Websites help Hyderabad drug dealers find customers

Hyderabad: Silk Road, the drug peddling website in the darknet, was shut down following a bust by FBI in 2013. But with its closure, the plot of the ever-growing darknet drug market just thickened. 

Dozens of clones of the website sprang up in deep web. Modelled on Amazon and eBay, these websites were well organised community marketplaces, complete with profiles, listings, and transaction reviews. There is one major difference: Everything was anonymous on the site. 

These websites don’t show up on regular search engines. To access the darknet, one needs special search skills.

Combining an anonymous interface with traceless payments in the digital currency bitcoin, the sites allow thousands of drug dealers and nearly 10 lakh worldwide customers to find each other.

The first Silk Road was active from 2011 to 2013. According to the FBI, Silk Road managed a business of more than $1 billion in sales. It had multiple drug categories with 13,000 listings from sellers. After the FBI bust, site founder Ross Ulbricht from Texas, USA was arrested.

The marketplace crashed but the widely publicised case made the website’s name even more famous. Within a few months, new websites started appearing in the darknet.

Not many Indians figured in the list of Silk Road users which the FBI revealed in 2013. Two years later, Calvin and a few others from India started using the second generation Silk Road. Excise officials suspect Calvin must have paid with bitcoins.

Tor browser used for anonymity 
Hundreds of sites lurk in the darknet, creating havens for people with likeminded interests. To accessing these sites, a user needs Tor, a browser developed by the US Navy, which gives anonymity to the user by shuffling their IP addresses with the millions others around the world.

Tor, “The Onion Router”, was launched in 2002 and has since become a tool for all types of clandestine communications, from circumventing censorship in countries like Egypt during the Arab Spring to allowing sites like Silk Road Tor’s encryption is so layered, that TS police has not been able to break it so far.

There are darknet email services that allow people to send and receive email without revealing location or identity.

Earlier, when the Hyderabad police busted credit and debit card fraudsters, a few offenders confessed that they had bought the details online. Investigation hit a roadblock when the officials could not find the websites. A large mafia is active in darknet selling card details.