Not necessarily. There’s nothing illegal about contacting criminals if you have no intention of committing a crime. The FBI might in good faith be looking for witnesses to come forward and be available to testify in a criminal case against the administrators.

It’s actually entirely reasonable for regular people to contact botnet administrators without any intention of purchasing criminal services. Security researchers sometimes do this when investigating the source of botnet attacks or when tracing machines they deliberately allowed to be infected (honeypots). The FBI may be very interested in getting testimony from these security researchers, even outside the scope of expert witnesses they may select out of the researchers they’re regularly in contact with.

What fraction of people on Genesis do you think were security researchers versus criminals, though?

A very tiny fraction. But I have to assume that most criminals on there would be smart enough not to reach out to the FBI unless they were facing far worse trouble than the possibility of being charged with a crime for this. I could be wrong, there could be criminals dumb enough to expose themselves to prosecution — they are criminals after all — but I would expect them to be smarter than the average street criminal.

Most of those vendors would flip and cooperate once pressed even a tiny bit by law enforcement. They're probably just regular ole nerds who made money in a bad and stupid way.

I mean, I've gone to websites similar to this in the past, after seeing them mentioned on sites like Krebs, simply out of sheer curiosity (as mentioned elsewhere in the thread, a lot of my curiosity stemmed from a place of, "Hold on, this sort of site is publicly hosted and easily available to anyone!? I can't believe that"). I've never registered or posted, but some of those sites/forums are wide open for the public to peruse. I'm not even that technologically savvy or into security research, yet I've made it there, so I imagine the number is a bit higher than you'd expect.

> FBI might in good faith

Hah, cops, good faith, pick one.

> There’s nothing illegal about contacting criminals if you have no intention of committing a crime.

The resoundingly consistent legal advice from any lawyer you can find regarding communicating with cops will ALWAYS be: "don't."

I can't fathom why anyone would go out of their way to have a chat with the FBI.

If the FBI needs to talk to you for whatever they're up to, they can find and contact you, and then have a pleasant conversation with your lawyer. If they absolutely need to talk to you, they should only do it after forcing the matter with the subpoena, and your lawyer should be there.

These processes and protections exist for a very good reason.

https://www.lacriminaldefenseattorney.com/never-talk-to-the-...

People in places where they can’t be extradited might be able to bargain for some recouping of costs in exchange for reliable information.