I noticed because I was trying to start a trade with him. Possibly I’m the first person on the internet to notice, and it’s right when r/Monero and r/CryptoCurrency are dark because of the Reddit protest, so it’s difficult to warn people. I see r/xmrtrader is still up; I may make a burner account and post it there, or someone else is welcome to.

http://nehdddktmhvqklsnkjqcbpmb63htee2iznpcbs5tgzctipxykpj6yrid.onion/nojs/user/LetterGuy21969

He formerly had agoradesk and localmonero accounts under his real name for years. About 5 months ago he deleted them and created the current pseudonymous account. He has quite a web presence under his real name, and is a crypto “OG”, active in Bitcoin since at least 10 years ago. He often had the lowest price for XMR via cash by mail (~4% above the rate on CoinMarketcap) and would accept trades up to $10k.

He recently set his account to require trade requests to be approved by him before becoming live, and since a few days ago (06.08), he stopped responding to trade requests or trade chat, but his ad was still up. LocalMonero makes it easy to go on a ‘Buying vacation’ with one click, so that was odd. His profile still said “Last seen just now” until 3 days ago, which suggests he had a keepalive script. I tried to SMS text him via an anonymous provider and received no response.

So, I was thinking, dead, arrested, or hospitalized? Or maybe just on vacation? OpticBit recently died. Hospitalized but unconscious? People typically have their phones with them in the hospital these days. Arrested? I started checking for death and arrest records, which has to be done on a county by county basis. There were no such records in his home county, but he still wasn’t responding to texts. This morning, I tried another neighboring county, and found that he was listed as in custody, arrested by the US Marshals, who execute federal warrants, booking date and time June 09 2023 13:00, no charges listed yet, but listed as ineligible for bail.

If you have traded with him, you have his name and address and can confim this. I’m not sure that I should publicly dox him in the process of warning people, but it will likely become public soon enough, and I can provide it to moderators for verification. Find a map of his state, find the large county directly to the north of the one where he lives, find their arrests & booking records web site. Find his age or DOB via a people search engine. Search with his name and age, and the arrest record comes up. I have a screenshot of it.

If you have traded with him, consider your position, because the feds now have his computers, cell phone records, sms texts, any records he kept, potentially his localmonero account password to view all his prior trades and trading partners (they do have a ‘delete my account and all information’ option which trading partners can use), any postal mail that was still in his possession, and likely records of inbound tracking numbers, and possibly scans of parcels.

The US government is suddenly declaring war on crypto. Everyone’s answer to how to buy Monero without invasive KYC has been “Just use LocalMonero, cash by mail.” LocalMonero have a massive ad at the top of r/CryptoCurrency ever since Binance delisted XMR in Poland, Spain, France and Italy a few days ago. Maybe they were a tad overconfident in raising their profile so much? I had been thinking that it would be rather easy to shut down cash by mail onramps - all you have to do is make a trade request and the sellers send you their address, and then you arrest them for operating an illegal money service business. I didn’t say anything because I didn’t want to give them ideas, but it seems that they are already doing it.

Screenshot of his current terms of trade for posterity in case LocalMonero remove it:

  • ArdabilOPEnglish
    7·
    2 years ago

    Records said he has been released. I gave him a link to this site, suggested he make an account, and asked if there was anything he wanted me to tell people.

    Thanks. I’m safe and unavailable for trades, and working with the pretrial services office of the US District Court for the Central District of California to get trades on Agoradesk/LocalMonero. I’m barred from “social media apps” but not under a gag order. Thanks for letting people know.

    • Monero-chan LoverEnglish
      2·
      2 years ago

      Thank you for this update. Why didn’t he say why he was arrested exactly?

      • ArdabilOPEnglish
        3·
        2 years ago

        These are minimal SMS exchanges, and the feds are probably reading them in real time. I asked if he was able to use email + PGP, and he said no. I haven’t said who I was, I’m just anon asking for the Internet.

