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Dropgangs, or the future of darknet markets

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Re: Dropgangs, or the future of darknet markets

#121

Post by grugq »

Dead drop based drug distribution doesn’t scale to retail levels. It is used in Moscow and I know of people who will order from a dealer, then search the surrounding area and clear out all the drops they find. It works for them, although one questions the sanity of stealing from Russian drug dealers.

For more practical guides on how people who sell drugs avoid the negative repercussions:

• AlpraKing’s business guide is hard to beat. https://archive.is/K7j1U (It’s a great business guide in general, actually)

• Gary Cooper’s Never Get Busted Again and Never Get Raided Again shows practical use of dead drops for dealing.

Busted: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=ZyAjLkBCWKI

Raided: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=ML6VAy_ygVs

Re: Dropgangs, or the future of darknet markets

#122

Post by cobbzilla »

hinkley wrote: post #82
CamperBob2 wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 y…

great observations. but as for “how do you make a profit at that?” I’m pretty sure it gets priced into the (expensive) product. That premium might be too high for retail, then this gets used for lower frequency, higher quantity and higher trust transactions.

Re: Dropgangs, or the future of darknet markets

#123

Post by wongarsu »

selestify wrote: post #92
mindslight wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Criminal networks do benefit from a bread-and-butter businesses like drug distribution. These innovations likely wouldn't be taking place at all if altering one's own consciousness with substances hadn't been criminalized - when the law is made to be at odds with society, society adapts to being at odds with the law. But unlike say murder, "identity theft" isn't some serious crime - it's in the same basket as "war on…

How could identity theft need fixed?

"Identity Theft" is a marketing spin on "broken identification". An identity is unique by definition and can't be stolen. But if you use an inadequate identification technique, like my birthday that's on my facebook and everywhere else in combination with my social security number that I have to give out to just about everybody, anyone can aquire those two pieces of information and impersonate me.

The ways to fix it are numerous, but most of them would involve a widely used national identity card that's actually designed for identification (as opposed to social security numbers which were never meant to be used like this). Alternatively have the banks pay fines for each instance of "identity theft" they suffer, and watch how they figure out better ways to identify people (probably verifying them in person).

Re: Dropgangs, or the future of darknet markets

#124

Post by krageon »

mirimir wrote: post #113
3131s wrote: post #83

> “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, fa…

Well, it was Adamflowers "long before". And its OPSEC was over-the-top lame. I mean, Hushmail? But then, DPR was also very sloppy.

If you really look at how the big names have gotten busted, you will see that their opsec is bad with no exceptions. Apparently people that actually know the craft don't see enough upside to running a marketplace like that, which should make you wonder about the ones that still exist.

Re: Dropgangs, or the future of darknet markets

#125

Post by krageon »

perlmutterlabs wrote: post #38
zzzcpan wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not a fatal flaw, unless they choose a location with police surveillance, but why would they?

Taking a guess: ML is just too good. Don't forget, it's also a signal to leave surveillance areas, eg "last seen driving into the desert". Any kind of outlier behavior is PART of the detection model ... that's where probabilistic models gain leverage, in fact ...

You are vastly overestimating your adversary here.

Re: Dropgangs, or the future of darknet markets

#126

Post by thatoneuser »

atemerev wrote: post #103
dahdum wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A strong judiciary, high bar to change the law, and harsh accountability. Still a fine line to walk.

People from more or less politically stable countries like the US are very naive in not considering what can happen to the best of governments overnight. People from Europe have this sort of... experience. Most of us know that trusting the government with our lives is not a good idea.

If we’re gonna pull punches...

The US isn’t naive. In fact, it’s the opposite. It is a country that was so aware of the folly of government that it deliberately inhibited its own government by design. Because it knows damn well what happens when you relinquish control of yourself to another. That’s why the 2nd amendment is so fundamental.

The US doesn’t have to worry about things happening to the govt overnight, because the worry is built in. A successful model exits, it just needs to be followed...

Re: Dropgangs, or the future of darknet markets

#127

Post by golergka »

Once again, I'm completely surprised how behind is western dark market world compared to Russia in that regard. Tor-based marketplaces with dead drops in parks and around the city have been around since 2013 and are now the only practical way to buy any drugs. Telegram channels have been widely used since at least 2015. Any city park has police squads patrolling the exits at night - they search people, open up your phone and look up Telegram and Tor apps if they suspect you've gone there to get a drop. Drops (they're actually called "buried treasure", or "klad" here) moved from parks to the city - you get instructions, for example, to go to some floor of a random apartment building, stop the elevator and search for a magnet-attached package behind it's doors.

I don't think that this article doesn't do a good job on the risk model because it doesn't understand how law enforcement operates - at least in Russia, the picture is completely different. Law enforcement has KPIs to catch some amount of drug dealers and users, and they have developed ways to do this reliably. So, instead of intercepting communication between the drug sellers and drug buyers, they prefer to work together with sellers (taking considerate money for 'protection') and arrest some proportion of buyers when they go for the drop.

Re: Dropgangs, or the future of darknet markets

#128

Post by orbifold »

JohnJamesRambo wrote: post #12

Dead drops sounds like an awful way to distribute anything at scale. The loss from other people finding stuff seems enormous also.

Even normal drug dealers often don’t have the drugs on their person. Instead they are stashed away somewhere close and retrieved on demand.

Re: Dropgangs, or the future of darknet markets

#129

Post by franga2000 »

wongarsu wrote: post #123
selestify wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How could identity theft need fixed?

"Identity Theft" is a marketing spin on "broken identification". An identity is unique by definition and can't be stolen. But if you use an inadequate identification technique, like my birthday that's on my facebook and everywhere else in combination with my social security number that I have to give out to just about everybody, anyone can aquire those two pieces of information and impersonate me. The ways to fix it…

This is something that has always frustrated me when reading about identity theft in the US. It's a problem that can only be fixed through legislation, yet I haven't heard of any even remotely successful attempts at establishing an official form of identification. Smart cards would be ideal, but even a simple national ID card with a picture would prevent the vast majority of identity theft.

I've done some research around social engineering and the no. 1 thing that stopped us from getting into bank accounts etc. was that to do anything remotely dangerous, you had to present your ID card. Even if you got your hands on someone's IBAN, name, address, bday and national ID number - no card, no deal.

It's not impossible to get fake IDs, but it's a significant investment to do so, which stops the kind of drive-by identity theft I read about from the states.

Re: Dropgangs, or the future of darknet markets

#130

Post by tawm »

golergka wrote: post #127

Once again, I'm completely surprised how behind is western dark market world compared to Russia in that regard. Tor-based marketplaces with dead drops in parks and around the city have been around since 2013 and are now the only practical way to buy any drugs. Telegram channels have been widely used since at least 2015. Any city park has police squads patrolling the exits at night - they search people, open up your p…

Thank you for this valuable comment. It is highly likely that police would go for the lower hanging fruit of buyers instead of sellers in a system so opaque and decentralized. The old thinking of "what could happen, they only want the big guys anyway" should have no place in OpSec. And when information on these networks is so hard to come by to begin with, a buyer being busted is very desirable. The way I see this "evolution" of the dark markets, is that it mostly protects vendors while inconveniencing and endangering buyers.
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