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Dropgangs, or the future of darknet markets

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Re: Dropgangs, or the future of darknet markets

#81

Post by kakarot »

perlmutterlabs wrote: post #27
GistNoesis wrote: post #22

How do you defend against the eye in the sky, video surveillance or location tracking ? There seems to be conflicting objectives. When hiding an object you don't want too many people around to see where you hide it. Yet if you record only two person going to exactly the same non standard spot it's pretty much a red flag, then you follow the person in the recording to identify them. Most buildings are probably not val…

Yeah, it's a great story, but machine vision + machine learning + surveillance could pull the rug out from the dropgangs market in a second. But really, other than this fatal flaw, it's a great narrative of the internet spilling into and interfacing with analog markets

Employ and build trust with a tight circle of local homeless folk, establish delivery methods which circumvent surveillance such as on-foot delivery, chained drops, multiple couriers, etc. Some distribution networks currently employ such methods. It will always be a game of cat and mouse.

Re: Dropgangs, or the future of darknet markets

#82

Post by hinkley »

CamperBob2 wrote: post #10
drcode wrote: post #3

I wonder if dark web markets will ever establish a comprehensive alternative parcel system... that seems like the natural, final extension of these ideas. The technical challenges to this would of course be significant (I'll refrain from listing them and suggesting potential workarounds since I don't really want to give anybody any specific ideas on this LOL)

There are quite a few holes in the scheme as outlined in the article. The author asserts that dead drops are better than post office boxes because they're harder to surveil, but what keeps law enforcement from signing up their own personnel as distributors? Then it's just a matter of staking out their own dead drop and arresting whoever shows up. This is why the first rule of opsec has always been, "Involve as few pe…

It's not just the cops that will be surveilling a dead drop.

You don't think a heroin addict who couldn't come up with the money for their next buy isn't going to go check every dead drop they ever bought at on the off chance that there is something there?

I mean, just thinking of the old espionage meaning of dead drop, if you have dead drops or safe houses or secret meeting locations that you could only use once a year, to avoid patterns, then researching them would become tremendously expensive. A full time job, really, probably for several people (and someone in logistics managing them all). I can't see how that'd be much different for criminals, and how do you make a profit at that? At least in the espionage case, you would have been State sponsored. You don't have to make money.

Re: Dropgangs, or the future of darknet markets

#83

Post by 3131s »

> “The Silk Road” was the first of a phenomenon that became widely known: Darknet Markets.

The history is way off here, Silk Road was one of the first two completely public darknet markets (the other being the short-lived Open Vendor Database) but there were private darknet markets long before, e.g. The Farmer's Market.

> Use of the Internet to facilitate the marketing and sales of physical goods - drugs, weapons, false identification papers - began latest in the late 1990s, but usually focused on local geographic markets in major cities. This was due to the fact that payment and delivery still required in person meetings.

Not so, back then and still to this day drug dealers simply throw a stack of cash in the mail. The clearnet markets for "research chemicals" all operated this way and went basically unchecked until Operation Web Tryp in 2004, which began an era of harsher enforcement of the Federal Analogue Act.

Re: Dropgangs, or the future of darknet markets

#84

Post by omeid2 »

sigmaprimus wrote: post #51
omeid2 wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The war on drug has to be one of the top contributors and financiers of crime and criminal gangs. Imagine a world where criminal gangs don't have access to the money they make through drugs and a government that doesn't have to spend huge amount of money on drug laws enforcement because drug trafficking would be much less lucrative in the existence of legal access and you get fewer and very cash-strapped drug gangs,…

The war on drugs is also a big contributor to the LEGAL gangs such as police,distric attornies, defence attorneys, prison officials and worst of all judges. Definitely an industrial economic complex similar to the Military Industrial Complex.

Don't forget for-profit prisons.

Re: Dropgangs, or the future of darknet markets

#85

Post by hinkley »

bigiain wrote: post #73
chrisweekly wrote: post #40

Excellent summary. I'm reminded of the old saw, "The future is already here, it's just not evenly distributed".

"Old saw"? I remember that quote being new, it's not _that_ old... It's from 2003. https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/681-the-future-is-already-h...

