by Marc Goodman
Though Tor is the largest and most popular gateway to the Dark Net, it has competitors, including Freenet and I2P (the Invisible Internet Project). Moreover, Silk Road is just one of dozens of online criminal super marketplaces; others include Black Market Reloaded, OpenMarket, Sheep Marketplace, Agora, BlackBank, Atlantis, and the Pirate Market, and new channels come and go daily. Importantly, criminals, like any good entrepreneurs, learn from their past mistakes, and thus in the wake of the Silk Road takedown a new generation of Dark Net bazaars has risen in its place, most notably DarkMarket. Whereas Silk Road had centralized control in the hands of DPR and the computer servers he administered, DarkMarket is a completely decentralized online black market with no single owner. For the FBI to successfully take down DarkMarket, it could not just arrest its leader, as none exists. Rather, police would be forced to go after every contraband buyer and seller one by one, a near impossibility, making the Dark Net a veritable Elysium for Crime, Inc.
To help newbie criminals and hackers navigate the Dark Web, illicit marketplaces have established helpful hidden wikis—think Crimeopedias—neatly organized by category with links to other .onion sites. Categories include hacks, phreaks, anarchy, warez, viruses, markets, drugs, and erotica, each with links and descriptions of what will be found there. Even with the help of wikis, the Dark Net can be challenging to navigate, and finding the exact drug, gun, or assassin you’ve been looking for can prove difficult. To that end, in mid-2014 one highly innovative hacker created the Dark Web’s first distributed search engine, known as Grams. Modeled after Google, Grams can only be accessed via the Tor anonymizing browser and using an .onion address. With Grams, those searching for contraband can now enter their keywords and search simultaneously across eight separate dark markets for goods and services. The search engine returns a vendor’s name and allows for comparison shopping. Like Google, it has an “I’m Feeling Lucky” button, which, when clicked, might take users to a site for “high-quality crystal meth.” As the prototypical Google for crime, Grams even accepts advertising, and various cartels can compete for customers by buying keyword search terms. That’s right, your search for “Afghani Brown Heroin” in Grams will return all available results on the Dark Web, but those members of Crime, Inc. who pay a fee will have their search returns listed higher up just like sponsors in Google. The fact that Grams offers an AdWords program for the digital underground demonstrates both the keen technical business acumen and the sophistication of Crime, Inc.
Though ad-supported search has come to the digital underground, not all illicit traders are enthralled by being readily locatable by the criminal masses and, by extension, law enforcement. Thus in the more discriminating preserves of the Dark Web, just as in the real world, online criminals need introductions and must be vouched for before they can transact. Here “the distribution of goods and services is organized through thousands of illicit chat rooms and invitation-only forums.” To access the most exclusive of these illicit domains, one need be forearmed with the secret alphanumeric address, one that is not cataloged or listed anywhere else online but must be passed from person to person. Certain criminal forums like the Russian carder site Maza, a massive online stolen credit card exchange, prevent aspiring entrants to their clandestine worlds unless they are unanimously approved by a vote of the organization’s senior membership and then only after an eight-day waiting period. Once you are accepted into the elite realm of the criminal digerati, however, the world is your oyster.
Browsing the cornucopia of taboo and illicit wares available in the digital underground can feel much like a slow descent through Dante’s nine circles of hell, with each step leading further and further into a frightening and deeply disturbing abyss. What follows is but a cursory sampling of the goods and services available from within the darkest recesses of the Internet, listed from the banal to the horrific.
