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

Posted by msmash on from the market-movements dept.

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.

3 of 113 comments (clear)

  1. I keep wondering why we don't legalize drugs by rsilvergun · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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.

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    1. Re:I keep wondering why we don't legalize drugs by sjames · · Score: 4, Insightful

      You mean as opposed to now where they're strung out on illegal drugs and so have little to lose by adding one more criminal charge?

      Try running the prisons properly and legalizing drugs. Then the prospects are: Avoid crime and use drugs or commit a crime and 'enjoy' a few years in a drug free prison.

      With the significantly reduced prison population and taxes on the drugs, we will easily be able to afford to upgrade the prisons and still save money.

  2. Re:the real solution by sjames · · Score: 4, Interesting

    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.