Silk Road still offers dubious drug delights

Mail-order online sites don’t die, they simply get reloaded

BASKETS stashed with cocaine or perhaps a bankie of Swazi Gold, was meant to be the future.

Then the FBI changed all that.

The Feds busted the Silk Road, the largest online drug bazaar, in October 2013 and with it went the new trend of sourcing narcotics in cyberspace.

Middle-class druggies had to once again head out on to the hard streets to find their highs. Or so it seemed. But online drug sites don’t die, they just get reloaded.

Four years later and the Silk Road is still around, in name that is.

Silk Road 3.0 has risen from the shuttered ruins of Silk Road 1.0 and Silk 2.0, both the casualties of FBI investigations.

The first Silk Road died when it was seized by the FBI after it arrested the founder of the site, Ross William Ulbricht, who went by the pseudonym Dread Pirate Roberts.

A month later in November 2013, Silk Road 2.0 was launched by some of the original administrators of the Silk Road.

It lasted a year before the alleged owner of the crypto site, Blake Benthall, was arrested.

But today a click through the site’s catalogue reveals the usual wide selection of narcotics.

There is cocaine, black tar heroin and South Africa’s best known illicit export, Durban Poison.

As with the older Silk Road, Bitcoin is still the currency, delivery is by post and a Tor browser is needed to join the party.

But it is the drug site’s repu- tation that might have changed.

“I can’t imagine anybody buying from it at all, people don’t even talk about Silk Road 3 anymore,” said drug trends researcher Tim Bingham.

But there appears to be at least one South African drug dealer slinging dope in this corner of the Dark Web.

“I specialise in Durban Poison and dank weed from neighbouring Swaziland. Not the regular sh*tty Swazi – I have the best Swazi on Earth,” boasts Revenant Child, on his profile.

Ten grams of the dealer’s Swazi goes for the equivalent of $50 (about R646).

E-mails to him requesting an interview went unanswered.

The dealer also advertises his dope on another cyber-drug site called Dream Market.

Its tag line is that it has been around since 2013, which is ages in a world where international drug cops are continually sniffing around looking to make some real-world arrests.

“My assumption is that this (buying drugs on the dark web) is not a big thing anymore.

“People are just too wary. It is not the open flea market it once was,” said Simon Howell, a drug researcher based at the University of Cape Town.

Bingham believes the dark web drug market will evolve.

“I think the natural progression is for independent vendors to have their own market places rather than being hosted on a larger server.”

Another innovation Bingham feels will become more used in the cyber drug world is peer-to-peer networks.

This is the same technology behind Pirate Bay, the site that enables users to illegally download movies.

Peer- to- peer file sharing can be more difficult for law enforcement to track.

Then there is always the problem of keeping customers happy – complicated technology could drive consumers back to making drug deals on those street corners.

“There has to be a balancing act between detection or the risk of detection and the ability of public to access the site,” said Howell.

A screen grab from the Silk Road website, where drug users can buy an assortment of drugs and have them delivered by post.