PIRATED CONTENT
Numerous illicit “torrents,” or peer-to-peer file-sharing sites, exist such as the Pirate Bay, which ranked among the top one hundred most visited Web sites on the Internet. Another such site, New Zealand’s Megaupload.com at its peak was visited by fifty million “customers” a day and accounted for a full 4 percent of global Internet traffic. International law enforcement authorities maintain the site was run by a six-foot-seven, 350-pound expatriate German national hacker who used the alias Kim Dotcom. According to authorities, Megaupload’s main products were fifty petabytes (fifty-two million gigabytes) of stolen movies, songs, video games, books, and software. Business was good at Megaupload, and the firm generated an estimated $25 million a year from online ads and an additional $150 million in fees paid by users who wanted to steal their downloadable content more quickly. These profits allowed Kim Dotcom to enjoy a wildly opulent lifestyle down under in a $24 million mansion, with sixty acres of manicured lawns and its own tennis courts and golf course. Some of Kim Dotcom’s other possessions included a helicopter, a mega-yacht, fifteen Mercedes, a Rolls-Royce Phantom Drophead Coupé (MSRP from $474,600), and a Swedish horsehair Hästens bed, custom-made at a cost of $103,000. Piracy is indeed a profitable business.
DRUGS
As we saw with Silk Road, illicit and prescription drugs of every type are available in the digital underground in quantities ranging from individual use to bulk dealer-to-dealer sales. Silk Road, however, is far from the only narcotics marketplace on the Dark Web, and hundreds of such sites exist. Not only do they sell the standards like marijuana, heroin, ecstasy, and cocaine, but they also offer much rarer fare such as Scopolamine, the so-called Devil’s Breath powder used as an offensive zombification drug, which, when blown into a victim’s face, leaves him or her coherent but with no free will. Once ingested, within minutes the odorless and tasteless dust allows burglars, robbers, and rapists complete control over their victims and, worse, completely wipes the victims’ memories of the details of the incidents.
COUNTERFEIT CURRENCY
Counterfeit currency is widely available in the digital underground, and costs vary by quality, amount purchased, and currency type, including dollars, euros, pounds, and yen. Tor hidden sites such as Guttemberg Print, Cheap Euros, and WHMX Counterfeit offer high-quality notes for twenty-four cents on the dollar ($600 real dollars to buy $2,500 counterfeit ones). Vendors promise all notes will pass pen and UV light tests meant to uncover counterfeit bills.
STOLEN LUXURY GOODS/ELECTRONICS
Dark Web sites such as Tor Electronics, CardedStore, and Buttery Bootlegging all offer factory-new brand-name electronics and luxury goods at a Deep Web discount. Their advertisements offer “expensive items from major stores at a fraction of the price!” Of course these items have all been stolen, diverted from the factory, or mysteriously fallen off their delivery trucks.
CARDS/ACCOUNTS
Perhaps no item is more abundant in the digital underground than stolen credit cards, widely available in so-called carder forums, where individuals buy and sell credit and debit cards from virtually every bank and country in the world. All the financial data stolen via malware, hacking, and credit card skimmers eventually end up for sale on the Dark Web via “dumps.” Dumps refer to the data contained on the magnetic strip of a credit card and include details such as the cardholder’s name, card number, expiration date, and CVV (card verification value). Once stolen, this information is used by criminals to make online purchases or even to encode the data onto new plastic counterfeit cards, which they use to go shopping for “high-dollar merchandise that can be resold quickly for cash.” Given the vast amounts of credit card theft, prices per stolen card on the digital underground have been dropping (from about $3 in 2010 to $1 in 2013). Stolen credit card dumps demonstrate market elasticity, and after a major break-in like the 2013 Target store hacking, prices for stolen cards drop further because of an oversupply beyond market demand. The cards are sold on Dark Net sites such as Mazafaka, Tortuga, CarderPlanet, ShadowCrew, Approven.su, and my personal favorite, IAACA (the International Association for th
e Advancement of Criminal Activity). Nearly all these sites require registration, and members are often vetted to keep out the cops. Carders promise “high validity rates” and offer guarantees that 95 percent of their stolen credit cards will work or “your money back!” For the carders engaged in this business, profits are staggering, with over $11 billion lost to global payment card fraud annually. The United States is the largest victim of these thefts, accounting for 47 percent of all fraudulent card activity globally.
