If you were to walk around a Russian city, you might not realise it but hundreds of small packages of drugs, could be just below the surface, buried in the ground, or maybe attached to the back of a nearby drainpipe with magnets, or hidden inside a hole in a wall. These little "treasures" have been ordered online from a vendor operating on a darknet platform and then hidden by couriers known as 'Kladmen' all over the place waiting to be collected - this is the "dead drop" method.

The darknet markets servicing Russia have revolutionized the illicit drug markets in the country, which has seen an explosion in the consumption of synthetic drugs like methadone, mephedrone or Alpha-PVP. The vendors run a network of chemists, wholesalers, and Kladmen. Sportsman, hired thugs, roam around looking for Seagulls (people who steal dead drops) and punishing Kladmen on behalf of vendors, before uploading the punishments to social media as a warning to others.

For many years, Hydra, the largest DNM the world has ever known, defeated all competition and reigned supreme, handling over $5 billion dollars of cryptocurrency during its lifespan. But in 2022, it was taken down and like the mythical beast it was named after, new heads sprouted in its place - OMG!OMG!, Mega, Kraken, Blacksprut - all vying for position, competing for market share and creating the most audacious public marketing stunts and highly produced online videos.

The DNMs, with connections to the precursor markets of China and India, operate on TOR, have pushed synthetic drugs into all corners of Russia, democratizing the production process, with how-to guides and readily available lab equipment, and even created an apprenticeship scheme for prospective Kladmen, with a guaranteed job at the end.

The whole process is highly anonymised from production to transportation, and from purchase to delivery through the dead drop method. We have seen darknet markets affecting the drug appetites of an entire nation and beyond.

Speaker(s):

Max Daly, Journalist who specialises in drugs and organized crime. He is an Orwell Prize winner, co-authored of the book Narcomania and the co-author of the GITOC paper 'Breaking Klad: Russia’s Dead Drop Drug Revolution'.

Patrick Shortis, Senior Blockchain Intelligence Analyst working on the illicit drugs program at TRM Labs and co-author of the GI’s paper ‘Breaking Klad: Russia’s Dead Drop Drug Revolution’.

Links:

Breaking Klad: Russia’s Dead Drop Drug Revolution

Global Initiative against Transnational Organized Crime

(Podcast) “Death Can Wait”: Drugs on the Frontline in Ukraine

Additional Links:

https://home.treasury.gov/news/press-releases/jy0701

https://meph.lenta.ru/articles/1-popularity

https://lenta.ru/news/2024/11/27/borby-s-rasprostraneniem-narkotikov/

https://lenta.ru/news/2024/11/27/milonov-predlozhil-proverit-vseh-rossiyan-na-narkotiki/

https://lenta.ru/news/2024/11/28/v-gosdume-vyskazalis-ob-epidemii-mefedrona-v-rossii/

https://argumenti.ru/society/2023/06/838979

https://www.tiktok.com/@brem100/video/7242272283954253058?lang=en

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sWTmaRvpViw

https://www.tiktok.com/@moriarti.dark/video/7271777133335153926

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https://meduza.io/en/feature/2024/02/07/when-a-college-student-challenged-russia-s-top-censorship-activist-at-her-q-a-event-she-responded-by-threatening-him-with-prosecution

https://novayagazeta.eu/articles/2023/12/20/mother-russia-en

https://www.google.com/maps/place/Obukhovets,+Leningrad+Oblast,+Russia,+187047/@59.4806054,31.2688815,13z/data=!4m6!3m5!1s0x46bdb94966834f73:0xbfe5e983110f840f!8m2!3d59.4952008!4d31.2902649!16s%2Fg%2F1pzpdbhfc?entry=ttu&g_ep=EgoyMDI0MTIxMS4wIKXMDSoASAFQAw%3D%3D

