![]() ![]() Jim Breyer, Facebook’s first big backer, led a £21.3 million investment in 2014. Then I waited to see if it was safe and packs were landing, and they obviously were." Johnnie*, a customer who has used Wickr "a few times", tells me how he got started: "Like everyone, I just saw it all over the sub. ![]() On the DNMUK subreddit – a busy forum where British users and dealers discuss the drugs being sold on the dark net – out of the last 100 "Vendor Reviews", where customers rate the substances they receive in the post, 60 reveal their drugs had been bought using Wickr, while only four months ago there were almost zero mentions of the app. Instead of stopping the trade, these closures have forced many dark net dealers into selling on a different digital platform: the secure messaging app Wickr. Though Dream and a few smaller markets still exist, AlphaBay and Hansa were shut down in July and, since then, buying drugs online has gone through a massive change, especially in the UK.īut is it the change law enforcement predicted? Not exactly. This was replaced by Silk Road 2.0, which in turn was replaced by AlphaBay, Hansa and Dream. Silk Road was the first prominent dark net market, before the FBI shut it down in 2013. In 2017, the Global Drugs Survey found that over a quarter of British drug users bought their supplies on the dark net – more than in any other country except Finland and Norway, and up 200 percent from 2014. Consumers, understandably, are just as interested as journalists. Countless outlets – including VICE – have written extensively on the dark net's dealers, power struggles and quirks, like the fact you can leave online ratings for, say, your last order of Blue Skypes, a luxury not afforded to people still buying their pills from the passenger window of a Golf GTI. It's that final category, drugs, that the marketplaces have become most infamous for. Think of items you're not supposed to have, and chances are you can buy them there: assault rifles, credit card details, every breed of drug under the sun, whether they're conventional, experimental or one-off powders synthesised in a bedroom lab and named after a Stargate character. Dark net marketplaces are essentially of the underworld. ![]()
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