Drink and Drugs News DDN July_August 2019 | Page 10

online purchasing
A Tangled W
The ‘darknet’ online marketplace has experienced
significant turbulence lately, affecting the
availability of different drugs. Be ready for the
impact, says Kevin Flemen
A
series of international policing operations has made a significant dent
in darknet market places. While it’s inevitable that new models and
markets will emerge, in the short term these changes will have a
significant impact on the UK drug supply. Drug services should be
aware of this now so that they can respond promptly to the shifts in
availability.
Darknet drugs markets have been around for a few years now. The most famous
early example, Silk Road, was shut down in 2013 and its successor, Silk Road 2.0,
closed a year later. Predictably, more darknet drugs markets emerged to fill the void,
including Agora (shut in 2015) and Alphabay.
Alphabay was shut down through an FBI operation in 2017 – but importantly, this
was part of ‘Operation Bayonet’, a two-pronged attack. Many people trading on
Alphabay migrated to another market, Hansa, which had already been infiltrated by
Dutch Police. This allowed international law enforcement to identify both buyers and
sellers, resulting both in prosecutions and wariness about the safety of other markets.
While these other darknet sites were either voluntarily closing or being shut
down by enforcement, one, Dream Market, continued to function and grow.
Originally established in 2013, it had risen to being the largest darknet drug
market place. In March 2019 it had some 120,00 market listings, more than ten
times its nearest competitor. It was easy to use, had a large number of vendors
apparently located within the EU, a lot of vendors with long selling histories, and
was as ‘trusted’ as any darknet marketplace can be.
Then in March 2019, Dream Market suspended trading. After logging in,
customers were told that the market would close in April 2019, and a new
operation with a new partner would be launched.
Dream Market had been subject to intense denial-of-service attacks, making it
harder to trade on the platform. But the abrupt suspension of trading came out of
the blue. There was an opportunity for people to extract any bitcoins lodged with
Dream Market, dispelling myths that it was an ‘exit scam’ where the site ran off
with the money. But the orderly suspension of Dream Market couldn’t disabuse
people of fears that the site had been infiltrated, or that any successor site
wouldn’t be another ‘sting’ like Operation Bayonet.
As before, people flocked to the next functional market, Wall Street Market.
This was then probably part of an exit scam, and new subscribers lost money. Wall
Street Market was then shut down.
In order to find the next reliable darknet drugs market, the easiest directory to
use was DeepDotWeb which linked to the main markets, offered reviews and
provided updates on their status. In May 2019 this website was seized by the FBI
and the people behind it arrested for allegedly receiving kickbacks for sales
generated via the drug markets to which they linked.
10 | drinkanddrugsnews | July/August 2019
‘If laws of supply and demand hold
true, cost may well go up, and quality
may also suffer.’
S
o, since March this year the largest two darkweb drug markets have been
shut down, and the directory site that pointed people to these sites and
any future ones was also shut down. It was the drugs equivalent of
Amazon and eBay being taken out within weeks of each other – then
Yellow Pages being closed down too.
It’s almost inevitable that new markets will emerge and grow. There’s a
new directory service running, and emergent markets trying to fill the gap. But it
will take a while for any newer site to build up the confidence that Dream Market
enjoyed with vendors and buyers. Such trust isn’t born overnight. The key issue in
the meantime is, how does all this impact on the UK drugs scene?
Some drugs markets such as the UK homegrown cannabis market or the more
‘traditionally’ smuggled drugs such as heroin and cocaine will probably experience
less disruption from these darknet closures. Indeed, closing down the online
competition effectively ‘gifts’ a large market to the existing street suppliers – a
position that the ‘county lines’ gangs are well placed to exploit. It’s a bonanza for
traditional drug gangs and emergent dealer networks.
So where is disruption more likely to be experienced?
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