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https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/former-dea-agent-sentenced-extortion-money-laundering-and-obstruction-related-silk-road

https://www.forbes.com/sites/ryanmac/2013/11/08/meet-the-silk-road-employee-that-the-dread-pirate-roberts-allegedly-tried-to-murder/

https://www.ice.gov/news/releases/administrator-silk-road-website-and-drug-vendor-plead-guilty-drug-conspiracy

https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2017/04/silk-road-ross-ulbricht-drugs-murder

https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2436643

https://t.me/IrinaVolk_MVD/826

https://t.me/skgovby/8901 /

https://lenta.ru/articles/2022/03/24/sportiki/

https://darknark.lenta.ru/article/part3-broken-lives

https://www.themoscowtimes.com/2024/09/24/russia-moves-to-allow-criminal-defendants-to-fight-in-ukraine-a86456

https://www.themoscowtimes.com/2024/10/01/russias-army-plans-to-enlist-20k-criminal-defendants-for-ukraine-war-istories-a86534

https://www.legal-tools.org/doc/8eed35/pdf/

https://severpost.ru/read/180945/

https://socradar.io/beyond-hacktivism-deanon-club-killnet-and-the-russian-dark-web-market-wars/

https://www.bankinfosecurity.com/hostile-takeover-kraken-hacks-rival-dark-market-solaris-a-20986

https://therecord.media/pro-kremlin-hackers-target-latvias-parliament-after-declaring-russia-a-sponsor-of-terrorism

https://www.thetimes.com/world/article/pro-kremlin-hackers-killnet-hit-latvia-with-biggest-cyberattack-in-its-history-2jvmp8hk7

https://www.bitdefender.com/en-gb/blog/hotforsecurity/pro-russian-killnet-group-hits-us-airline-websites-with-ddos-attack

https://www.darkreading.com/cloud-security/killnet-ddos-attack-royal-family-website

https://dzen.ru/b/Y-5DIbb7bh7QW5SR

https://m.vk.com/wall-66678575_81399673?lang=en

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https://www.youtube.com/@Jessica_Ocean

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_592OyIvV5U

https://lenta.ru/news/2024/12/02/organizatoram-torgovavshey-po-vsey-rossii-narkoimperii-vynesli-prigovor/

https://therecord.media/hyrda-darknet-drug-marketplace-kingpin-sentenced-life-russia

https://www.themoscowtimes.com/2024/12/02/russia-sentences-alleged-founder-of-hydra-darknet-site-to-life-in-prison-a87198

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-61002904

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https://www.justice.gov/opa/press-release/file/1490906/dl

https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/justice-department-investigation-leads-shutdown-largest-online-darknet-marketplace

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https://socradar.io/under-the-spotlight-ramp-forum/

https://tass.ru/proisshestviya/4572560

https://darknark.lenta.ru/article/part1-the-war

https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/security/us-charges-three-men-with-creating-and-running-first-ever-mirai-botnet/

https://www.zdnet.com/article/dyn-confirms-mirai-botnet-involved-in-distributed-denial-of-service-attack/

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2016/nov/03/cyberattack-internet-liberia-ddos-hack-botnet

https://www.datacenterdynamics.com/en/news/failed-mirai-botnet-campaign-takes-900000-germans-offline/

https://explodingtopics.com/blog/iot-stats

https://spectrum.ieee.org/mirai-botnet

https://www.radware.com/security/ddos-knowledge-center/ddospedia/mirai/

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https://globalinitiative.net/analysis/deep-dive-podcast/

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https://tass.com/society/866067

https://www.wired.com/2014/11/operation-onymous-dark-web-arrests/

https://www.wired.com/2014/12/interview-darkside-russias-favorite-dark-web-drug-lord/

https://www.chainalysis.com/blog/how-darknet-markets-fought-for-users-in-wake-of-hydra-collapse-2022/

A dead drop is the act of hiding a packet of drugs for someone who can later come and pick it up.

It's a classic sort of method of spycraft.

He you don't even have to meet or know the person.

When I first went onto a Russian darknet market and got into Hydra for the first time, what really struck me straight away was the visuals.

Because the level of graphic design on the landing page for every single vendor's store was just so far beyond what had been achieved in the West.

There's no need for the new guys on the block to rely on drug trafficking gangs, the old roots, the old families, because they make their own drugs.

I would say it's been like a bloodless coup.

There has been a complete takeover of Russia's drug trade.