Sit down. You're not going to like what I'm about to say. This is going to start happening to you (us, really) more and more. Things that happened in the 00's happened a 'long time ago' to a larger and larger group of loud people with Internet access. People who can drink legally were born in '98. What's up with that shit?

https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/William_Gibson#Quotes has a citation for him saying it in '99 and an unsupported assertion that it might have been said in '93. I've been hearing this long enough that I believe the '99 date, but I'm skeptical about '93.

Re: Dropgangs, or the future of darknet markets

#86

Post by zhoujianfu »

stcredzero wrote: post #69

The current method of reporting sales experience on forums is open to spamming and manipulation since it is hard to show that a deal even took place. It is likely that forums and merchants develop best practices to solve this problem. There is the potential that merchants will start to issue “proofs of sale” in a cryptographic form, that customers then use to make statements about the performance of the merchant in p…

Yeah, and you can at least sort of solve the manipulation issue by weighting ratings based on “bitcoin days” of the address making the review.

(Number of bitcoin on the address times time it’s been there.)

Re: Dropgangs, or the future of darknet markets

#87

Post by mirimir »

sigmaprimus wrote: post #48

My biggest problem with using the Darknet, messaging apps, or old school methods such as dial a dope or hitting up the guy on the street corner to buy drugs is the same. How can I really trust someone willing to break the rules and sell drugs or other non legal goods? You lay down with dogs you get fleas!! Last thing I would want is to eat, smoke or snort something from someone I have never met even if they have a 5…

Yes, you never know what you'll get.

But you can protect yourself. Whenever you have a new batch of some street drug, you test with a small dose. Maybe 10% of what you'd normally use. If it's too little, test with maybe twice as much. Waiting as appropriate, if tolerance is an issue (as with LSD). And then use what you need, to get the desired effect.

In most cases, bad drugs are either cut way too much, or adulterated with some other drug. But it's pretty rare for someone to be selling outright poison. So maybe an amphetamine in the MDMA or LSD. But nothing that's likely to kill at 10% of a typical dose.

The one key exception is fentanyl. So yes, some idiot may indeed sell you heroin (or even cocaine) containing too much fentanyl. However, you can still protect yourself by initially testing a small dose.

Re: Dropgangs, or the future of darknet markets

#88

Post by dghori »

crowbahr wrote: post #2

Very interesting reading the obstacles faced by the black market drug trade and how they're overcoming them. It seems like the producer layer is most susceptible to penetration as it is essentially identical to most gangs. It's entirely glossed over here but procuring the product seems like a difficult problem for an anonymized distributor: How do you make sure the product gets to your support layers? As interesting…

There's nothing to be worry dangers of this network. I don't believe that our intelligence agencies haven't found a way break this anonymized distribution network. Its a well known fact that IA is indirectly sponsoring this network to get funds for their illicit operations. And I am pretty sure that they have planted backdoor in this network.

Re: Dropgangs, or the future of darknet markets

#89

Post by mirimir »

kakarot wrote: post #79
mirimir wrote: post #49

It's cool to see serious tradecraft applied to this stuff. Especially compartmentalization. And yes, using traditional shipping systems is a serious problem for old-school dark markets. I've thought off and on for several years about the potential for using dead drops with accurate GPS. I mean, geocaching. Many years ago, when I was dealing LSD, it was pretty common to use dead drops. But then, they were typically re…

> However, it's ~clueless customers and low-level distributors who'll most likely get pwned. INTERPOL has made some large busts in the past, but afaik it always has come down to failure to maintain proper OPSEC. There's also the issue of possible directives in the future to prosecute customers en masse after major domestic busts using backlogged USPS analytics. As traffic obfuscation methods continuously improve, the…

Well, they could end the drug war, and then crime wouldn't be an issue.

Re: Dropgangs, or the future of darknet markets

#90

Post by TylerE »

bigiain wrote: post #75
TylerE wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's why you'd use a burner.

Depending on your adversary, you need to be super careful to not make the single mistake that'll blow your cover there. If that burner ever gets switched on or off at your home, or if it only ever gets switched on/off at the same location as a phone registered in your name, or if it commonly travels exactly the same route as your phone... I'm guessing "they" won't go to those sort of investigative lengths for theoret…

If you’re sufficiently paranoid just use a new phone for every single call.
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