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Qntra - Herald Of The Most Serene Republic |
A Louisiana man charged with conspiracy to commit wire fraud and conspiracy to commit trademark counterfeiting in May of this year has plead guilty (archive) to the charges. Beau Wattigney, better known on the PurpleLotus/GoldenLotus/MoxDiamond/NickMode sold counterfeit coupons on the Silk Road 1.0 and 2.0 which provided the bearer with significant discounts such as $50 Visa gift cards for $0.01 each.
Wattigney will be sentenced on October 28th, 2015.
The Australian Securities and Investments Commission has issued an interim stop order on Sam Lee's Bitcoin Group IPO which intends to float on the Australian Stock Exchange later this year. After considerable delays, the Bitcoin Group lodged its prospectus late last month with the regulator issuing the interim stop order on the 13th of July1. At this time, ASIC provides no information as to why it has issued the interim stop order. ASIC describes a stop order as: Continue reading
Document #027846316 ↩
Reuters reports (archive) that Michael Duch AKA Deezletime and otherwise known as the Silk Road heroin dealer who turned government witness and testified (archive) against Ross Ulbricht despite having never communicated with him has been sentenced to a term of 2-1/2 years prison time for conspiring to sell drugs.
A request by Duch's lawyer Samuel Braverman that Duch now be released into a drug treatment program was denied by U.S. District Judge Katherine Forrest stating it would be not be the right thing to do. Receiving credit for the 21 months already spent in custody, Duch is expected to be released soon.
The Guardian reports (archive) the trial of a British man arrested last February after he allegedly attempted to purchase ricin via the darknet site Evolution Marketplace began this week with the prosecution telling jurors Mohammed Ammer Ali AKA WEIRDOS OOOO attempted to order 500mg of ricin from them paid for in bitcoin and that he promised to be a repeat customer.
Communicating with an undercover FBI agent, Mohammed Ammer Ali is alleged to have arranged the shipment of five 100mg vials from the United States into the UK telling the undercover agent masquerading as a darknet marketplace merchant that: Continue reading
In conjunction with the announcement (archive) that he will step down as moderator of the /r/darknetmarkets subreddit, Gwern has released a 1.5TB archive of content consisting of his own scrapes of various darknet markets as well as material sourced from others spanning the time period 2011 through 2015 with the majority of the content dated 2013 onwards. A description of the files included in the torrent reads: Continue reading
An indictment against BurtW AKA Burt Wagner related to the alleged operation of an unlicenced money transmitting business has been dropped after U.S. District Court Judge William J Martinez dismissed the case at the behest of the U.S. Department of Justice. Such a victory is bittersweet though as Burt's wife Jean writes (archive): Continue reading
The Irish Times reports (archive) the United States is seeking the extradition of alleged Silk Road administrator Gary Davis AKA Libertas in relation to charges of conspiracy to distribute narcotics, conspiracy to commit computer hacking and conspiracy to commit money laundering. Continue reading
If you have attempted to read Qntra these past few days, chances are you've had some difficulty reaching the website. Since the inception of this site, it has come under regular ddos attack by an unknown individual or group who wish to limit our ability to publish content and your ability to read it. We publish all comments whether they are critical or not so I encourage those responsible for the down time to engage the site in that manner of discourse. Regardless, Qntra will continue to persevere despite the attack – we're not going anywhere.
Having plead guilty (archive) to a charge of importing a Class B drug into the UK, 25 year old student Gary Trouve now faces 250 hours of community service as punishment for the 145 grams of "herbal cannabis" he purchased using bitcoin via an unnamed darknet market.
Trouve came to the attention of the UK authorities earlier this year when a parcel pertaining to contain specialist welding equipment was intercepted by customs officers who instead found it to contain cannabis. Having been notified, Humberside Police subsequently attended the residence of Trouve who then gave a full confession of his crime. Continue reading
Today sees the Bitcoin network enter new territory with the mining difficulty advancing to 51,076,366,303, crossing the 50 billion difficulty mark for the first time in its history. Today's increase represents a 3.39% increase over June 28th's difficulty of 49,402,014,931.