Welcome to Deep Dive from the Global Initiative Against Transnational Organized Crime.

I'm Jack Meaghan Vickers and this is Drugs Dead Drops and the Battle Over Russian Net Markets.

So imagine that a bunch of friends are meeting up to go out for a night, just a few bars, maybe a party.

One of them suggests that they should buy some drugs to make the evening a bit more wild.

In the UK they might reach out to a friend of a friend because he knows someone, a local dealer.

They reach out on WhatsApp and a few minutes later a guy turns up in a car.

They make the deal through the car window and then they drive off.

Pretty easy, pretty seamless in the drug trade usually.

If it ain't broke, don't fix it.

This is journalist Max Daly who specializes in drugs and organized crime.

He's an Orwell Prize winner and co author of the book Narcomania and also co author of the GI paper Breaking Russia's Dead Drop Drug Revolution.

I think in the west there is a very, very easy and efficient way of buying drugs.

And that is the face to face system in the west is what everyone does.

It's like falling off a log.

The risk is fairly low that you're going to be caught and jailed and certainly for small amounts of drugs.

If you want to buy your drugs in a more normalized way, which is how most people buy drugs in the west, in Europe and in the US they don't buy them online, they buy them by calling up their friend, friend of a friend, or by messaging someone on WhatsApp.

That's how people buy drugs.

They go to a party, they bump into someone.

All that stuff is so easy to do.

Or if you're more tech savvy and more organized, you might jump onto Tor the darknet and purchase some drugs from an online shop.

In a few days, those drugs will arrive in the post.

But this way of purchasing illicit drugs is still relatively niche compared to face to face.

But in Russia, it's totally different.

The darknet markets have revolutionized the way consumers purchase illicit drugs.

There's no need for the new guys on the block to rely on drug trafficking gangs, the old roots, the old families, because they make their own drugs, they completely forget about these people.

They don't have to run neighborhoods with guns because they sell in secret.

There might be some gangsters now involved, say in the state, at a state level who are getting some payback from this potentially.

But in terms of the drug trade, I would say it's been like a bloodless coup.

I think there has been a complete takeover of Russia's drug trade.

With no gunfights, with no argument.

It's just happened.

The ecosystem that's grown around the Russian darknet markets is sleek, modern, highly efficient, secretive and highly profitable.

And it has spread throughout Russia and into some neighboring countries.

And that's what we're going to be talking about in this episode.

Well, a major bust on the dark Web, the largest and longest running illegal marketplace in all the world is shut down.

Officials in Germany made that announcement today.

The operation part of a month long effort with the U.S.

justice Department.

The illegal marketplace called Hydra Market officials.

Say it's a Russian language site on the dark web.

They say it sold illicit drugs, counterfeit currency, stolen information and hacking services.

Officials say they also seized 25 million bucks worth of bitcoin from Hydra's servers.

Now, Hydra was an absolute beast in this world.

Over the course of its existence, it was estimated that over $5 billion worth of cryptocurrency went through this platform.

The story of Hydra is key to understanding how the bloodless couple Max described took place.

They completely changed drug markets in Russia.

But first, let's go back to the very beginning.

Many people will be familiar with the story of the Silk Road.

In Russia, Darknet markets had also appeared.

A few small markets like R2D2, Wayaway, Amber Road, Molina and Rutor.

But the one that really took off was the Russian Anonymous Marketplace, or ramp.

It was a platform that kind of acted as signposting for vendors, so vendors could rent a space on the site and kind of say, hey, I'm selling.

This is Patrick Shortis, a senior blockchain intelligence analyst working on the illicit Drugs Program at TRM Labs & Co author of the GIS paper Breaking Russia's Dead Drop Drug Revolution.

In order to buy, you'd have to contact one of these vendors, and that often happened off platform on a cryptid messaging platform called Jabba.

And essentially there was a bit of technical know how needed to make this work.

Like it wasn't just a very straightforward process.

Ramp was administered by this guy known as Darkseid, whose avatar was Edward Norton's character from fight club.

Of course, since then, we know that bitcoin isn't anonymous at all.

In fact, it's pseudonymous and traceable.

