Dark web drugs markets – more TripAdvisor than Amazon
They used to be known as the “Amazon” or “eBay” of drugs, but modern dark web drug sales use a system more comparable to Yelp or TripAdvisor Ever since Silk Road, the first mass-market point-and-click dark web drugs bazaar, made its debut in January 2011, the DNMs (darknet markets) have been invariably compared to popular […]
That time I visited Roger Clark, aka Mongoose, aka Variety Jones
The man alleged to be Silk Road’s Variety Jones, Roger Thomas Clark, has finally been extradited from Thailand, where he has spent 2 1/2 years in Bangkok Remand, to face trial in the USA. Variety Jones was basically unheard of until the trial of Ross Ulbricht, where he was revealed as a sort of behind-the-scenes […]
How Telstra stole my identity
You can’t have a burner phone without a prepaid SIM, so I guess it’s only fitting that Telstra is using my Fake ID to illustrate their identity requirements There is a long history of people having their photos nicked without attribution and payment by large corporations. It is the reason the very excellent ‘for exposure’ exists. I’ve […]
Murder, they wrote – freelancing for a dark web hitman
Dark web murder-for-hire organisation Besa Mafia never paid any of their would-be hitmen for burning cars for them. The only people paid were their army of freelance writers. Here’s what Besa Mafia had them do. Any freelancer knows that sometimes you have to take some pretty questionable jobs to put dinner on the table. This […]
DNM Vendors, have your say
Below is a callout to DNM vendors to share their views about DNMs and the perceptions of others about what you do. I know some of the independent researchers involved in this initiative personally, the others by reputation, and they have my full confidence that they will pull out all the stops to maintain confidentiality and […]
Some interesting titbits to come out of the latest Silk Road “rogue agent” allegations
I was digging through my Silk Road archives when researching parts of my new book, and came up with a couple of little nuggets surrounding the latest “rogue agent” allegations that I don’t think have been reported yet. TL;DR: What we assumed to be a simple Silk Road scam in early 2013 may have been […]
Dark Web’s CrimeBay raising funds for a hit on Trump
CrimeBay, the new incarnation of Besa Mafia, has stepped up its marketing with a new attempt to extort money by crowdfunding a hit on the new US President. “Donald Trump is an extremely difficult target”, the site acknowledges, “however, he is neither a God nor immortal, and Crime Bay enjoys a challenge.”
What OzFreelancer* did next
A couple of people have asked me about the book I mentioned in my last post. I recently threw in my nice, steady, well-paying but ultimately creatively unfulfilling tech-writing job. So here’s all the things I have in the pipeline that I’m finally getting around to. Another non-fiction book First, I’m working on a proposal for my agent for […]
So what’s been happening on the Dark Web?
The problem with writing a new book is that you save all the good stuff for the book and that leaves you with nothing for the blog. So in desperation, I’ve been clicking on random links from Onion crawlers to see if there’s anything new, relevant and/or even vaguely interesting happening in the deep dark web. […]
A word from one of the Silk Road “Old Guard”
There’s nothing like an inaccurate, poorly-written, unresearched defamatory piece of garbage journalism to bring people out of the woodwork. So I have to thank one Ms Margi Murphy for this laughably bad piece of trash I often lament the loss of Silk Road (v.1.0). I was so entrenched in that place, spending hours a day in the […]