” As part of a separate research project, a 15-year-old was able to locate an account selling Xanax tablets in mere seconds on Instagram. In response, social media companies’ algorithms to detect drug-selling behavior are getting smarter and are aggregating images and emojis, Fuller says. “There is an understanding that seeing these ads on social media is correlated to a decreased risk perception, and young people are led to think the drugs are safer.” Of the teenagers she sampled, 10 percent reported purchasing drugs via social media. “Those exposed to drug ads were 17 times more likely to purchase drugs on social media compared to those who had not seen such ads,” she adds. Some dealers these days are even brazen enough to boost their posts and pay for sponsored advertising. “Mushrooms and marijuana used to be hard to get and now they’re being marketed to me in beautiful packaging on Instagram,” says one 34-year-old in Austin, Texas, whom WIRED spoke to.
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The cat was out of the bag — online shopping was the future, and drugs were no exception. Other markets quickly adopted the system Ulbricht pioneered, starting a seemingly endless cycle of authorities busting sites, only to have more take their place. Monero is a privacy-centric crypto designed to mask transaction details, making it a preferred payment method for darknet drug dealers and cybercriminals. The drug information organization Pill Report has told of people wiring cash to dealers and getting duped, with nothing sent to them. When one such person interviewed by WIRED sent money for cannabis through a cash transfer app but received nothing in the mail, he reported the account.
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The team began by identifying the major marketplaces on the darknet and crawling their content. The biggest marketplaces are AlphaBay, Hansa, TradeRoute, and Valhalla, which together account for about 95 percent of inventory on the darknet. Dr Barratt says there is not yet any proof that Ulbricht’s release from prison will result in a renewed Silk Road website, or an emboldened push towards more online illicit drugs marketplaces. To the UNODC, this suggests “an increase in wholesale activities” on the dark web—though this could also reflect consumers who buy smaller quantities shifting from the dark net to the clear net and encrypted messaging apps. After dropping out of a culinary apprenticeship, the then 19-year-old began to fully devote his time to running Shiny Flakes and ultimately built up one of the most lucrative online drug shops in Germany. Aside from some help in the beginning from his mentor, RedBull (who has by now been arrested) and support from someone with the username DummesSchwein (who disappeared early on), Maximilian S.
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- “The system is being used in places where the Russian diaspora are living, for example in Bali. People are selling via dead drops in France, Greece, and the UK, where one site is teaching people how to become kladmen and drug cooks” — says Daly.
- The cryptocurrency Bitcoin was used for payments to provide a second layer of anonymity for customers looking to buy the almost 13,000 listings on the website, which were linked to at least six overdose deaths across the world, according to officials in the US.
- The platforms encourage the behavior by paying for advertisements on Telegram channels and even YouTube.
- The proliferation of dead drop sales is likely to have contributed to this trend.
Dealers ran hundreds of paid advertisements on Meta platforms in 2024 to sell illegal opioids and what appeared to be cocaine and ecstasy pills, according to a report this year by the Tech Transparency Project, and federal prosecutors are investigating Meta over the issue. THE HAGUE — Authorities in the U.S. and Europe arrested nearly 300 people, confiscated more than $53 million and seized a dark-web marketplace as part of an international crackdown on drug trafficking that officials say was the largest operation of its kind. The value of these markets was estimated by the UNODC in September of 2018 to stand at $14 million (£11 million) to $25 million (£20 million) per month – a tiny fraction of overall illicit drug sales. Still, the EU has funded a three-year, €5 million (£4.5 million) project, project, TITANIUM, with the aim of de-anonymising criminal bitcoin users and providing “court-proof” evidence of underground market activity.
Within 48 hours of Archetyp being busted, scam relaunches such as ‘Archetyp V2’ appeared, while refund scammers mimicked well-known vendors to exploit the chaos. The influx of previous Archetyp users overwhelmed fragile markets such as Abacus, causing outages and distrust in the platform. Jerrell Eugene Anderson, who federal authorities allege ran a darknet methamphetamine and cocaine trafficking ring from Santa Clarita, was sentenced to 96 months in federal prison. In the UK, the “Breaking Bad” drugs forum launched its own dead drop initiative with a video advertisement.
The Silk Road grew into an empire churning through tens of millions of dollars. It became an international marketplace that included hacking services, foraged documents, and weapons — until it was brought down by the FBI in a dramatic sting operation at a San Francisco public library. “I’ve been writing about the drug world for 25 years, and what I was seeing in Russia was a genuinely new phenomenon,” says Max Daly, former Global Drugs Desk Editor at Vice.
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Plus, the far-too-common grey sort (known confusingly as “grey death,” despite often being on the weaker side) is rather hard to inject. A pale, ashy shade in powder form, it turns pitch-black when mixed with water. This opaqueness makes the flash of blood impossible to see, so you never quite know whether you’ve hit a vein.