IDENTITY THEFT
The illicit use of personally identifiable information (PII) is widespread in the digital underground. The information leaks from insecure data brokers, social media sites, and the unsound handling of your medical, financial, educational, tax, and online shopping transactions. These stolen identities are often referred to as “fullz” by hackers and contain names, addresses, Social Security numbers, dates of birth, workplaces, bank account numbers, bank routing numbers, state driver’s license numbers, mothers’ maiden names, e-mail addresses, and additional online account names and passwords. Nearly 20 percent of American and EU citizens have been the victims of identity theft, and the profits facilitated through the Dark Web PII sales are monumental. Medical identity theft (false claims with stolen IDs) costs the U.S. health-care system $5.6 billion annually, while tax refund identity theft (somebody submitting a fraudulent tax return on your behalf and pocketing the refund) will cost the IRS $21 billion over the next five years—all because we’re leaking massive amounts of data from deeply insecure systems that can easily be traded at tremendous profit on the Dark Net.
DOCUMENTS
Any number of documents can easily be purchased online, including passports, driver’s licenses, citizenship papers, fake IDs, college diplomas, transcripts, immigration documents, and even diplomatic ID cards. Dark Net firms such as Onion Identity Services are glad to sell passports and ID cards for Bitcoin. These documents in turn are used by criminals and terrorists to facilitate their free movement across international borders, to establish new identities, and to launder money. U.S. driver’s licenses (any state) of extremely high quality often ship from China or Russia and cost approximately $200, while passports from the United States or the U.K. will sell for a few thousand dollars.
WEAPONS, AMMUNITION, AND EXPLOSIVES
Just about any weapon you would like to purchase is available online via the Dark Web on sites such as the Armory, Black Market Reloaded, and LiberaTor. Handguns such as Glocks, Berettas, and 9 mm machine pistols with silencers are readily traded here. So too are assault rifles, including AK-47s and Bushmaster M4s (used by Special Forces in Afghanistan and capable of firing 700–950 rounds per minute in full-auto mode)—no waiting period and no background checks required. Also in stock are C-4 explosives from a provider who cheerfully notes “we ship worldwide.” Of course shipping is a bit of a problem: one can’t just FedEx an Uzi without raising some alarm bells. Thus gun purveyors on the Dark Net have adapted well to this challenge and send their products via shielded packaging, disguised to look like other products. The firearms are broken down into smaller component parts and forwarded via special shipments. Weapons merchants can even arrange for “dead drops” where they hide the fully assembled firearms buried in a park, in a rubbish bin, or in an alley. After payment, buyers receive GPS coordinates and descriptions of where the items are hidden. Even military-grade weaponry is available online these days. One Dark Web user going by the name Bohica offers mostly small arms for sale but noted, “If you need artillery, MANPADS [man-portable air-defense systems], ordnance, APCs, Helos we do have resources and can make certain introductions for a fee. Please send your next message through PGP encryption, our public key is on our profile page.”
HIT MEN
As we saw with Silk Road, assassinations are just a click away on the Dark Net. Service providers such as Killer for Hire, Quick Kill, Contract Killer, and C’thulhu all advertise “permanent solutions to common problems.” The mercenaries offering these services proudly note their training with militaries such as the French Foreign Legion or their sniper capabilities honed in Iraq or Afghanistan. Each service has different rules and regulations. One has a strict “no minors policy” and refuses to murder children under eighteen, while another demurs when it comes to political assassinations. No worries, though, there are just as many services that are dedicated to killing government officials, such as the crowdsourced Assassination Market mentioned previously. Prices range from a low of $20,000 to more than $100,000 to kill a police officer. The sites request you provide a recent photograph of the target, as well as home and work addresses, daily routines, and frequent hangouts. Bitcoin gladly accepted, and photographic proof of murder is included standard.
