how criminal investigators used bitcoin tracing techniques to try to find out who was at the center of a child sexual abuse darkweb website.
This story is part of Andy’s new book “Tracers in the Dark: The Global Hunt for the Crime Lords of Cryptocurrency”. An affiliate link to the book on Amazon is here: https://amzn.to/3VkjSh7.
Sponsors
Support for this show comes from Varonis. Do you wonder what your company’s ransomware blast radius is? Varonis does a free cyber resilience assessment that tells you how many important files a compromised user could steal, whether anything would beep if they did, and a whole lot more. They actually do all the work – show you where your data is too open, if anyone is using it, and what you can lock down before attackers get inside. They also can detect behavior that looks like ransomware and stop it automatically. To learn more visit www.varonis.com/darknet.
Support for this show comes from Axonius. The Axonius solution correlates asset data from your existing IT and security solutions to provide an always up-to-date inventory of all devices, users, cloud instances, and SaaS apps, so you can easily identify coverage gaps and automate response actions. Axonius gives IT and security teams the confidence to control complexity by mitigating threats, navigating risk, decreasing incidents, and informing business-level strategy — all while eliminating manual, repetitive tasks. Visit axonius.com/darknet to learn more and try it free.
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