With the untimely death of Philip Seymour Hoffman, there’s a lot in the news about heroin, which sadly is making a big comeback these days. (You’d think after what happened to Kurt Cobain twenty years ago that people would have learned their lesson.) While it’s probably not smart to be selling drugs on the ‘net, that’s apparently what one kid has been accused of doing.
The Daily Beast tells us a 29 year old kid named Ross Ulbricht has been accused of having an internet drug market, which goes under the name Silk Road. He’s potentially facing a life behind bars. As the Beast and Forbes tell us, one of the charges against Ulbricht is “the kingpin statute,” which usually targets mob bosses and bigger drug lords.
This could be the way a lot of dealers are doing business these days, but it’s not really smart because it’s really easy to track you down. Drug deals used to be done with beepers and pay phones, neither of which are cool today, and good luck trying to find a pay phone anywhere. Another key to drug deals is untraceable cash, but you knew that.
Silk Road was called “the Ebay of the online drug world,” and according to a report on Gawker, you could practically buy any drug you wanted on the site. It also made a ton of money, reportedly $1.2 million a month. Like Ebay, a lot of dealers would sell their wears on there, and at one point, there were over 10,000 listings. How did the site, dealers, and buyers keep their anonymity? Through a network originally developed for the military called Tor.
Perhaps this is how things are done in the drug trade today, thanks to the wonders of modern technology, but again, you would think it would be way too risky to get tracked down through the net. This is why whenever you’re buying something illegal, it’s best to do it in person, and with untraceable money. As one senator said of Silk Road, “It’s more brazen than anything else by light years.”