  • monerobull
    3·
    2 years ago

    Woah, what a great writeup/warning, thank you very much for doing the research and posting this here!

    Receiving cash by mail seems really tricky if what you are doing is declared illegal. Even with a decoy address it would be trivial to just arrest you when you pick up the package and deaddrops like the Hydra DNM had can also be easily surveilled :/

    • ArdabilOP
      6·
      2 years ago

      People have been relying on the notion that “Selling peer-to-peer isn’t illegal.” The problem with that is, that as soon as you are trading regularly, or making a profit, they are going to say that you are in the business of it instead, and therefore have to be a licensed money-service business, keep records, and perform full KYC on your customers.

      • monerobull
        4·
        2 years ago

        I am personally looking forward to cross-chain DEXs like SeraiDEX. Once that is live, Monero will always be easily accessible as long as people have access to Bitcoin. Should governments however go seriously hardcore and ban any and all crypto plus actually enforce the ban, the situation will become dire.

          • monerobull
            2·
            2 years ago

            If crypto is entirely banned and the feds track down people posting offers for cash-trades? Not really.

            If only privacy coins get banned? You just buy BTC and exchange it for Monero using the DEX.

      • tusker
        41·
        2 years ago

        When the rules change as we go along there is no safe way to live except to go fully dark. The state mafia does not do anything unless it will protect their power monopoly or expand it. We know one thing for sure, they are scared.

        Crypto is not a currency so you have to pay capital gains.

        Crypto is a currency so you are a money exchange service when you trade it.

        • retard@federated.fun
          28·
          2 years ago

          @tusker @Ardabil the entire monero ecosystem rejoiced as all the criminality migrated to their coin from bitcoin. this “the usa government does it too” is even more of a reason to use literally anything that isn’t USD or XMR. it’s a farce.

      • retard@federated.fun
        17·
        2 years ago

        @Ardabil @monerobull monero has been successfully maligned and now the most vulnerable methods of exchange are all that are left you’ll be rounded up with RICO. i’ve been harping on about this for fuckin years dude.

  • janowitz
    3·
    2 years ago

    Please keep us updated, when there is some more information available. Probably they want to charge him for money laundering and/or illegal banking services.

    I had a similar situation few years ago, however with wire transfer and in Europe. They accused me of faking a bank transfer form to myself and faking the signature of the sender. It was ridiculous, since the sender’s bank was like 700km away from my place, but ended in loosing all my bank accounts at once back then and in a police house search several months later. After two years they dropped all charges agains myself.

  • ArdabilOPEnglish
    2·
    2 years ago

    Now that people seem to be pulling their cash-by-mail ads on localmonero, I was thinking that something I’d like to have would be a site that has the same sort of escrow and dispute resolution infrastructure, but with private ads. If you already have contacts, you want to keep buying during “p2p winter”, and you know someone who wants to keep selling, you can tag each other, make accounts, and one party puts up a private ad which is only visible to specified other parties.

    It turns out that localmonero sort of supports that already. If you go to make a new ad, there is an option to make it for trusted users only. So you can mark each other trusted and make a private ad with arbitration protection that way.

    I’d like to see a finer-grained version of this where you just specify users that can view a specific ad, and don’t have to worry about what ‘Trusted’ does today. Obviously your trust level is not 100%, which is why you’d like the escrow service to keep both of you punctual.

    If you’re going to salt your current localmonero account because you’ve traded with someone who’s getting prosecuted and you want to keep your past trades with them from being slurped, remember to exchange PGP keys with everyone you’ve already traded with before you hit the big red button, so you can verify your identity with each other afterwards.

    I would also like to see a feature on private ads, that once the trade is finalized, with the agreement of both parties, the trade chat and all other information about the trade can be expunged immediately. No waiting six months, and no record of the trade whatsoever. Just escrow while you need it and then it’s gone.

