Platform Criminals

Hello, Grams scrape feedbacks from the markets sir, you must sign up to your market, buy some stuff and then place a feedback before you will see it on Grams. If you want to add a Grams review, you must search for your vendor on the InfoDesk, then click on the

‘review’ button and place it. That’s how it works :).(Figure 77)

The numbers in parentheses shown in the image are reviews, not sales and Grams plans to have a vendor directory on the site, where reviews will be collated from different markets.¹³³

Updating the site every three days, they added new features to the search algorithm to give the user the best results possible, such as a ‘scoring system’ based on ‘keywords, number of transactions, good reviews, and the number of clicks from our site’ (Anonymous 2014). The Grams anonymous admin also planned to add other features for discrimination such as price, country and market. When this interview was conducted, sites like Agora, Pandora and Silk Road 2 were still up and running and they were looking to integrate more sites into the search engine.

Figure 77: Grams Info Desk

however, buried that deep because ‘cyberspace doesn’t have depth’ (ibid). Yet his caveat is to be careful, cautious and responsible when exploring it as he also relates meeting people who buy guns, illicit drugs or solicit illegal services with their Bitcoin (Bartlett 2014a:240).

Figure 78: Dutch Police: Active at Dark Markets? You have our attention (2018)

The former Silk Road 2.0 traded in many forms of drugs, marijuana and cocaine ‘were the most popular items but customers could order almost anything, from ecstasy to magic mushrooms, from OxyContin to Valium’ (Glenny 2015:3). When searching with Grams I had access to these Darknet markets, also called cryptomarkets, which rely on anonymising technology and

electronic currencies to facilitate licit and illicit transactions among participants in relative anonymity (Dittus et al. 2018:217, 278). As mentioned in Chapter 5, Platform Capitalism is changing the nature of markets through multi-sided platforms where ‘[t]heir business models typically involve rent-seeking in the form of transaction fees, and other forms of profit derived from the hosted transactions and resulting data trails’ (Srnicek 2016:21 cited by ibid). Darknet markets are ‘two-sided markets that operate as Tor Hidden Services, connecting large numbers of vendors to large numbers of buyers, offering a wide range of licit and illicit products that are catalogued in a structured manner comparable to e-commerce platforms’ (ibid:280). In recent years, on Silk Road, police have infiltrated sites and certain markets (Figure 78) as with the site Hansa, which was an eponymous keyword on Grams’ Flow before it was taken down.¹³⁴ (Figure 79)

134 Dutch law enforcement took over the Hansa site in 2017, which led to the arrest and prosecution of many users.

‘While the live Hansa site was protected by Tor, the development server had somehow been exposed online, where the security firm discovered it and recorded its IP address’ (Greenberg 2018).

Figure 79: keyword ‘hansa’ with Grams’ Flow

When I clicked on the keyword ‘silkroaddrugs.org’––I received and advert to sign up for the

‘Anonymity’ newsletter, a type of journalism that publishes on the market places. (Figure 80)

Figure 80: keyword ‘silkroaddrugs’ with Grams’ Flow

The empirical study Platform Criminalism: The ‘Last-Mile’ Geography of the Darknet Market Supply Chain analyses the flow of the online drug market supply chain through the lens of economic geography and the relationships between producers, sellers and buyers worldwide.

These Dark Net markets are accessed by users searching with the Tor Browser that hides the user’s IP address and blocks locative data, thereby revealing ‘the ways in which a layer of the internet specifically designed to conceal geography might in turn alter material economic geographies’ (ibid:277). In their conclusion, the authors state that the vendors of cannabis, cocaine and opiates are located in the consumer countries, not the producer countries and that Dark Net purchasing occurs in the countries of consumption, not production, possibly ‘leaving the old trafficking routes intact’. Their findings ‘suggest that the geography of darknet market trades is primarily driven by existing consumer demand, rather than new demand fostered by these markets’ (ibid:285). Furthermore, the study delivers a conceptual contribution to the literature on ‘platform capitalism’ through their analysis of economic geography by situating

‘darknet markets in existing platform discourse’, yet showing illicit supply chains.¹³⁵

Their outcomes support the media reputation of the Dark Net and the Silk Road, in particular, as an illicit drug economy, however, the reputation economy concerning customer service is contradictory. Many consider the former Silk Road to be the eBay of the Dark Net (Bartlett 2014b:6; Glenny 2015:3; Dittus et al. 2018:278), where ‘the site administrators don’t deliver the goods themselves but act as market facilitators between a buyer and a seller, getting a cut from every transaction’ (Glenny 2015:3). At eBay and Amazon, customers write recommendations that determine whether other buyers will decide to frequent the services of a dealer. The same could be said of the Silk Road as the Dark Net economic model with my discovery of the Info Desk and Grams subreddit. En route through his own ethnographic excursions, Bartlett discovered the vendor review system and the Dark Net secret:

The most surprising statistics about the Silk Road 2.0 is not the amount of available drugs (although that is truly staggering); it’s the satisfaction scores (2014b:6).

Reflected in the 95% customer satisfaction reports, the reputation economy of the Silk Road supports the theory that ‘the real secret of dark net markets is good customer service’ (Bartlett 2014:165). Analogous to Google PageRank that determines which websites are more frequently visited, based on ranking through authority (Chapter 3) and advertising (Chapter 5), the

reputation economy of the Silk Road enabled its expansion and hegemony, not only its discoverability through Dark Net search engines. ‘Once a site like Silk Road acquires a reputation for reliability it tends to grow rapidly’ (Glenny 2015:3), exhibiting features of the

‘network effect’. This recommendation system on the Dark Net is also analogous to Google’s personalisation and sorting people into groups of others ‘like them’ (Chun 2016) from Chapter 5––yet vendors (and buyers) can switch identities through pseudonymity and onion addresses and there is fierce competition, like any capitalistic market. Trust also plays a salient role in this reputation and recommendation economy.

These networked relations were found to be shaped by preferential attachment, and a need to develop trusted relationships among anonymous participants. Such structures allow for a diffusion of commerce that is more amendable to new entrants, including

135 ‘We further acknowledge the support of Google for funding the “Economic Geographies of the Darknet” project at the Oxford Internet Institute’ (Dittus et al. 2018:285).

bulk traders, potentially supporting subsequent redistribution elsewhere (Dittus et al.

2018:279).

Figure 81: A list of sites with reviews and recommendations (2014).

The reputation economy of the sites increased as well as the number of users who had the tech-savvy to access the site and then became ‘happy customers’, expressed by their reviews (Bartlett 2014b:6) as shown by the results from a search on Grams with the keyword ‘cocaine’, along with the announcement of major changes to the search algorithm (May 2, 2014). (Figure 81)

‘The user-ranking system provides a safer, systematic and reliable way of determining the quality and purity of the product’ (ibid). These platforms put strangers in touch with each other anonymously, who might never have met in the ‘physical’ world and, if they did, other things might happen.

The perceived benefits include a reduction of physical danger compared to street trades, increased product quality at cheaper prices, speedy delivery, and the convenience of varied and well-presented offerings from the same source (Dittus et al. 2018:285).

With the help of specialised search engines for Tor Hidden Services, this ‘novel form of [drug]

retail distribution in consumer countries’ offers potentially less risk for both buyers and sellers (ibid).