The Dark Net (32 page)

p.140
‘“Silk Road has risen” . . .’
https://twitter.com/DreadPirateSR/status/398117916802961409
.

p.140
‘Buyers and vendors who’d become . . .’ The following is a short timeline of Dark Market drug website activity in the aftermath of the original Silk Road being shut down by the authorities:

2 October 2013
: Silk Road taken down.

9 October
: Libertas announces Silk Road 2.0.

October–November:
Silk Road’s two main rival sites, Black Market Reloaded and the Sheep Market, experience a surge in activity and vendors and buyers shift over.

October:
Backopy, the admin of the Black Market Reloaded site, says the site will close after an admin leaked some webpage source code, but subsequently changes his mind when it becomes clear that the source code did not betray any vulnerabilities.

6 November:
Silk Road 2.0 goes online. There are new security features, including double validation PGP encryption. It tries to make up for lost ground by validating old vendors automatically.

30 November:
Sheep Market shuts down after $5.3 million in Bitcoin is stolen from the site. The site administrators claim that a vendor called EBOOK101 found a bug in the system and stole all of the marketplace’s money. Others allege that the administrators absconded with it.

December:
The Black Market Reloaded, by now the largest online drugs market, closes. Backopy says they cannot handle the influx of new customers and sellers. Backopy hints at a 2014 relaunch.

December:
The administrator of a new site, Project Black Flag, panics and runs off with users’ Bitcoins.

December:
DarkList, the online drug dealer directory, is launched as a way of keeping track of all the disparate online drugs marketplaces. It closes again in late December.

December:
Virginia resident Andrew Michael Jones, Gary Davis from Wicklow, Ireland, and Australian Peter Philip Nash are arrested. The FBI alleges they are the admins of Silk Road 2.0 (Indigo, Libertas and SameSameButDifferent). There is some speculation about FBI infiltration of the site.

December:
Agora Market is founded.

19 January 2014:
Drugslist Marketplace starts to offer a new type of security feature called ‘Multisig escrow’.

22 January:
DarkList relaunches.

Late January:
Cantina Marketplace launches. It is challenged by sceptical Reddit users for security specifics.

Late January (possibly 27 January):
A group of hackers expose multiple security problems on Drugslist Marketplace. One hacker posts all the site’s internal information and user information.

2 February:
CannabisRoad is hacked.

3 February:
Black Goblin Market launches, and a day later is taken down due to amateurish security.

First week of February:
Utopia marketplace is launched. It has a strong connection to Black Market Reloaded.

Early February:
The White Rabbit marketplace is set up. It accepts Bitcoins and Litecoins, and runs on I2P, not Tor.

12 February:
Dutch police seize Utopia, forcing it offline. They decline to discuss the details.

Early February:
Silk Road 2.0 is hacked, $2.7 million in Bitcoins lost.

16 February:
Agora Market becomes the most popular marketplace on the deep web.

Late February/early March:
Agora is closed down, reopened and closed numerous times as a result of intensive distributed denial of service attacks.

Early March:
Hansamarket, a new online drugs market, is opened; it is almost immediately exposed as insecure.

19 March:
Pandora Marketplace hacked, $250,000 in Bitcoins are lost. The market stays up.

22 March:
EXXTACY Market launched.

23 March:
Reddit user ‘the_avid’ exposes EXXTACY as having poor security. The_avid also steals and publishes Red Sun Market server information.

24 March:
Serious security issues exposed on White Rabbit Market.

p.141
‘The
Sydney Morning Herald
warned . . .’
http://www.smh.com.au/technology/technology-news/riding-the-silk-road-the-flourishing-online-drug-market-authorities-are-powerless-to-stop-20110830-1jj4d.html
, 30 August 2011.

p.141
‘Charles Schumer, the US Senator . . .’
http://www.nbcnewyork.com/news/local/123187958.html
.

p.141
‘There are no regulators to turn . . .’ The greatest scam ever pulled on the original Silk Road was by a vendor called Tony76 who spent months building up a solid online reputation and then ran multiple scams, known as ‘Finalise Early’ scams.

p.142
‘Major e-commerce companies spend millions . . .’ Nahai, N.,
Webs of Influence
.

p.142
‘We do this in several different ways . . .’
http://allthingsvice.com/2013/04/23/competition-for-black-market-share-hotting-up/
.

p.144
‘It provides the most detailed . . .’ It was uploaded on a Tor Hidden Service as a very large Excel File. Data relates to all feedback given on the site between 10 January and the time of writing (April 15/16). It is continually updated. This data was collected by gathering reviews on all purchases (which is close to mandatory). Not quite back to the level at the height of Silk Road in July 2013 – but getting close. One review is left per transaction, not per product, so it is likely that this is a conservative estimate. In 2012, Professor Nicolas Christin wrote an excellent report based on user review feedback left on the original Silk Road.
http://www.andrew.cmu.edu/user/nicolasc/publications/TR-CMU-CyLab-12-018.pdf
.

p.145
‘Although vendors tend to be based . . .’

p.146
‘Twenty-one vendors sold over . . .’ Other vendors sell more products – professorhouse is selling 1,170 items – but these are not drugs, and include scamming and hacking guides.

p.147
‘A very decent salary . . .’

p.147
‘(Studies typically show that . . .’
http://www.standard.co.uk/news/19000-a-year-is-average-profit-of-a-drug-dealer-6667533.html
;
http://www.jrf.org.uk/publications/understanding-drug-selling-local-communities
;
http://www.prisonpolicy.org/scans/sp/5049.pdf
.

