Dream Market, the Top Dark Web Marketplace, Will Shut Down Next Month (zdnet.com)

Dream Market, today's top dark web marketplace, today announced plans to shut down on April 30. From a report: The announcement came on the same day Europol, FBI, and DEA officials announced tens of arrests and a massive crackdown on dark web drug trafficking. The timing of the four announcements immediately sent most of Dream Market's users and dark web threat intel analysts into a frenzy of theories that law enforcement might have already seized the site and are now running a honeypot operation. Their fears are based on a similar event from June 2017 when Dutch police took over Hansa Market and ran the site for a month while collecting evidence on the portal's users. Law enforcement later used passwords collected from Hansa Market users to gain access to accounts on other dark web marketplaces.

Comments

I keep wondering why we don't legalize drugs

[rsilvergun]

There's pretty broad support for it. I know folks who don't want to legalize the hard stuff (think cocaine, meth and heroine) but there's places that have done it and then treated addiction as a medical condition and it's worked well.

It does mean you can't just abandon addicts though, e.g. you can't just lock them up in a hole in the ground, you need to provide treatment, but even then the treatment is often cheaper than paying somebody to guard the hole, so to speak.

the real solution

[slashmydots]

I was shocked to hear that people were sending the drugs Fedex, USPS, and UPS like it was ebay or something. When I asked online why they can't just put drug sniffing dogs in all USPS mail hubs, everyone said it's unreasonable search and seizure. That sounds ridiculous to me. If a cop looks in the window of your car and see a pile of drugs, they don't need your permissions or a warrant to "search" it at that point. The same goes for sniffing drug residue off the OUTSIDE of a box and then opening it. That would instantly solve the entire problem because without a shipping carrier, there is no dark web drug sales. Why are they not doing this?!?!

Re:the real solution

[sjames]

If they did that, they would be forced to admit that there's enough residue on common items that the dog would alert to everything.

For example, money. Pretty much all of it will test positive for at least cocaine.

The dirty secret: Most of the time the dog alerts due to subtle cues from it's handler, not from something it smells.

Re:the real solution

[AvitarX]

let's see.

1 dog, 6 packages/minute (unlikely they could actually do one in 10 seconds)).
8 hours sniffing/day (no idea how many they actually can work, but between food, and walks, and what not, seems reasonable)

that's 2800/dog/day

UPS sends 15.8 million packages/day on average.

So that's 5600 drug dogs (though they'd need 50% more in the winter).

So, 4000 for the dog, 1000 for the training stuff, 2500 for food and vet over it's life, for 5 productive years

1500/year * 5000 is 7.5 million/year.

Of course, 5200 handlers is likely another 150 million or so.

And to cover Christmas we're at 50% more.

That's a lot of money, ignoring the fact that a 10 second per package bottle neck would make shipping that many packages practically impossible.