Silk Road forums
Discussion => Off topic => Topic started by: AlbertHoffman1943 on January 05, 2013, 12:57 am
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I'm looking for a historical record.
For sure SR isn't the first of it's kind in online's history. There had to have been others before it....
I would love to know as much about that history as I can learn, particularly ones that got busted and the circumstances surrounding them.
Please share what you know...
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Not really a "marketplace" but this came to mind when I first read your post. Before the darknet I have no idea what it was like, but now I'm curious too.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Hive_(website)
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I believe the farmers market was the first big place to buy drugs, the operated a clearnet site a few years ago I think. I also remember in the early 2000s a lot of people sold things over IRC specifically ketamine, when its legal in about 50% of countries.
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Do you know why those ones shut down?
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The Farmers market was using dummy paypal accounts for payment (i think) and they were using hushmail which is not at all secure. The goverment got info about them through their hushmail accounts.
They might still be arround today if they used PGP, bitcoin, and tor.
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http://www.inquisitr.com/221102/secret-online-drug-market-busted-by-dea/
http://www.emptywheel.net/2012/04/16/dea-busts-tor-operated-farmers-market-drug-market-place/
http://www.smarternootropics.com/2012/04/dea-busts-online-drug-vendors/
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Not really a "marketplace" but this came to mind when I first read your post. Before the darknet I have no idea what it was like, but now I'm curious too.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Hive_(website)
Very interesting!
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@Hofmann
http://dkn255hz262ypmii.onion/index.php?topic=13047.0
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been using them since 2001, none of them were ever on the scale of SR though, few hundred members max.
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been using them since 2001, none of them were ever on the scale of SR though, few hundred members max.
How about some details microboilie...
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One of the earliest online drug forums that has a direct lineage to the community today was good old sandoz labs. Of course the real pioneers were places like the hive of course, and the RCML (research chemical mailing list). Those two were pretty much as far back as anyone around these days can remember. As far as sandoz labs, I guess it must have been around 2005 or so. It was hosted on the clearnet on some free forum host with ads and all. I guess technically speaking undrug predated it, but undrug was more like the first incarnation of what safeorscam is now, although run by completely unrelated people. Pretty much on undrug you had to know a vendors contact information to look up reviews on them. The people on sandoz labs got their starts collecting source information, back in the good old days people would scour search engines and such for hours at a time trying to find one lab in a place like China that was willing to synthesize research chemicals, or one of their resellers. Those were the semi-modern days of sourcing, post operation webtryp though (prior to that it was trivial to find sources online, they had nice google ads and everything. Kind of like today actually.) Anyway it was pretty common for people to trade their sources. And although undrug wasn't strictly speaking a community, after all it had no private message system and I believe it was against the rules to even try to network with people from it, there were names that you saw on review threads pretty frequently. A lot of the times you may recognize the same names posting on non-source forums. I am not sure exactly how it happened, but a lot of us knew a few of us. Then one day one of us made a forum for trading sources on and invited some of us, and it went from there until a nice little community was formed, although it was fairly English Native centric it did have people from several other sorts of countries on it as well. And we all posted all of our sources and they became our communities sources.
Then one of the European members made his own forum, which I guess I will just call the religious forum out of respect to the now long obsolete rule of never discussing it or naming it off of it. He was part of a European community of drug traders, still with interest in research chemicals but a lot more interest in more mainstream illicit drugs as well. SL sort of merged together with his community into the new community. This was of course the best drug forum that ever existed, and was one of the first largely international drug forums, if not the first. The reign of the religious forum lasted quite a while and it was awesome, the community consisted of highly intelligent people and had its fair share of people with highly technical chemistry and even computer knowledge, although the forums security standards were no where near the standards used today.
The next major forum was also started by Europeans, r-c.n is what I will call it. This forum wasn't as high quality as the previous two, however it served a nice purpose and brought a lot of new blood into the online scene. It also caused a bit of a culture clash, and actually the religious forum shut down partially due to paranoia about one of the members on this forum, who acted sketchily and actually managed to use some pretty skillful measures in order to determine the existence and partial membership information about the religious forum. Anyway I cannot recall exactly how it happened, but part of the people from the religious forum and part of the people from r-c.n came together into a new forum called FTWR, which later turned into FTGB.
