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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

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.

tawm 8y ago
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.
- golergka 8y ago
  It's always been like that here - the police departments that were supposed to fight drug trade basically overtook it. So why would they arrest their own employees when they can close their quota with drug users instead?
mirimir 8y ago
It's the same in Mexico.

tawm 8y ago

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.

golergka 8y ago
It's always been like that here - the police departments that were supposed to fight drug trade basically overtook it. So why would they arrest their own employees when they can close their quota with drug users instead?

mirimir 8y ago

It's the same in Mexico.