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Variety Jones in the news.

Posted: Sun Sep 20, 2015 3:00 am
by smokebreaks
The most interesting guy on the Internet

Happens to be here :lurk:

Variety Jones in the news.

Posted: Sun Sep 20, 2015 3:28 am
by Roots
Thanks.

Variety Jones in the news.

Posted: Mon Sep 21, 2015 3:15 pm
by PlutoPete
Jesús Malverde wrote:
johndoe_ wrote: The line is very thin here. Some of you might know a UK based seeds seller going under the name Pluto Pete from http://www.plutopete.biz/" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;? He was arrested the same day Silk Road was seized in Oct 2013 and was on bail since. He has been charged yesterday despite selling legal items http://motherboard.vice.com/read/silk-r ... web-crimes" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;.
Please note that none of the charges brought against Ward were related to selling seeds. His bust seems to rather have been a fishing expedition seeking information unrelated to his legal business.
Hi guys, I just popped in to check VJ's thread and stumbled upon this thread.
We actually think my raid was a case of mistaken identity, we think the feds thought I was VJ, that's why my arrest was co-ordinated with Ross'
I can't say much as I'm still on bail, but it promises to be an interesting trial :smoke:

Variety Jones in the news.

Posted: Mon Sep 21, 2015 5:29 pm
by Jesús Malverde
Very interesting. This would suggest that the feds at charging level as of October 2013 still had no idea who was running the VJ account at SR. Given the level of infiltration of the site right up to the top levels by plants and informants this seems incredibly odd. They certainly appear to have known who everyone else was. GCHQ probably knew you weren't VJ, but for whatever reason didn't pass that down to the grunt prosecutors and police and you got caught up in their ignorance. Good luck with the charges, hopefully they will at some point realize the screwed it up charging you. It's not even entirely inconceivable that the bust was cover for VJ's account holder at SR--that the bust was as much as anything meant to fool people into thinking they didn't know who VJ was in support of continuing investigations. What if anything other than the timing led you to think it might have been targeted as VJ?

Variety Jones in the news.

Posted: Mon Sep 28, 2015 5:43 pm
by roller24
Interesting excerpts from antilop.cc/sr
good primer for new arrivals.
Variety Jones or the old guard back in harness
26/02/2015 - Thanks to Dehickensian for the help. H/T Eileen Ormsby.

I've always been a powerful figure in the scene, but the last 11 days have made me realize just how much power I wield. It is quite a burden, but I bear it with pride. However, some day, and that day would come, I would start to see that power as a right, and not as the result of honesty, integrity, and hard work. And I'd start to silence those that disagreed with me. And I would become all that I hate.
Plural of Mongoose

Ross Ulbricht trial revealed, through a set of chat logs found on his laptop, the existence of an individual going under the name "Variety Jones a/k/a cimon". Dread Pirate Roberts' journal shows that Variety Jones and his alter ego cimon became "a real mentor" for Ulbricht in the early months following the creation of Silk Road in 2011. After reporting a major security vulnerability, in bitcoind, to a then hesitant Silk Road administrator, Variety Jones provided guidance on other technical matters like servers configuration, security review, but also advised on how to improve the communication with the community and interact with customers. Variety Jones influence "behind the scene" got bigger as the marketplace grew in size and popularity, slowly empowering, his newly named, Dread Pirate Roberts to start his own legend. But who is Variety Jones?

Variety Jones registered an account on Silk Road forum on June 27, 2011. From the information available on his vendor page he was selling exclusively cannabis seeds, shipping from the UK, and according to the website "Down the silk rabbit hole" as of November 03, 2011, Variety Jones had the highest number of items listed on Silk Road, 231. Outside of Silk Road, open Internet searches on the alias "Variety Jones" don't immediately produce results. There is an account Variety Jones, with only 8 posts, dating from 2002, on the forum uk420.com, which looks relevant but doesn't provide much information.

More interesting, a reference of a Variety Jones can be tracked back to February 2006 and an individual using the alias Plural of Mongoose. Plural of Mongoose presented himself as a respected member of the legendary cannabis grow site overgrow.com (OG), but was also involved on a larger scale in the cannabis seeds community through various online shops selling cannabis seeds for breeders, most prominently seedsdirect.co.uk. However, before getting into the specifics we need to take a trip down memory lane, stopping first at OG.