The next major Era came when one of the members of FTGB splintered off and made a new forum called su.pplier.info , this was one of the most active and large forums of the time with several hundred members. Quite a lot of new people also joined the party at this point in time, and a lot of the people around today got their start during this time. Another forum also came up about this time, I will just call it L , and I wont talk much about it simply because the people from it probably don't want me to. I always viewed them as rather distinct, where as SL -> Religious / r-c.n -> FTGB/FTWR -> Su.p was sort of a merger of groups and the same members over time, I don't exactly know much about their history. 'OS' was another such forum during this time, and additionally I will out of respect not go into much about them either, even though today it is entirely pointless to keep these things secret as all of these forums are long gone or evolved into completely new things. DZF also came out around this time, it was the first 'really big' drug forum with something like 600 members, unfortunately it turned out to be run by the FBI. Around this time we had been really starting to beef our security up to the standards they are at today: GPG became more common and on some forums mandatory, we were not using hidden services but pretty much everyone was using Tor. Of course DZF banned the use of Tor because after all only scammers use it. I think that this is the first time when the forum communities started to attract law enforcement attention, there is pretty good evidence that there was not a law enforcement presence on the earlier forums simply because despite an almost complete lack of security busts were essentially unheard of.
su.pplier split off into a series of hidden service forums, BBS, TLG and then BB. Those were the first real hidden service forums, although DrugsTor was sort of the first proof of concept, it didn't last very long and was misconfigured and leaked its IP address anyway. During this time our security continued to improve substantially as well. There have also been several dozen other English speaking forums, I don't know all of their histories and I know some of them wouldn't want me to say anything at all about them. Some today are still quite insecure, using no proxies and hushmail, they really do rely heavily on security by obscurity. Others today are still quite secure though. I really can't even look at the forums today as a linear thing , growing from old groups changing server administrators or leadership / merging together with each other and gaining new members. Simply because there have been so many now, so many different people in administrative positions, so many server and name changes , so many different distinct groups of people that it is just impossible. Not to mention that this is only the communities I have been a part of or been aware of , I am sure there are dozens I have not. There have been forums for communities that don't speak English as the primary language, Russian, Dutch, Swedish, etc. I know little about those forums except from the people I have met on international forums (which speak English as the common language).
The first actual marketplace style site similar to SR would have to be the farmers market, actually that is another community as well that had a pretty early start. I believe they started as a mailing list for a specific vendor and only evolved into a forum at a later point in time though. I had heard of their operators before but I think my first presence on one of their community forums was their the farmers market Tor hidden service. OVDB was sort of the SR equivalent from the more mainstream forum scene. Then of course there is SR, which has in all honestly been completely unprecedented in its popularity. Although some of the forums I have mentioned have had very big bulk vendors doing single deals in the hundreds of thousands of dollars on them, the number of people doing smaller deals on SR probably adds up to more than any other forum has managed to move, I think SR has been estimated as having 22 million dollars worth of drugs a year move through it and that is certainly quite a lot.
I am sure I have missed a lot of forums, and I am sure that this is not a very comprehensive history of the online scene, however it would literally take a book to make that and would require a lot more people than just me.
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actually I take it back, I can still see things as linear. Everyone from all of the other forums is moving to a one massive singularity at SR.
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nice read kmf, thanks.
I had no idea there was so much history in this.
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That was a nice, detailed overview. I remember some of those forums.
Only thing I would add is usenet. That was probably the first online place where people bought and sold drugs.
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Excellent post Kmf! Really interesting read.
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wow extremely interesting. I have been on the forums since 02 moreso for the anabolics support but have recently stumbled across this and couldn't be more pleased with the security and quality of members especially willing to help others
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I used to get amazing weed delivered to my university accommodation via Budmail (and I think another site called BudMonkey), paid via E-Gold. I'd never have imagined how easy the whole process would get - buying E-Gold was a nightmare!
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Maybe it depends on where you live, but buying e-gold wasn't much different from buying bitcoins. You had to send money to a virtual currency exchange and then get it deposited to your e-gold account. Those exchanges were more fly by night, that's one difference. MtGox has been a very stable business so far.
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actually I take it back, I can still see things as linear. Everyone from all of the other forums is moving to a one massive singularity at SR.
kmfkewn, thx for the lesson - your knowledge seem quite thorough. other than farmers market, have there been any other busts of these types of forums and marketplaces? if yes, could you supply details? links to existing online info would be very helpful too...
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DZF was the first forum that went down, although to be fair it was operated by the FBI. They busted several of the vendors on it, particularly they seemed focused on people selling opiates. Other than DZF and TFM I don't think any other forum has had an entire operation against it or substantial busts related to it. Of course individual members on several forums have been busted due to interceptions, but as far as actual operations aimed at internet drug dealing forums go, DZF and TFM are all that I am aware of.
Of course I am speaking in terms of recreational drug forums, there have been two other major operations against online drug dealing communities though. The first of which was operation webtryp which targeted vendors selling research chemicals (although no forums, they operated from their own independent websites), the second of which was operation raw deal which targeted the steroid forums.
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What about Topix ? It seemed popular among many. Anybody ordered on Topix before ?
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Thanks kmf - very interesting read +1