For Daly, the dead drop system could be “a peek into the future of the drug world, dominated by tech and DIY synthetic drug labs.” “Many of these are young people, including young women, who are abused and have had fingers chopped off and bones broken. Because, like in the normal drug world, reputation is everything, and the big businesses cannot be seen to be taken advantage of.” Like the early Silk Road, platforms do put on some airs about caring for customers by providing harm-reduction resources. Caches of drugs are hidden under park benches, rocks, holes in walls, buried under dirt or snow, and magnetized to lamposts, drainpipes, and post boxes. The stashes, or ‘klads’ in Russian, are most often bags of synthetic drugs manufactured in Russia from precursor chemicals sourced from China or India. He repeats instructions to himself from The Kladmen’s Bible, an ebook that instructs couriers how to make a living stashing drugs others bought online in clever spots to be picked up.
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Monica Barratt, a criminal and justice studies and drugs policy expert from RMIT university, first started researching the Silk Road marketplace in 2011 and said she quickly noticed some of the ideals demonstrated by Ulbricht online. In 2015, the then-31-year-old was found guilty and convicted of seven crimes including the distribution of dangerous drugs, conspiring to commit computer hacking and money laundering. Other defendants in the investigation, including Christopher Canion Von Holton, 37; Kenneth Lashawn Hadley, 37; Adan Sepulveda; and Jackie Walter Burns, each pleaded guilty to one count of conspiracy to distribute controlled substances, according to the U.S. But most of all, Shiny Flakes made it incredibly easy for customers with no dark web experience to order drugs over the internet and was able to draw in countless consumers with his image-heavy web shop.
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On Dec. 16, 2024, Rui-Siang Lin pleaded guilty to charges brought by the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of New York of narcotics conspiracy, money laundering, and conspiracy to sell adulterated and misbranded medication for owning and operating Incognito Market, one of the largest narcotics marketplaces on the internet. However, the widespread use of the Russian template internationally allows authorities to anticipate many of the features of dead drop activity and leverage the expertise of blockchain intelligence companies with experience tracking Russian-language DNMs. Increased social awareness of the dead drop phenomenon and close cooperation between law enforcement and their private sector partners can help counter this rising threat. TRM research found that vendors using dead drops in Hungary, the Czech Republic, and Greece prefer Telegram, Session, and other end-to-end encrypted messenger services to DNMs. One Greece-based vendor tracked by TRM uses Telegram bots to arrange dead drops across Thessaloniki, relying on online geocoding services to provide customers with unique reference points for dead drops and posting the successful pickup in their channel.
He wanted to be able to buy high-quality psychedelics from a trusted, reliable source and the dark web seemed like the best place to do so. Karenza Moore, an expert on club drugs at Newcastle University, said neither banning drugs nor seizing them had much impact on the public’s ability to buy them. Party drug prices are falling on the encrypted messaging app despite claims of record seizures by authorities, VICE News analysis shows. In a statement, the Australian Federal Police says it is aware of illicit trading on the dark web and is working with its partners to combat all forms of technology-enabled crime. “Despite what we see in the news about an epidemic, there’s not really that many ice users in the country,” Dr Martin said. Australia owns a sizeable chunk of the narcotics market on the dark web, according to new research released by the Australian Institute of Criminology.
The darknet is often linked to anonymity, privacy and a way to escape the moderation and restrictions of the surface web. One of the most talked about aspects of the darknet is the darknet markets, these are online markets where people can buy and sell a wide range of products and services. These include drugs, stolen data, counterfeit goods and more, all of which are usually not visible to the public eye. Social media companies are under growing pressure to eradicate drug dealing on their platforms, says Ashly Fuller, a PhD candidate at University College London researching the sale and advertisement of illegal drugs to young people on social media. Data released by social media companies shows that millions of pieces of drug-related content are already taken down every year.
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“It became a threatening match and they sent photos of thugs with guns saying they were going to come for me,” he says. For every illegal drug, there is a combination of emojis that dealers and consumers use to evade detection on social media and messaging platforms. Grapes and baby bottles are the calling cards for codeine-containing cough syrup, or lean.
Being able to order drugs for self-medication so easily and discreetly, Marie continued, also kept misguided friends from trying to force her to quit. Contrary to popular belief, making a loved one become abstinent (even if you can) won’t cure the underlying issues that may have led them to use in the first place. For people who use opioids, it also increases their risk of overdose when they resume use with lower tolerance.
One obvious point is the challenge, for people without technical know-how, of accessing dark-web marketplaces through the necessary software. I would be able to do it with the help of my friends’ advice; without it, I’d be stuck relying on online guides that I might not feel comfortable trusting. Canadian software engineer Marie, on the other hand, never even bothered with offline purchasing. Her decision to begin buying drugs online came at an extraordinarily trying time in her life, in 2016.