p.147
‘But Silk Road has brought new . . .’
http://www.reddit. com/r/casualiama/comments/1l0axd/im_a_former_silk_road_drug_dealer_ama/;
http://www.vice.com/print/internet-drug-dealers-are-really-nice-guys
.

p.147
‘“We are an importer” . . .’
http://mashable.com/2013/10/02/silk-road-drug-dealer-interview/
.

p.148
‘“When you’re going to leave” . . .’ It is still some way off the complexity of eBay’s review system, although eBay has had substantially longer to refine it.

p.150
‘It didn’t matter that no one . . .’ Over time, some vendors built up long-term and sustained reputations on Silk Road. Therefore, many kept the same pseudonym and transferred it to new sites. Libertas – on setting up Silk Road 2.0 – allowed all existing Silk Road vendors to immediately become Silk Road 2.0 vendors if their PGP keys matched up. When the marketplace Atlantis went online as a rival to the original Silk Road, verified Silk Road traders were able to become Atlantis traders immediately, in a clever effort to latch on to some of that precious credibility that the Silk Road had facilitated.

p.151
‘Common tricks include creating fake . . .’ Manipulating the review system is hardly limited to the deep web. The importance of online reviews to e-commerce is feeding a growing ‘Online Reputation Management’ industry. Hundreds of companies now offer to repair and improve the reputation of companies online. Several major companies have been fined for manipulating or faking their own reviews.

p.152
‘That’s why on the streets . . .’ Daly, M. and Sampson, S.,
Narcomania: How Britain Got Hooked on Drugs
.

p.152
‘Analysis of seized ecstasy tablets . . .’ Drug Treatment in 2009–10
(Report), National Treatment Agency for Substance Misuse, October 2010;
https://www.unodc.org/documents/data-and-analysis/WDR2012/WDR_2012_web_small.pdf
.

p.152
‘Fourteen died . . .’ Scottish Drug Forum, ‘Anthrax and Heroin Users: What Workers Need to Know’:
www.sdf.org.uk/index.php/download_file/view/262/183/
(accessed 20 April 2014).

p.152
‘True, price here . . .’ Mahapatra, S., ‘Silk Road vs. Street: A Comparison of Drug Prices on the Street and in Different Countries’,
International Business Times
,
http://www.ibtimes.com/silk-road-vs-street-comparison-drug-prices-street-different-countries-charts-1414634
(accessed 20 April 2014).

p.152
‘On the other hand . . .’ Clarity Way (a drug charity), ‘The Amazon of Illegal Drugs: The Silk Road vs. The Streets [Infographic]’,
ClarityWay
.com
,
http://www.clarityway.com/blog/the-amazon-of-illegal-drugs-the-silk-road-vs-the-streets-infographic/
(accessed 20 April 2014).

p.153
‘But according to Steve Rolles . . .’
http://www.reddit.com/r/Drugs/comments/1tvr4a/the_most_popular_drugs_bought_with_bitcoin_on/cecw84x
for some discussion about the quality of the drugs. ‘With stuff like MDMA in particular, Silk Road was popular because they had the best
and
the cheapest that most consumers could find. The heroin from the Silk Road was rather expensive compared to local prices, but it was also some of the best (mostly). Couple venders were selling shit laced with fent[anyl], which just isn’t cool, but reviews helped.’

p.155
‘Some of the newer markets . . .’
http://www.deepdotweb.com/2014/01/25/drugslist-now-offering-full-api-multi-sig-escrow/
.

p.156
“[Multi-sig is] the only way” . . .’
http://www.deepdotweb.com/2014/02/13/silk-road-2-hacked-bitcoins-stolen-unknown-amount/
.

p.157
‘However, researchers have found that . . .’
http://motherboard.vice.com/blog/bitcoin-isnt-the-criminal-safe-haven-people-think-it-is
;
http://anonymity-in-bitcoin.blogspot.com/2011/07/bitcoin-is-not-anonymous.html
.

p.157
‘CoinJoin, for example, works . . .’
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php? topic=139581.0
.

p.158
‘The future of these markets . . .’
http://www.chaum.com/articles/Security_Wthout_Identification.htm
. This was what David Chaum – the inventor of digital cash twenty years before Satoshi Nakamoto – had in mind all along. In his 1985 book,
Security without Identification: Transaction Systems to Make Big Brother Obsolete
, he set out systems that could combine anonymity with secure payment.

p.159
‘Dark net markets have introduced . . .’ Hirschman, A.,
Exit Voice and Loyalty
.

p.160
‘When Professor Nicolas Christin analysed . . .’
http://www.andrew.cmu.edu/user/nicolasc/publications/TR-CMU-CyLab-12-018.pdf
.

p.160
‘The Silk Road 2.0 . . .’
http://allthingsvice.com/2013/04/23/competition-for-black-market-share-hotting-up/
.

p.160
‘Grams searches the largest markets . . .’
http://www.deepdotweb.com/2014/04/08/grams-darknetmarkets-search-engine/
.

p.161
‘Illicit substances are more available . . .’ Kerr, T., Montaner, J., Nosyk, B., Werb, D. and Wood, E., ‘The Temporal Relationship Between Drugs Supply Indicators: An Audit of Internation Government Surveillance Systems’,
http://bmjopen.bmj.com/content/3/9/e003077.full
.

p.161
‘Since President Nixon declared war . . .’ ‘War on illegal drugs failing, medical researchers warn’,
BBC News
, 1 October 2013 (
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-24342421
).