Overgrow was originally created by a group of cannabis activist from the weedbase forum in April 1999 (screenshot). Soon after, the troop was joined by what will become the technical backbone of overgrow, Vancouver based, coder and administrator the mighty ~shabang~ a/k/a overgrow (screenshot 1 and screenshot 2). Along the way, another Canadian using the nym Richard Calrisian a/k/a RC got involved by paying for the cost of running the forum and promoting his own seed bank Heaven's Stairway. ~shabang~ stayed the main administrator and developer of the forum, until 2004 when RC copied the site and redirected the domain overgrow.com from ~shabang~'s Vancouver based server to a server located in Montreal and owned by RC. The change of ownership created a split within the community and raised the question of who had the legitimacy to run the site. Overgrow will eventually shutdown in 2006 after it was reveal that RC, whose real name was revealed as Richard Baghdadlian, had been busted by the Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP), leaving it's members in doubt and somehow fearful of more arrests and seizures (screenshot).

It is in this context that Plural of Mongoose (a/k/a PoM) will appear. Through a series of posts on the now defunct planetganja.com, PoM will go into the behind the scene which led to the shutdown of overgrow.com. While apparently revealing an insider and informed view on the situation, PoM created complex intrigues with wild accusations involving several vendors, breeders, members of overgrow and revealing their respective connections to each other (screenshot). In one particular post of the series, dated February 21, 2006, PoM describes a visit to a good friend of his, Variety Jones.

Plural of Mongoose: In early 2004, a few weeks after leaving Seeds Direct, I left England to spend some time with a good friend of mine, Variety Jones. VJ was my editor for about two years, but so much more than just that in all the time I've known him. I met VJ when I was just a pup, and he had always been my counsel. If I started getting to big for my britches, I could always count on him to take me to task. There is nothing I knew that I didn't share with him, and he was a sounding board and confindante like no other. His beautiful house lay in a tranquil country setting, a perfect location to meet people and get to know them. My favorite memory of such events has to be an evening at VJ's house with Kif Richards and his lovely wife. You couldn't ask for a nicer group of people.

While there, I flew ~S in to spend 24 hours with VJ and myself, and have a little meeting, face-to-face. First off, let me say ~Shabang~ was a joy to spend time with - we were all sorry it had to be such a short meeting, but needs must, eh. I hope that someday the three of us can get together and share another spliff. But enough of that sentimental crap.

From the quote above, we can see that Plural of Mongoose has a very high opinion of Variety Jones portraying him, with admiration, as a "counsel" and a friend he can count on. This description of Variety Jones somehow echoes the words in Ross Ulbricht's journal in an interesting way. The extract also hints at PoM, Variety Jones and ~shabang~ (or ~S) knowing each others, not only from their online ventures at overgrow.com, but also "in real life". PoM goes further in their relationship explaining how few years before the fall of overgrown.com he bought 50% share of overgrow that ~shabang~ owned, adding "I trust ~S with my life".

~shabang~ was the main coder and administrator of OG, and also developer of the karma reputation system for vbulletin. He built the foundation of what will become one of the biggest vbulletin board at the time, 100 000 members strong when the RCMP pulled the plug. Since then, he became a legend, some sort of Keyzer Soze of the cannabis boards, appearing on and off in between shabatical, as he liked to call his period of absence from the scene. Every marijuana forum, worthy of the name, created after the demise of OG, had the shadow of ~shabang~ hanging around and their administrators called out as ~shabang~ at some point.

It will be half a surprise to learn that ~shabang~ was also member of Silk Road. He registered an account on June 27, 2011, the same day as Variety Jones. His account was last active August 05, 2013. There are very few posts of ~shabang~ on SR considering he was "active" for over two years (27 under this nym). Despite the low post count, we can form a quick idea of his profile as being tech-savvy, security and privacy minded, which would certainly fit the ~shabang~, administrator of OG. Variety Jones will eventually wonder if the person operating the ~shabang~ alias on Silk Road also happen to be his old pal from the OG time. Silk Road moderator Nomad Bloodbath, in what is likely a positive answer, confirmed to Variety Jones that it is the same ~shabang~. Couple of month later Variety Jones will acknowledge their past affiliation with overgrow.com.

