Part 4: The Darknet Myth | Drugs, IDs and Guns – The Silk Road
If there’s a site in the Darknet, that’s been causing a lot of turmoil, it’s most likely the Silk Road.
The Silk Road can be considered an eBay for illicit goods and services, such as fake EU resident IDs, all kinds of drugs, prescription medicine, fake money and money laundering. In general you pay in Cryptocurrencies there, because if done right they allegedly guarantee your anonymity. As opposed to PayPal or a bank transfer, you don’t have to provide personal information such as your address and your name to own a Cryptocurreny.
The site is making it really easy for the buyers – Every trader gets reviews for his sales. Of course, the buyers do not only rate the delivery time, but also the quality and the effects of meds and drugs for example. However, you’ll also find reports by buyers who managed to easily get a visum to the EU with a fake pass. Looking at all the ratings a trader gets per day, you can only imagine that the Silk Road is frequented by a whole lot of people.
A site like that of course does not only attract the average Darknet user, but also hackers and authorities such as the FBI or the German LKA.
Illicit deliveries are intercepted by the customs and if the content is more than just obvious, the recipient is surveyed on the Internet from now on – this is how the authorities are attempting to catch Silk Road customers. Furthermore, the Silk Road founder Ross William Ulbricht was arrested in October 2013. The Silk Road was then closed by the FBI, thus, the Bitcoins Ulbricht was owning also got confiscated. He had around 26.000 Bitcoins at that time, which were then worth approximately 3.6 Million US Dollars! In this year’s February, Ulbricht was sued – the lawsuit is still running.
However, this did not mean the end for the Silk Road: After a short period, it went online again under the name Silk Road V2. The new Silk Road didn’t stay safe for too long either. By exploiting a weak spot in the Bitcoin protocol, the attacker managed to take all the circulating Bitcoins. The Silk Road V2 was temporarily closed to further increase the site’s security. By now, most members have gotten their Bitcoins back by the way.
An acquaintance of mine who claimed to regularly order drugs on Silk Road said the following to me: “Ordering drugs on Silk Road definitely is no walk in the park and people are lying if they say that it’s absolutely safe. Why I still get my drugs on Silk Road? Speed with 80% purity and 70% purity MDMA from the Netherlands. The speed with a purity of just 20% you buy in Berlin is just Persil [name of a washing powder brand) compared to the stuff you get on Silk Road.”
Copyright and Source: http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Silk_Road#Das_Ende_von_Silk_Road_1.0
