Security in obscurity.
Most people don't seem to be aware international shipments from the US go through an "outbound customs" process, with data collected by CBP including shipper and destination.
In the federal court docs for a couple of busts of steroid labs/sellers, the feds mention records of packages being sent from the defendants to a lab in central Europe "known for testing anabolic steroids".
This wasn't how they got busted, but was used as corroborating evidence for search warrants.
But that's from several years ago, and the result of a manual search done after the fact by investigators who knew what they looking for.
Now you've got CBP's vast AI systems scraping data from tens of thousands public sources online, including social media.
These systems are optimized for recognizing patterns that can be used to identify individuals and cargo of concern. Agents can also "suggest" connections to "seed" searches,
So for instance. Let's say you have an AAS lab in the US who routinely posts Jano lab results on MESO. (and yes, thinksteroids content is definately is being scraped, it's quoted as a source on numerous GPTs).
CBPs "Automated Targeting System" AI can take the "Date Received" off the dozens of tests posted publicly and scraped into their database.
Then correlate those dates to a shipper in the US who sent samples to the address of the "known European lab".
Unless the shipper took steps to mask their identity, AND payment is made via some anonymized method, they're easily identified.
It doesn't matter if the dates the packs landed don't precisely match the "received date" on the test. A shipper in the US who's sent 20 packs to Jano, and the dates the packs arrived are close to the received date on 20 publicly posted test results can be easily identified. It's not going to be a coincidence.
May be a good idea going forward to keep the "received" date off test results entirely and limit to month and year for test results, to preserve anonymity.