In December 2011, Ross Ulbricht, known then as "Silk Road", changed the hidden service URL to the vanity onion address "silkroadvb5piz3r.onion" but didn't let the previous URL point to the marketplace, creating some confusion on the forum. A technical discussion with Variety Jones will follow to find a solution to configure multiple .onion addresses to point to the same site. The exchange shows the technical limitations of Ross Ulbricht on the topic as well as a more advanced knowledge from Variety Jones. ~shabang~ also chimes in to the conversation a few minutes later to provide advices on hidden service configuration and criticizing Silk Road poor choices. Acknowledging his lack of technical ability in the field Ross Ulbricht will send ~shabang~ a private message to learn more about the recommended setup. ~shabbang~ will eventually delete his post, which we can only read thanks to "Silk Road" reply quoting ~shabang~ message. This is somewhat bizarre since ~shabang~ post doesn't seem to contain particularly sensitive information. We believe this exchange might have been one of the early one which eventually led to further collaboration between Ross Ulbricht, Variety Jones and ~shabang~.

In April 2012, according to the early feedback on his vendor page, ~shabang~ was selling Yubikey devices, for two-factor authentication, intended to improve the security of the buyers and sellers accounts on the marketplace. The listing describes the Yubikeys as being currently beta-tested on Silk Road which is consistent with a post from ~shabang~ where he explains that he is an "alpha tester" of the solution and that "Silk Road is currently beta testing their own Yubikey authentication server". Also in April 2012, the Silk Road expense spreadsheet, found on Ross Ulbricht's laptop by the FBI, lists a purchase of $37,000 of Yubikeys. At the same period, in May 2012, Smedley, who seems to be the main developer of the marketplace, also mentions the Yubikey project during a chat with DPR, in what we think is not a coincidence and show Dread Pirate Roberts will to develop a Silk Road branded Yubikey solution (GX-231C).

Smedley started contracting as a developer toward the end of January 2012 as one can deduce from the chat log between DPR and Variety Jones (GX-226I). From the same excerpt, it looks like Variety Jones introduced Smedley to DPR or at least played the intermediary between the two. Few days later, on February 2nd, 2012, the Silk Road expense spreadsheet shows a first payment of $15,000 labelled "payroll (sr2.0)". Seven similar payments, also labelled "payroll (sr2.0)" will occur over the course of the next six months for a total of $185,090. In May 2012, DPR and Smedley will have a catch up discussion about the development process and the progress made so far (GX-231C). Eventually, on July 22, 2012, Dread Pirate Roberts announces a new version of Silk Road, which we think was the internally named "Silk Road 2.0" since the associated payment labelled "payroll (sr2.0)" will stop shortly after. Unfortunately no release of the two-factor authentication solution despite the investments and efforts from the development team and ~shabang~ to promote the technology.

The Silk Road Sales Data exhibit (GX-940), which summarizes the transactions that were in the SR databases at the time the servers were seized by the FBI, lists 23 transactions of Yubikeys for a total of $1,728 (฿222.75) and a total commission of $114 (฿16.06). It clearly shows the project didn't succeeded as initially planned but also indicates that the $37,000 on DPR's expense spreadsheet were likely used as a funding for ~shabang~ to promote the Yubikey devices rather than a purchase from a Silk Road vendor. Considering the $37,000 Yubikey investment from Dread Pirate Roberts, ~shabang~ Yubikey business, his technical background and close ties with Variety Jones it sounds reasonable to speculate that he might have been involved not only by reselling and beta testing the Yubikey devices but also working closely with Smedley on the development side to implement this new feature. Additionally, for the reckless tin foil lovers amongst us, it is possible that ~shabang~ may even have been operating the Smedley account.