Despite the appreciation shown by Darkside to Silk Road, Ramp was quite different.

It was decentralized.

And this was something Darkseid was keen to maintain.

It had very active forums discussing everything from hacking to drugs.

Although subjects like politics were banned from the platform, as Darkside said that this was to avoid unwanted attention.

Other illicit goods were also banned from the site, like firearms or pornography.

The clientele of Ramp was exclusively Russian, while which is perhaps why it avoided any dealings with international law enforcement.

Like other darknet markets over the years, Ramp had 14,000 users, and Darkside said that the site made around $250,000 a year from the sales of illicit drugs.

Granted, that doesn't sound like a lot, but the reason for this was that Ramp didn't take commission from drug sales, but took a fee for the ability to trade on the platform.

So it didn't matter whether you were making hundreds of deals or just a handful.

Everyone paid the same.

At the same time, Ramp launched a series of attacks on its rivals, destroying R2D2 with a series of distributed denial of service or DDoS attacks.

At the same time, RAMP began to revolutionize the drug buying process.

Russian Anonymous Marketplace came up with this feature that really changed how people Went about buying drugs.

Because the way that it used to work was that order for you to buy drugs on the site, you would have to contact a vendor, and the vendor would, you know, ask you what you wanted.

You'd make an order.

They would go out into Russia and hide your order somewhere for you to pick up.

And then you would have to then go and pick it up.

And that's quite a slow process.

You know, you make the order, they go out, they come back, you go out, pick it up, you come back.

And what the administrators of RAMP came up with was, was this process of automating this a bit.

Instead of you making the order and then the vendor doing the dead drop, the vendor would just go out into the street and hide all of his drugs across different spaces in Russia.

So maybe in a forest, maybe down the back of an alleyway, what have you.

And then he would advertise the fact that he had addresses to sell locations where drugs were, and then you would buy one of those locations.

So now the vendor just does one big series of drops, goes online and sells those locations.

And this immediately speeds up the entire process because you can order it and your locations are ready to go immediately.

And so that, I think, was really what changed things for this model of dealing was the fact that suddenly you could buy your drugs and get them the same day.

Given the quantity of drugs being purchased, shop owners used couriers to place the drugs in Russia.

These people are known as clad men.

And to improve efficiency further, ramp created training for these couriers and a kind of how to guide or best practices on dead drops.

Called the clad man's Bible.

It basically describes how to go about doing the job of hiding drug packages, both in a city or in the outskirts of cities, what materials you'll need, what kind of operational security you should follow.

And it's a very different kind of set of problems, right, because they need to think about what happens if the police stop you, how not to look shady, how to go and scout out all of the different places that you want to drop the drugs and make sure that you make those drops without raising any suspicion.

So some of the advice in it may be first, do a route of everywhere you plan to make the drops without the drugs on you, just to kind of get a sense of each hiding spot, make a note of them in your mind, and then go and do them all in a row so that you're not just trying to do it all at once and possibly putting yourself in danger.

Another bit of information might be on how to create an encrypted partition on your phone so that if the police do stop you, they'll look through your phone and they won't see anything that looks like drug related information.

But actually you'll have an encrypted partition in something that looks like a calculator or what have you, where actually within there are all the pictures you've taken of all the drugs and you know, the app that you're having conversations with the guys who are running the network or what have you, it will cover the correct placements for correct different types of drops.

So there are three different ways in which drug drops are made in Russia.

One of them is a magnet.

So drugs are attached to a small, small neodymium magnet and that might be attached to anything metal, the bottom of a phone box or the back of a street pipe or something.

And in this guide, it describes the benefits and drawbacks of all of them.

So, for example, a magnet is very good for being able to quickly pick it up and move on.

But it's not great for leaving in place because there's lots of people out there in Russia who are aware of magnets with drugs on them all over the place.

And so if you leave something on a magnet, it's probably going to last a couple of days at best, and then someone's going to find it and just need to be aware of that.

And then there's a buried treasure.

So this is like the most secure treasure because it's buried under the ground and only you know where it is and you've taken a picture of it.

Right.

