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Buzzby

Cannabisworld.com and Overgrow.com Seized By Police
Overgrow.com, Cannabisworld.com, Heaven's Stairway Seed Company, and Eurohemp.com Shut Down and Servers Seized by Canadian Police
Marc Emery and Jodie Giesz-Ramsay | CannabisCulture | 02/03/2006

When the world's largest websites for cannabis growers and enthusiasts disappeared from the web on Monday, January 30, it was thought to be a server problem.

As the week dragged on, tens of thousands of members, seed company sponsors, growers and fans worried there might be more than mere 'server' problems as Richard Calrisian (a pseudonym) had not made any statements in any web based media about any 'technical' problems.

Now it appears Heaven's Stairway Seeds (hempqc.com), Cannabisworld.com, Overgrow.com, Eurohemp.com have been shut down and the owners arrested in Canada; all their web properties seized, including the physical servers that held massive databases on thousands of growers, and tens of thousands of photographs of cannabis plants. Seed companies by the dozens used both Overgrow.com and Cannabisworld.com as a main trading ground. Over 40 seed companies had customer service interactive forums on these sites.

All the information held on those servers is now in the hands of police. It is not known what charges have been laid nor against whom. That police have not boasted about this seizure means the investigation is continuing, before any affected parties can react.

Cannabis Culture began receiving emails on Wednesday saying Richard Calrisian and his wife had been arrested along with four employees, but this could not be corroborated.

On the website www.icmag.com, seed merchant Gypsy Nirvana, operating from England where cannabis seeds are legal, posted this news late Friday:

“It is with great sadness that I bring you the news that RC and HS, OG and CW have been taken down by the authorities in Canada.....

...I have it from a bonofide source that it happened on monday and RC's computers/servers have most probably been siezed, they spent 2 days going thru his house and removed alot of stuff ...

His wife and some members of his family were also taken into custody and it's possible that she may be released tommorrow on bail... There has not been a peep in the media about this so there could be a reason why it was not advertised by LEO......BE WARNED! not to try and log on to Overgrow or Cannaworld for now since most certainly the security of that site has been compromised and if it comes back up without me first hearing from RC then it is NOT being run by him.....think about it!

...This could bring up some real security issues with many Overgrow/Cannabisworld members.........be warned guys and do what you need to do to make it safer for all of you.......duck and cover if needs be....

....Yours Faithfully...

Gypsy Nirvana"

As soon as we find out more information about what's happened, we will provide updates here or in the Cannabis Culture forums. Overgrow.com website members are welcome to converge here to find out more and reconnect.

__________________

 

rick

taken from my blog entry posted Sat, 2006-02-04

This past week I have been following the Overgrow.com debacle. It’s interested me a great deal as I actually own one of these cultivation websites, HempCultivation.Com. While not the size of Overgrow, HC.Com has earned a place among the best grow sites on the Internet, along with icmag.com, bluelite and a few others. I have to say that over the past few months I’ve begun to see a pattern emerging.

First Mark Emery, of EmerySeeds.Com located in Canada, was arrested by the RCMP under the request of the U.S. Dept of Justice and DEA. Emery is to face charges in the United States on various counts related to his Marijuana seed sales business. With extradition treaties in place there is no reason to believe that Emery will not spend time in a U.S. jail, I’m so sorry to say. Emery has long been a spokesman for the Marijuana Movement and is someone who I have always held in high regard.

Only days after Emery was arrested I received a very unusual letter from one of the largest advertisers on Marijuana.Com, WorldWideSeeds.Com. WWS was based in Rotterdam, Netherlands. The email contained only one sentence, which I can quote for you here, “Rick, please removed all WWS ads immediately”. That was it, and I never heard from my friend at WorldWideSeeds.com again. At the same time I received the email request I checked the WWS website, and it was offline, for good. His ad campaign had just been paid for and no request for refund, which would have been granted were it received.

So, now we have lost the largest of the Marijuana Cultivation websites on the Internet, Overgrow.Com. I hold OG in deep regard as I was a friend to one of the original creators and it’s very sad to see much of his work simply disappear from the net, probably never to be seen again. But, this is where the pattern begins to develop. You see, Overgrow ownership changed hands a few years back and the new owners were primarily, you guessed it, a Marijuana Seed distribution business. The business named Heavens Stairway located at hempqc.com on the net is now also offline along with all the other domains controlled by the owners of Hempqc.com.

It has become quite evident to me that the seed distributors are in danger of arrest. We’ve seen a great deal of legal activity surrounding the seed business over the past 6 months and we have not seen one cultivation community that is not owned and operated by a seed company have any problems to date.

Take HempCultivation.Com for instance. HC.Com is owned and operated by Global Sativa Corporation, a U.S. based Corporation. Global Sativa Corporation earns it’s bread and butter through advertising, simply placing advertisements for others products. GSC is in no way affiliated with any seed banks, other than those that accept as advertisers. It is up to those advertisers to deal with state to state and country to county laws where their product may or may not be legal. We just place advertising, we don’t recommend products in the same way a T.V. station or magazine doesn’t recommend products – we are the messenger.