Coming back to the intriguing posts from Plural of Mongoose it became more and more apparent, as the story unfolded, that the main reason of PoM's posts was not directly related to overgrow busts but a means to achieve a vengeful vendetta against another interesting character named Glyndwr Foster a/k/a Gypsy Nirvana. Gypsy Nirvana, who borrowed his name from his ex girlfriend Tattoo parlour, has been part of the online cannabis scene for what seems to be forever selling seeds through several ventures, the most notable one being Gypsy Nirvana Ltd, owner of seedsdirect.to and International Cannagraphic Magazine at icmag.com. In the 80s, before getting into the seed trade, Gypsy Nirvana had a mildly interesting actor career in Hong Kong, giving birth to movies like Bionic Ninja. Anyway, Plural of Mongoose and Gypsy Nirvana used to be business partners in the UK and the Netherlands based seed shop seedsdirect.to. Plural of Mongoose was eventually fired by Gypsy Nirvana after he and Gypsy's ex were accused of data-mining/harvesting customer and breeder information and sending it to a third party in Canada. The relation between Gypsy Nirvana and Plural of Mongoose got worst and, according to Plural of Mongoose posts, eventually reached physical assault, death threat and Gypsy Nirvana allegedly contracting a Calgary based hitman to get Plural of Mongoose killed, "Crazy shit, murder and international intrigue, going on in real-time!" as PoM will describe the situation when posting the story.

Along the way, Plural of Mongoose with the help of, Gypsy Nirvana's ex-girlfriend and co-owner of Gypsy Nirvana Ltd, Nicky, took over "Gypsy Nirvana ltd" and its affiliated cannabis forum and magazine http://www.icmag.com" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false; (screenshot) . The love birds modified the status of the company by appointing Plural of Mongoose Director and an interesting "Mr Jones" as Secretary. After a complaint through the UK Companies House Gypsy Nirvana will eventually get his company back, under his own name and control. The legal procedure resulted in the identity of Plural of Mongoose to be revealed as Thomas Clark a Canadian citizen, born in 1961 and living in Surrey, UK.

What about Variety Jones? Well, we got hold of the documents associated with the company "Gypsy Nirvana ltd" showing that the Mr Jones registered as the company Secretary is an English citizen going under the name "Peter Robert Jones", assuming that person even exist and used his real name it could be an interesting lead. However, we could not find anything linking a Peter Robert Jones with the breeder community and even less with Silk Road. Is Variety Jones from Silk Road Peter Robert Jones? Probably not.

Another theory, which has become a favorite of ours, involves Plural of Mongoose in the role of Variety Jones. It is obviously difficult to say with certitude, and we suspect a twist might spice up this story, but there are definitely some parallels between PoM and Variety Jones from Silk Road as we will try to show below.

In one of the posts made during the "Plural of Mongoose - Gypsy Nirvana drama" following Overgrow bust, Plural of Mongoose published a statement (thread) which appears to be intended to law enforcement and sum up the threats from Gypsy Nirvana he was allegedly subjects to. At the very beginning of the statement he claims to suffer Motor Neuron Disease as well as having been diagnosed with multiple sclerosis (MS).

Statement of Thomas Clark, Tuesday, 26 April, 2004

To help put this situation in perspective, I think it's important to have a little background first. I weigh under 10 stone, and have Familial Motor Neuron Disease. This means the motor signals don't travel correctly to my muscles, which leaves me with inefficient muscle control, and constantly weak. I was also recently diagnosed with MS as well, which adds to general weakness of my extremities. In short, any 7 year old kid in a playground could beat the heck out of me, without having to put down their ice cream. The two men, Mr. Foster and Mr. Edwards, who tried to kill me, are well aware of this fact.

Going through Variety Jones threads on Silk Road forum we find couple of posts mentioning the use of cannabis for pain relief (screenshot 1 and screenshot 2). Furthermore, in a chat with Dread Pirate Roberts Variety Jones tells him that he "had zero sleep last night due to leg/muscle cramps" and seemed to be quite please to have just received 1oz of weed from ~S (~shabang~) as a good pain relief (GX-226I). Main symptoms of motor neuron disease includes "muscles wasting away, muscle cramps, spasms or twitching" and usually occur first in the arms or legs. We can safely assume in that particular case the leg/muscle cramps are not from running a marathon.

In another post Variety Jones makes a direct reference to multiple sclerosis. The quotes can't be assigned directly to Variety Jones as he seems to be only giving examples of reason to grow cannabis but, with the hindsight of his condition, the quotes might not just be random examples.