CHILD SEXUAL ABUSE IMAGES
Disturbingly, the Dark Net is a sanctuary for merchants of child pornography, widely offered on underground Tor sites such as Hard Candy, Jailbait, Lolita City, PedoEmpire, and Love Zone. The Family Album offers “exclusive private child sex material by the members” and is a veritable YouTube of self-produced and videotaped child sexual abuse. Kindergarten Porn provides links sorted by a child’s age and gender. E-books are also for sale with titles such as Producing Kiddie Porn for Dummies and How to Practice Child Love. Many sites allow pedophiles to connect and communicate with one another in order to share fantasies or images. They also exchange detailed tactics on how to effectively target, seduce, and engage in sexual acts with children. The volume of these activities is startling. Just one Dark Web site alone had more than twenty-seven thousand registered pedophile members in its forums. Moreover, the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children examines nearly twenty million child sexual abuse images annually, a 4,000 percent increase since 2007. Law enforcement sources report that 19 percent of pedophiles have sexual abuse images of children younger than three years old, 39 percent younger than six years old, and 83 percent younger than twelve years old. Across the Dark Web, experienced pedophiles teach one another how to evade law enforcement authorities and discuss encryption and anonymity techniques to avoid detection online.
HUMAN TRAFFICKING
The Dark Web also facilitates the trafficking in human beings, and numerous Web sites specialize in the sale and trade of both adults and children. The U.S. Department of Justice estimates that trafficking generates upward of $32 billion a year in cash for Crime, Inc. While traditional channels of trafficking remain, online technologies provide traffickers the “unprecedented ability to exploit a greater number of victims and advertise their services across geographic boundaries.” In the United States alone, nearly 200,000 children are trafficked for sex, and a pimp can generate $150,000 to $200,000 a year per child. Nearly 70 percent of the survivors of child trafficking said that they were advertised online at some point during their trafficking situation and forced to have sex up to twenty times a day. These activities are transacted not only via the Dark Web but also relatively openly on social media and in surface Web classified ads. Web sites such as BackPage.com promise “escorts” and “massages,” and advertising by pimps generates nearly $45 million a year in revenue for online classified firms. Not only are children for sale online, but so too are immigrants and other at-risk populations.
HUMAN ORGAN TRAFFICKING
Around the world, there is a vibrant and gruesome black market for body parts. Kidneys can fetch up to $200,000, hearts $120,000, livers $150,000, skin a mere $10 per square inch, a shoulder $500, and a pair of eyeballs $1,500. Where do these bits of humanity come from? Both the living and the dead. Grave robbing is alive and well in the twenty-first century, and many mortuaries around the world are selling parts of those entrusted to their care, correctly assuming the family will never know. Worse, the living poor are at particular risk, actively targeted online and off to sell their organs to wealthy patients in desperate need. In the United States alone, there are more than 100,000 people on the list to receive kidneys, which works out to a ten-year wait. Most will die in just half tha
t time. As a result, wealthy patients head overseas in search of “donors,” driving a flourishing illicit trade in human organs. Crime, Inc. has a full division of dedicated organ brokers who act as middlemen across continents to connect buyers and sellers, whom they guide to broker-friendly physicians, surgeons, and medical facilities. The World Health Organization estimates an illicitly obtained organ is sold every hour within these underground networks. The organs may come from executed prisoners in China, from women in India, forced by their husbands to sell body parts in order to contribute to the family’s income, or from newly arrived Syrian refugees sheltering in Lebanon desperate for cash. Though a kidney may sell for $200,000, those donating the organ are paid far less, perhaps only $2,500 to $10,000, leaving a massive profit for criminal organ brokers. Sadly, those selling body parts receive little or no post-op care, and many die from the operations. Increasingly, these activities are taking place online, in chat rooms and via the Dark Web. The impoverished in places such as India, Bulgaria, and Serbia are posting desperate pleas, such as the one from a homemaker who listed her blood type and phone number and wrote, “I will sell my kidney, my liver, or do anything necessary to survive.” In China, organ brokers are particularly targeting young people in Internet forums with slogans such as “Donate a kidney, buy the new iPad.” At least one seventeen-year-old boy, now in ill health, is known to have taken the deal, after his mother discovered a new iPad in the impoverished family’s home and contacted police.