HempCultivation.Com is located in the United States, protected under the U.S. Constitutions first amendment to the Bill of Rights, the Freedom of Speech:

“Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.”

Americans live and die by these words and that’s why I really am not too concerned with having similar problems to the ones described above. We are acting within our rights in a country that holds these rights above all else. I can’t say the same is true for the remaining cultivation discussion communities.

I often hear in these cultivation communities the importance of security and stealth. One common theme is to never order seeds and have them shipped to the grow house, pretty much common sense, right? Well, let me ask this question. Why would you document your grow on a seed companies website given that the seed companies are in fact in trouble? It just doesn’t make much sense I hope that those people who do are careful and not doing so from their grow house – because the connection can be made.

This is indeed a scary time for the Marijuana Community. This reminds me very much of the infamous ‘Operation Pipe Dreams’ where they went after all the big glass smoking device distributors, ie. Tommy Chong, colorchangingglass.com, etc.

As an owner of one of these cultivation sites, I would recommend that everyone who is involved with a cultivation discussion board to immediately delete any identifying information that you may have stored in your personal profile or in your saved PM messages. And, PLEASE!!! Don’t think that just because you are not in the United States that the US can’t come get you. The US has extradition treaties with just about every country who would ever want the U.S help.

Regarding the remaining cultivation boards that do distribute seeds as a primary business, please take a moment to audit your security. Delete any log files that may exist, make certain IP logging is not happening ANYWHERE and tell your members to clean out their PM boxes ASAP, it’s the least we can do to protect our communities.

Be Safe, not paranoid.

__________________

ganjadude

my only question is will we have to worry about marijuana.com going under....

secondly anyone who knowingly puts personal info, pictues, from their home machines should know better... i am hoping that most people using such features from wws,og,etc. are smart enough to either use proxy servers, machines from elsewhere, mailing addresses frfom elseware, because everyone should know by now the internet is no longer ananomous and anything on the internet is concidered public record and can be used accordingly..

johnnyd

This is truly a scary story. Makes you want to stop and think, is this website next? I wonder what made the authorities decide to shut them down? Is their success as Overgrow was huge. Does this mean that just talking about marijuana is now illegal? Since this happened in Canada, what is their protections as far as freedom of speech is concerned? I'm sure these websites helped alot of medical marijuana growers with their crops.

johnnyd

Here is something else to think about. They (the narks) now have all the data from those websites including information on everyone who joined those websites.

 

rick

Hey guys, relax and read my post above.

This is Seed Business related, pure and simple. The states dont want any more seed deliveries being made and they've stamped out a couple of the larger ones, just like they did with Operation Pipe Dreams.

If you're posting on a seed distributors website, then thats a different story, as we have all seen.

Read the blog post above.

~r

johnnyd

Was Tommy Chong a large supplier of pipes and bongs or just a celebrity making waves?
Question: If the government should happen to seize MJ.com are your records encrypted? I'm not saying they will, but you never know now days do you?

rick

Yes, T.Chong was a very large supplier distrubuting to headshops all across the U.S..


Lets try not to confuse Marijuana.Com with HempCultivation.Com...

There is absolutely nothing on Marijuana.com that you have to worry about. We make certain of that in our rules and our moderating policies, basically, we wont let you hang yourself here.

HC.Com, slightly different. HC.Com maintains NO records. No ip address or indentifiable information is stored. The security risk is just too high. Remote backups are maintain, however, they are not encrypted as that would do very little to further protect the data.

Marijuana.Com is in absolutely no danger.

~r

DaDornta

This is a terrible day for all cannabis users world-wide. Whille I have never grown a cannabis plant myself, I have used cannabis for medical/recreational use.

If the above statement is loaded enough to land me in prison, so be it.

I live and die by the herb.

Without OG and other similar communities I would have never been able to refine my "habit" into somthing that was medicinal and healthy.

Rick, MJ.com was my **first** home on the internet, and always will be. I migrated over to OG.com because the responses were much faster, and they had a specific forum for glass and smoking toys.....

I want to apologize Rick to you personally for being so absent in the last 6-8 months. I remember durring the last re-organization I was a huge supporter of the creation of the 4-20 lounge....I appreciate it Rick and I want you to know that you're hard work never was not noticed.

This is a sad, sad day.

I have a feeling that several large commercial growers will go down. Weed will be scarce for a bit...just like when the original napster was shut down. It took a little bit for the community to restructure with the gnutella and fast-track networks.

If you currently grow, scale it down and conserve for yourself. I reccomend everyone smoke a little bit less, and grow/buy more NOW and save it for the drought that's about to come.

That is, if you want to stay high.

Go carefully my frriends..

__________________

Buzzby

Tommy Chong's son ran a company that manufactured and distributed bongs, some of which had his father's picture etched on them. When "Operation Pipe Dreams" went down, the Justice Department agreed to leave Tommy's son and his wife in peace if he would take the fall. Out of 50 arrests in this operation, Tommy was the only one who did any jail time.

The feds thought that sending a celebrity to jail would "send a message". It did. Everyone paying attention realized that the feds were involved in a Mickey Mouse scheme to try to scare the evil glassblowers into submission.