In a lighter way, Pural of Mongoose and Variety Jones have a certain lyricism when talking about marijuana. In a post on Silk Road forum titled Flavoured Marijuana, Variety Jones starts by comparing wine and cannabis before going with passion into the different "flavours and aromas" of his favourite cannabis strains. The vocabulary used for the description is not dissimilar to some of Plural of Mongoose reviews in the overgrow's strain guide. In the excerpt quote earlier, relating his meeting with Variety Jones and ~shabang~, PoM says that Variety Jones used to be his editor. His mundane strains descriptions and his imaginative Silk Road story "A tale of Darren Jones, vendor on the Road in the year 2450", would certainly fall within the skills of a word-smith.

Surprisingly for someone being in the marijuana seed business for so long, Variety Jones seems to exclusively get weed from other vendors. He makes multiple references of his buys on the Silk Road forum but we couldn't find a single reference of him discussing selling weed or even growing his own seeds, corroborating Gypsy Nirvana's idea of a Plural of Mongoose never having grew a seed crop in his life and matching the description of one of PoM previous nym "NotAGrower" (screenshot).

In 2008, Plural of Mongoose and a Seeds Direct associate, Gene Barker, travelled to Thailand and the island of Koh Chang. They took back with them to the west a marijuana strain which happen to be only available on this island and was named after it. Seeds Direct used the Koh Chang seeds as freebies for customers and an associated thread was created on PG to discuss PoM and Gene trip to Thailand as featured by a local blogger. In a chat with DPR (GX-226I), Variety Jones hints at being familiar with Thailand and having travelled over there, "I love thailand for the weather, the people, and the weed ain't bad either" he says.

Then we have the chat logs and screenshots presented as exhibits at Ross Ulbricht's trial. Most of the chat logs were private messages extracted from the Silk Road servers or TorChat log files recovered from Ross Ulbricht's laptop, like those with Variety Jones (and cimon). Exhibit GX-215 for example shows a snapshot of the TorChat log files when the FBI seized Ross' laptop. The files tv32wkhirljvcb4f.log and u7y2e2c3rbfqzjfe.log contain respectively DPR conversations with Variety Jones and cimon. We can learn from that same exhibit that DPR last chatted on TorChat with Variety Jones on July 16, 2012 and cimon April 4, 2013. The chat log with cimon is also the last file modified in the .torchat folder, suggesting the use of a different platform of communication after this date as we know DPR and cimon continued communicating after April 2013. Cimon installing the chat client pidgin, the mention "we are all on a more secure chat channel" by DPR to Cirrus along with the instruction file explaining how to configure a new XMPP account and add the user Dread as well as the multiple screenshots of DPR use of Pidgin confirm the hypothesis of TorChat being dropped in favour of a XMPP hidden service. One of the screenshot, published by the US government as exhibit GX-201G, shows Dread Pirate Roberts' buddies on Pidgin. His contact list contains the usual and known crowd, "Libertas", "Inigo", "smed", "nod" but interestingly neither Variety Jones nor cimon. From the "unknown" contacts two individuals have their original Jabber identifiers and one user was renamed with the alias "mg". The same "mg" also appears on a screenshot, sent by Ross Ulbricht, of a Pidgin window (GX-317), and was online and chatting with DPR when Ross Ulbricht was arrested in the library (GX-201H). In our opinion "mg" is a shortened alias for "mongoose" which would then explain the absence of the VJ and cimon aliases from DPR's contact list. Another possibility is that "mg" is the nym used by "Ace" of the Scurvey Crew who noted in an interview with Vice that they were chatting with DPR when he was arrested. Although, it is possible "Ace" and DPR were not communicating through XMPP but via PM on the SR forum and marketplace.

Last but not least, in one particular chat log between Dread Pirate Roberts and cimon (a/k/a Variety Jones) cimon tells Dread Pirate Roberts that his real identity could easily be found if only DPR spent a bit of time searching for... "Plural of Mongoose" (GX-227H).

Cimon: You know - I post up, and give you shitloads of info that could if you tried just a bit (fuck, Plural of Mongoose alone should do it!) that you could determine exactly who I am. I did that to make you feel comfortable.

