Monero

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.

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.

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.

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?

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.

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 :/