Every time I read one of this story about someone busted due to a half cropped blurry picture, I expect it is actually law enforcement covering the way they actually did it which might include something illegal or someone talking. I am not sure if it makes me a conspiracy theorist.

These pictures are sourced from darknet markets which usually let you access very high quality product pictures.

The half cropped blurry picture has been mangled by the press, it’s not the original.

I’ve seen a ton of product pictures while drug shopping that you could feasibly extract fingerprints from, definitely not surprised.

Or just a propaganda piece. "See, we're on the dark web, too. Watch out!"

Almost all good busts come from old fashioned, boots on the ground police investigation--usually with either an informant or an undercover investigator.

> Even though the image didn’t include his fingertips, forensic specialists were able to pull data from the rest of his fingers and palm and match it to fingerprints on the national database

How can lines on fingers and palm be matched with fingerprints?

I’m not sure about in the UK, but when I had prints taken in the US recently for a background check (my kid is in a coop preschool) they scanned the whole length of my fingers, so maybe they had partial data to match against?

When they arrested me they took palmprints (sides too!) with their fancy swiss fingerprinting machine they were very proud of.

They may have had him in custody already and got a warrant to scan his whole hand.

That might be my hand (not admitting it is), but that looks like frozen Greek yogurt.

Unless of course they can test for the presence of drugs in the photo, I'm not sure why they wasted their time. Whats the chain of evidence on the substance in the photo?

I don't think the issue is the white stuff in the photo, he could be holding anything on the picture. The point is, through the picture they identified the person whose hand it was, used detective work to identify his gang, raided their properties, and found drugs...

And why did they "waste their time"? Because probably their chat was discussing their drug trade...

>Even though the image didn’t include his fingertips, forensic specialists were able to pull data from the rest of his fingers and palm and match it to fingerprints on the national database.

Read TFA, please.