  • /u/stsh
    1·
    2 years ago

    rip lg

    These events are too tragic. I can’t get over 10+ years of enabling freedom…for this outcome? Can’t let the fear get the best of us though. It’s just so tough to know where to start with contemporary cybersecurity. I’ll hear that I’m safe if I host all my ish; route everything through tor, but is that really enough if the OG Privacy Gods of Old are still getting got by the feds? Do I really have to go full terry davis? How long has it felt so impossible to stay anonymously/hidden enough?

  • kopv
    1·
    2 years ago

    sad news. have any of you tried to do cash by mail to a foreign country? if things keep going in the direction they are going, then probably in the future this might be the only way to get xmr. buy it from someone who lives in a less repressive country like el salvador.

    • janowitz
      1·
      2 years ago

      Sending cash by mail over a nation border is probably not the best idea, tbh. Controls are most probably much more restrict than domestic, especially for less restrictive countries like el Salvador, which is commonly known for its drug cartels.

    • ArdabilOP
      31·
      2 years ago

      In principle it doesn’t matter what coin it was; their MSB rules are the same in any case, and they’ve done it with Bitcoin before.

      How else could I rent an SMS service to talk to someone who’s being prosecuted, without being targeted just for daring to talk to him? Without having to rely on a company not to secretly give my information out behind my back, even if they weren’t actually legally required to?

      If people want any sort of alternative to credit card payments and bank transfers, it has to have the privacy features of Monero. Open-ledger coins are even worse. People have recently been kidnapped and murdered for having too much Bitcoin, which anyone was able to see.

      • retard@federated.fun
        110·
        2 years ago

        @monerchanlover nah i just like being able to buy things with my money. i dont do drugs and i pay my taxes so monero is totally pointless for every single use case that i would have.

        you may find it hard to believe but when you have a red wine stain on your white shirt, using liquid dog shit as a detergent makes your shirt covered in fecal matter and the stain is still visible. that’s what mixing with monero looks like. it doesn’t actually do anything except taint your outputs. i have seen zero legitimate uses of monero, only grey market and straight up criminality.

        it’s sad because it could have been what replaced bitcoin if it wasn’t created and lead by malware authors and scammers.

        • tusker
          3·
          2 years ago

          monero is totally pointless for every single use case that i would have

          then go away

            • tusker
              3·
              2 years ago

              If Monero was a honeypot like USD is you would not be on here warning us abut it.

              Sounds like the bankers are dispatching culture jamming agents to inject FUD into something they are threatened by and can’t do anything about otherwise.

            • /u/stsh
              2·
              2 years ago
              If monero = honeypot
{
    bool soIsAll = true
}
else jeff = 'false consciousness'
        • Monero-chan Lover
          21·
          2 years ago

          I usually try to be logical but your statements are blatantly false and liquid dogshit. Kinda glows tbqh

          • retard@federated.fun
            15·
            2 years ago

            @monerchanlover i worked as a professional software developer for a fork of monero and you have no idea how fucking bad that codebase is. your opinion on the merits of monero are irrelevant until you do some code review. if that just filtered you your opinion never mattered to begin with.

            • Monero-chan Lover
              3·
              2 years ago

              Lol you’re so mad cause you can’t understand it, Mr Professional. Seethe and cope while your fork becomes useless while no one uses it. I bet your coin has optional privacy like ZTrash. Cause privacy is only for criminals right? gtfo loser glowie. no one is falling for your bullshit

            • retard@federated.fun
              12·
              2 years ago

              @monerchanlover it is cheaper to malign monero indefinitely than it is to malign tor for a month because tx fees can be recycled back in as you do your output space sybil. combine that with the decoy selection bias zero days (of which 2 remain) and you have the perfect honeypot.

          • retard@federated.fun
            11·
            2 years ago

            @folfgirl go do code review yourself, dont take anyone else’s word on it. if code review filters you, idk if your opinion ever mattered to begin with.

    • tusker
      2·
      2 years ago

      Better than criminal and fraudulent like USD.