This confession is a pretty good give-away and seems consistent with our independent findings and the links we think exist between Plural of Mongoose and Variety Jones.

In an article from High Times magazine dated July 2006, the journalist Chris Bennett, who covered at the time the overgrow arrests, gives an interesting description of the "megabyte megalomaniac" Plural of Mongoose:

PoM was like a puppet master, and it was eerily intriguing watching him pull the strings on the forums that made people dance in the real world: Business transactions fell apart, people retired nicknames and dropped from view, court dates came and went - but when the chance arose to interview PoM, I decided to pass. By that time, I had it from a reliable source that PoM deposited things on people's PCs via e-mail that gave him access to their personal desktops and files. Frankly, PoM scared me, and I didn't consider him a reliable source of information anyway. So why feed his fire?

In February 2008, Gypsy Nirvana recovered his company "Gypsy Nirvana Ltd" in the High Court of London but was also cleared of the assault charges and what seems to have been fake accusation of Plural of Mongoose, giving weight and credit to Bennett's view of PoM (screenshot).

Gypsy Nirvana: [They] even conspired to get me into criminal court on fake assault charges....one I was found not guilty of and the other one (after 2 years) [PoM] dropped the charges due to the fact that he lied so much in his witness statements that he would have been found guilty of perjury if he took the stand.

It was later revealed, among other bizarre intrigues, that PoM blackmailed Gypsy Nirvana and his staff at icmag.com, threatening to turn over breeders addresses to law enforcement (LE), if he wasn't given administrative access to icmag.com, addresses he probably gathered while working for seedsdirect. It is difficult to verify the claims of Gypsy Nirvana and his mignons and they may as also be rewriting history to their advantage. However it could also show that, once again, Plural of Mongoose is living by the maxim he used as signature at planetganja.com, "The last fucking thing you want is my undivided attention...™ ".

Considering LE investigation and arrests surrounding overgrow.com and the online breeder community and the extensive Silk Road investigation we find it difficult to believe an attention seeker like Plural of Mongoose managed to fly under LE radar while being part of the scene for so long. If PoM's allegation that he gave Dread Pirate Roberts a lot of information about himself, during their endless chats, as the Plural of Mongoose nym freebie would tend to show, the 1400 pages of chat logs must have provided LE with more than enough information to locate him wherever he is, especially since he was doxed back in 2008.

According to some rumours, PoM left Canada in the early 2000s after the police found a grow room of his in the remains of a building that catch fire. The incident led to a court case which didn’t look too good for PoM and he felt that leaving Canada would be a safer option. He asked his then online friend from Overgrow, Gypsy Nirvana, if he could come to the UK and lay low for a while. Gypsy Nirvana agreed and PoM eventually ran to the UK where he started, among other things, working as Gypsy Nirvana's IT kind of guy and helped run seedsdirect website, until their fall. A similar story is being told with PoM leaving the US for Amsterdam and then work for Gypsy Nirvana. The word being that PoM "is on the run forever from Uncle Sam" or the Canadian authorities depending which version of the story is to be believed.

PoM best enemy, Gypsy Nirvana was arrested in August 2013 in the Philippine where he is awaiting extradition to the US on drug trafficking charges for allegedly manufacturing, exporting, and importing marijuana, and money laundering "after several informants, who were Nirvana's former associates, tipped off US authorities about his activities". While part of the community seems to agree on an individual named Rezdog as being one of the informant, since he fully cooperated with law enforcement, others also see PoM's spirit as being involved in the arrest of Gypsy Nirvana. However, like the obscure story of the growing room in flame, it is close to impossible to verify (screenshot 1 and screenshot 2).

The same characters have been crossing path over the past 15 years on various cannabis boards and in real life to eventually reappear on Silk Road after years unheard of. Variety Jones and ~shabang~ accounts were registered on Silk Road forum the same day, on June 27, 2011, within 30 minutes interval. With hindsight and understanding of their past relation with Plural of Mongoose it does sound like a very lucky coincidence to say the least. The old guard back in saddle with Variety Jones the "counsel" and "confidante like no other", and ~shabang~ whom PoM would "trust with his life". Even if it is difficult to know with a high level of certainty who operated the account Variety Jones on Silk Road, the evidences presented above and common sense would tend to lead to Plural of Mongoose rather than to a copycat version who would have disseminated hints of being PoM, over the course of couple of years, to a Dread Pirate Roberts, along with anyone else around, who would have never heard of Plural of Mongoose before anyway. We don't have much information on the erstwhile Variety Jones since most of the boards where he is said to have been active under this nym are now gone. We know that he was a cannabis breeder and seems to have been a different person than PoM but that's about it. His reincarnation lived in the UK, sold cannabis seeds on Silk Road, has an IT background, a gifted silver tongue and Plural of Mongoose paw prints all over.

