Illusion Labs - Customers may be in trouble (huge paper trail!)
Kevin Wayne Tanner, (a/k/a “Scott Free“)the owner of Illusion Labs (which was run out of Canada) seems to have left a pretty extensive paper trail. And he was making around $70,000 per year off of his illegal business. This doesn’t make him a huge steroid dealer or lab (the bigger ones make ten times that much each month), but it does put him in the medium range. He had about 200-300 customers at the time of his arrest, mostly Canadian but some American.
And since all of his business was conducted on the oh-so-familiar message forums that we all know and love, those discussion boards are probably being scrutinized by law enforcement (remember, his computer was seized).
Remember, one of the guys busted in Operation Raw Deal was making about $30k/year, and he quit his job at Abercrombie & Fitch to start his steroid lab. He could have just kept working until he became an assistant manager and earned just as much (or worked some overtime). [Note: I believe that guy was SAMAR Labs]
The reason I believe Illusion Labs kept extensive records is because the prosecutor is throwing around a $200k dollar amount, as the amount that he believes Kevin Tanner had spent over three years, above his reported income. And they’ve also been mentioning that they have used other methods (probably tracking Western Union and using his computer records) to figure out how much money he really made. Anyone who has ordered from this guy and used a traceable method could be in some degree of trouble right now.
Right now, a financial profile of Mr. Tanner’s income and spending from Jan.1, 2004, until Jan.22, 2007 is being created, and if you were one of the people who contributed to his income, you may have cause to be worried. His bank account is also being audited, so people who wired him money from their own account should especially be worried.
And, before he became an underground Chemist, what did Mr. Tanner do for a living? Mr. Tanner worked for Buck’s Home Hardware, earning less than $25k/year. A dude with a minimum-wage job, and little education past high-school, was mixing up chemicals in his home, and people were happily shooting them into their bodies, and claiming that they were the best stuff around!
Have I mentioned that when they seized his computer they found a Child Pornography on it! [Note: The last time I heard of someone in the steroid world being connected to child pornography was on MassMonsterz.com, when BigGuns was turned in by his girlfriend - and yes, this is the site owned by BlackDream71] SO yeah, Illusion Labs, one of the most respected “bros” on the internet (the “community” if you will) was into child pornography. He should have been a mod on MassMonsterz.com instead!
To me, this is a huge deal, not only because it’s just about the lowest thing in the world someone can do, but because it’s added incentive for law enforcement to figure out every single person this guy ever had any internet chats with! Steroids may have been a closed case, but my suspicion is that they are going to be giving this situation added attention, and trying to figure out every site on the ‘net that he was ever on.
Through his Western Union receipts, law enforcement officials were able to track at least $50,000 that Illusion Labs sent to China, Thailand, Israel and Pennsylvania. I’d be worried if some of that money were coming to me and I lived in Pennsylvania. And two days after his initial arrest, a $15,605 in cash was seized in transit to Mr. Tanner - bad news for his last few customers!
The crazy thing about all of this is that in Canada, it is not illegal to possess anabolic steroids for personal use, but it is illegal to make, import, export or sell them.
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