>> HIS's role in combatting the marketplaces
on the Darknet
is a pretty straight-forward role.
We combat transnational criminal smuggling.
And these are now occurring quite frequently on the Darknet,
and HIS supports that effort in the cyber environment
through a Cyber Crime Center, or C3.
Silk Road and Black Market
Reloaded are two great cyber investigations
that were primarily led by Homeland Security Investigations,
or HIS. Investigation
started as contraband smuggling,
and they were discovered as smuggling occurred
through via mail
or through the traditional system.
However, as investigators dug into the investigations,
they discovered that a lot of the activity was occurring
on the dark market marketplaces,
and then the cyber investigations took off.
>> Operation Dime Store started
because we wanted to find the source.
And once we found out that the source of the drugs
were coming from a website known as Silk Road,
we decided that we would try to figure out ways
to shut down the website,
also intercept the packages, identify the vendors,
identify the recipients,
employ different types of analysis of fingerprints on packaging
to looking at different trends
and looking at the website itself,
to try to see if there was other things and clues
that could lead us to where the website was hosted.
And we also employed
some undercover purchases from the website,
as well as employed different undercover techniques
to try to infiltrate the website.
>> Criminals should know that the Darkweb
is not completely anonymous,
and any illicit activity that occurs on the Darkweb
will be aggressively enforced and pursued.
Homeland Security Investigations,
HIS, partners with our foreign
and domestic law enforcement partners
in attacking Darknet marketplaces
that are illicit in nature.
What people really need to know and pay attention to is,
you don't really know what's on a Darkweb.
It lends itself to unscrupulous behavior.
That can be in the form of illicit contraband
in all of its forms and functions,
most likely illicit drugs,
illicit counterfeit pharmaceuticals, gun-smuggling,
even the theft of personal identification
or hit men for hire.
They all exist on the Darkweb.