Quote:
Originally Posted by Ohio
With forensics guys like you, I would prefer the keystone cops.
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It is a common misunderstanding about forensic guys based on these cop shows on TV where the crime is solved in the 20 minutes given to a 30 min show.
I just finished reading about the investigation that brought down the Silk Road, a billion dollar dark web version of Amazon.com.
Unlike most criminals, this guy was very smart, Phd in physics smart. And, unlike most criminals he built the entire site himself with almost no outside help. Only two people knew he had anything to do with it and he really minimized how much they knew. Also, he used the TOR network and onion routing which is designed to be untraceable. Transactions were done in bitcoin, also untraceable.
Yet here is the thing, regardless of how smart you are and how careful you are everyone leaves traces. He left a tiny little trace of himself when he first started because he was the first reference to the Silk Road on the internet.
That one little mistake was enough for the "keystone cops" to catch him.
Second problem is that he was very well coached on how to avoid prosecution if he ever were caught. He never left his computer open and when it was closed it was encrypted. All he had to do was hit one key on the keypad and it would be encrypted. Since all the evidence of him being a criminal was on that laptop the cops had to arrest him with the laptop open to every single area of the site.
Yet the cops caught him and got his laptop and were able to take down every key player in the site.
But here is the common misunderstanding, they didn't do it in 20 minutes, it took two years of this guy being on their most wanted list. Baltimore Pd, FBI, DEA, IRS and Homeland security were all involved. That is not how long it took to convict him, only how long it took to find and arrest him. The trial itself probably added another year to that.
When Bozo's like Trump are screaming that Mueller is on a "witch hunt" it demonstrates that they are clueless about how a forensic investigation is carried out. It can take years.
But after everyone was arrested and the site was shut down and the IRS was doing their analysis guess what. They discovered two dirty cops who were acting as informants and getting paid hundreds of thousands of dollars. On the one hand these investigations take longer than people think it should take, on the other hand they wind up getting every single criminal and every single crime.