Then we have ~shabang~, who also has both, the technical background and a deep knowledge of the scene, to be a hand in the shadow driving the operations but hadn't been seen in the recent years, at least under this nym. Interestingly ~shabang~ also worked for seedsdirect.to around 2000, Gypsy Nirvana's seed bank PoM also worked for. Indeed, ~shabang~ created an early version of seedsdirect.to as shown by the footer and the source code of the site, further establishing the long, entrelaced and very confusing connection between PoM, ~S and Gypsy Nirvana. In one post on the Silk Road forum Variety Jones after a long period of time without posting comes back and says that he "just returned from an 8 month sabattical, and SR sure is wicked fast today!". As anyone who has been around OG will know, having a "sabbatical" is heavily associated with ~shabang~ which he sometimes calls a "shabatical" and seems to have been a hobby of his at OG. The difficulty here is to establish if the ~shabang~ account was also operated by PoM or not. Shared handles are common practice within the cannabis community and it isn't unheard of that a single account is used by several people or that a "known and respected" moniker is registered by someone else, creating interesting trolling opportunities. In any case, as we suggested earlier, the Yubikey project heavily hints at ~shabang~ being involved much more than his public posts would let one imagine at first glance.

The events surrounding the demise of overgrow.com and its associated characters seems to have been pillars of the shadow history of Silk Road, establishing in the same time the beginnings of a Canada-UK connection who almost ten years later saw emerge shady and intriguing characters who wrote some of the darkest moment of the Silk Road marketplace. It is clear that, unlike Ross Ulbricht, the likes of Richard Baghdadlian, Gypsy Nirvana, ~shabang~, Plural of Mongoose, and so on and so forth, knew the ins and outs of the game far better than Ross ever did. Having been part of the cannabis scene for a very long time, they all have been through the blackmailing, busts, scams, undercover operations, snitching, sock puppet trolling and fake assassination drama before, nothing new but history being replayed with Dread Pirate Roberts this time singing lead vocals. While Ross Ulbricht idea of creating Silk Road wasn't even yet an embryo of concept, Plural of Mongoose was publishing series of article on how to protect its privacy online warning 56K modem users for the length of the page, another era.

We tried to put together pieces of the puzzle surrounding the mysterious Variety Jones, but it does involve quite a complex web of underlying identities and history difficult to untangle as the original forums (OG and PG) where all those guys were active have been wiped from the Internet and seems to be available only through private backups. There is however one person that should be able to shed light on the incestuous relations of Variety Jones, Plural of Mongoose and ~shabang~ but he has been sitting in a cell in Manilla since the end of August 2013.
I love the last paragraph.

Variety Jones in the news.

Posted: Mon Oct 05, 2015 3:28 pm
by SR-Refugee
Yeah that last paragraph is golden. if somebody could interview Gypsy or even photograph him where he is supposed to be i would say it is nearly certain it is P.o.M

Variety Jones in the news.

Posted: Mon Oct 05, 2015 7:35 pm
by ninjacloakd
..... what's that, yer sayin' that Gypsy is PoM???? :facepalm:


Oh, the irony! :bigcry: :mutley2:

Variety Jones in the news.

Posted: Mon Oct 05, 2015 7:51 pm
by Jesús Malverde
I got a chuckle from that as well. :crazy:

Variety Jones in the news.

Posted: Mon Oct 05, 2015 8:47 pm
by smokebreaks
Good god you're a special kind of stupid

Variety Jones in the news.

Posted: Mon Oct 05, 2015 10:13 pm
by bentech
easy now,

remember, they dont have the background AND that social interactions on the silk road were quite different than what we have had