A Top Dark Web Drug Ring Goes Down—Thanks to ATM Withdrawals

Sinmed was one of the largest drug vendors selling on the dark web market known as Dream Market. Three men were arrested for allegedly running sinmed, and a recently unsealed indictment shows how the dark web vendor operation worked and how law enforcement was able to take them down. The case originated from suspicious ATM withdrawals, explaining that even cybercrime is about following the money. Despite taking out one of the largest drug vendors on the dark web, there are many vendors that remain active and the effects will most likely be short lived. On the other hand, law enforcement continues to improve and adapt to the new technologies and expand their capabilities to match the new challenges. My biggest takeaways from this article are that the dark web presents a lot of new challenges for law enforcement, but also that sometimes traditional methods still have success in this realm. At the end of the day, the people running the online vendor needed to cash out their money and they got caught making suspicious ATM withdrawals. Overall though the new technologies, such as bitcoin and the dark web, present a lot more challenges than solutions to law enforcement.