Suspicion and mistrust: Total anarchy on the dark web

WE THOUGHT Silk Road was bad with its illicit drug sales. What’s sprung up in its place is much worse than we’ve seen before.

IT was supposed to be a free market utopia in victimless crime, but as the business model collapses, Silk Road’s illicit trading has given way to total anarchy.

After the illegal but tightly organised marketplace was brought down by the FBI two years ago, users have turned to a slew of alternative websites to engage in criminal business transactions.

Whether it’s buying drugs, stolen credit cards or forged identification, there’s a black market on the dark web for whatever you want. But these descendants of Silk Road are a far more risky proposition.

Over the past year, websites keep disappearing, and site administrators have run off with millions of dollars of customers’ money, Wired reports.

Silk Road’s vision of a safe alternative to street deals has given way to a world of suspicion and mistrust, with sellers too scared of the law and having their identity exposed to stick around for long.

What they do is known as an “exit scam”. Administrators take all the bitcoins users have stored in on-site accounts and simply vanish.

Silk Road was a criminal’s utopia, now users are getting scammed.

In March, the biggest successor to Silk Road, Evolution, became the first to disappear, freezing users’ accounts and taking with it around $17 million of bitcoins. Traders flocked to its biggest competitor, Agora, where in May, a news.com.au investigation discovered that Australian dealers were posting more than 9000 listings of drugs worth $2.5 million in a week, including meth, cocaine and speed.

Then Agora vanished, too.

Panicked buyers and sellers scattered to sites including Abraxas, Amazon Dark, Blackbank and Middle Earth. All are gone, and are believed to have pulled their own exit scams as they went.

Alphabay is now the biggest dark web black market, with 50,000 “drugs and chemicals” for sale and 12,000 “fraud” products. But its reputation is poor, with users accusing admins of selectively stealing people’s money and blaming it on hacks, or locking people out of their accounts.

But the crash hasn’t stopped people making illegal deals over the internet. Nicolas Christin, a computer science researcher at Carnegie Mellon, told Wired the online drug trade’s revenue has flattened out at around $100 million a year.

Some are taking the risk on sites like Alphabay. Others have ditched the dark web entirely, conducting secret transactions using codewords on mainstream trading websites including Craigslist, Locanto, eBay and Gumtree.

Ads for drugs on mainstream sites make little attempt to hide their illegal activity. Picture: Craigslist

The online black market is in a state of anarchy. Picture: Craigslist

Dealers use street slang such as “420” and “Mary” for cannabis, “looking for Gina” for GHB, “Lucy” for LSD, “Charlie” for cocaine, “Keta” for Ketamine and “cold rock” or “ice cream” for methamphetamine. You can buy any drug you want, from heroin and MDMA to prescription medication such as Xanax, oxycodone, Vicodin and Valium.

A typical Australian Craigslist post reads: “Got some great quality crystal ice cubes for sale 1 .p is $60 or up to an 8 ball for $900 on the sunny coast.”

Another teases: “Mary J Bubbles and Ice Cubes offering their greatest hits.”

And another: “Premium Ice Cold Coffee is here and ready to go :) My Coffee product is guaranteed to keep you up and active ... My Coffee product is top shelf and cannot be located anywhere else.”

Transactions then typically move on to anonymous messaging services such as Wickr, protecting the identity of any scammers. But some posters leave mobile numbers and photos of bags of white powder, making no attempt to hide what they’re selling.

It’s a far more dangerous world than it was just a few years ago. Silk Road creator Ross Ulbricht, now fighting to avoid a jail sentence, styled himself as a kind of Mark Zuckerberg of the dark web, with ethics, principles and a dream. He insisted that only “victimless” contraband should be sold.

Now, there are no such rules stopping the sale of stolen or fraudulently obtained items — or theft from customers themselves.

Sick of the decline, one moderator of Reddit’s Dark Net Markets forum stepped down in July, blaming “the constant wearying turmoil of exit-scams and hacks.”

“There seems to be little chance that things will change substantially soon,” he added.

The golden age of the online black market is over, and people looking for illegal products are in danger of losing their money or being arrested.

But in a game that’s all about calculated risk, the sheer size of the internet means it remains the ideal place for a shady deal.