And so those tend to be on the outskirts of cities because it's a bit harder to go into like, you know, a very small park and just start shoveling away the ground.

But there's usually forests on the outskirts of cities which people can go to, and those ones will last for ages in place.

But they're a bit more annoying to get your customer to go to and find because the customers can dig like, you know, a couple of centimeters to the wrong space of where you've marked and not find it.

And also, you know, it could be a little bit worrying going off into the woods with a big bag of drugs and hoping no one catches you.

And so there's these kind of balances.

And the third one is called a cache, which basically is everything that isn't the first two.

So this might be you leave the drugs crumpled up in a little packet of cigarettes and, you know, you toss the cigarettes on the ground or I've seen some where people have used these kind of fake stones that you would usually see someone hide their front door key in and they've put the drugs in there and placed it somewhere.

So there's, there's some really kind of innovative ways in which people do dead drop placements.

And that tends to be something that they're rated on once the package is picked up.

You know, the placement is considered part of the art of being a good Russian drug dealer in the same way that the stealth, as it's called in the western drug dealers darknet world is considered part of the art of hiding a package so that no postal services will find it suspicious.

Right.

You know, in the west we have flowers that are sent to people and the plant food contains all of the drugs that's actually being sent through to the recipient.

So there's an artistry in both worlds.

And the drop placement is big one.

Why these two didn't get targeted like Amber Road and R2D2 is probably because their business models didn't overlap.

Wayaway and Legal RCS were synthetic drug specialists, whereas Ramp sold traditional illicit drugs like cocaine and cannabis.

But these traditional illicit drugs were also becoming more difficult to get.

According to Lenta.rs detailed investigation.

And so the winds were changing.

War was coming.

As Hydra emerged, it embarked on a three pronged assault on Ramp marketing, poaching and cyber attacks.

We'll come to the marketing later, but first let's look at the poaching side of hydra's approach.

They targeted Ramp through the sellers themselves by poaching sellers from their rival.

And one such example of this have been mentioned on this podcast series, Hemprom.

We did an episode on drug use on the front line in the war in Ukraine, and the organized criminal group known as Hemprom were at the forefront of the supply.

Now, Kimprom were heavily involved in the darknet markets.

Indeed, they were a pawn in the war between Ramp and Hydra, as Hydra was trying to persuade shops to move from Ramp across to its platform, Ramp retaliated by offering more favorable conditions, but for exclusivity.

But Kimprom, one of the largest synthetic drug producers and suppliers, refused and did business on both platforms at the time.

According to Aryna Volk, a representative of the Russian Ministry of Internal Affairs, Kimprom had an annual turnover of 2 billion rubles, which is around $18 million, and operated in 10 Russian regions.

So Ramp tried to make an example of Humproom by handing over details to Russian law enforcement, a practice that they had done before, resulting in a number of arrests and the seizure of illicit drugs.

But it had the opposite intended effect.

Stores voted with their feet and jumped ship to Hydra.

And then the cyber attacks.

Ramp was targeted with a series of DDoS attacks using the Mirai botnet.

According to Lenta.rus investigation, its use for this task was almost free of charge.

Perhaps an indictment from the cybercrime community against the way Darkside and Ramp operated.

And just to take a slight detour.

The Mirai botnet is a remarkable piece of malware created by three teenagers in the U.S.

it targets IoT devices, Internet of Things, and of course, there are billions of these devices all over the world.

Many of these have very weak or non existent security features and so can easily be compromised and gathered into a huge botnet to launch DDoS attacks, flooding targeted IPs with requests, rendering websites and servers unresponsive.

And just to make matters even more extreme, if an IoT device is compromised, the Mirai botnet can then also infect any other device connected to that same network.

One of the creators of the Mirai botnet dumped the source code, and now anyone could create one.

And to put things in perspective, the Mirai botnet was used for many attacks across the globe, including crashing Germany's largest Internet provider.

It took down almost the entirety of Liberia's Internet.

This was the weapon reportedly used against Ramp by Hydra.

Here's Patrick.

You had these kind of battles between Ramp and Hydra, in which Hydra was launching these attacks at Ramp.

And because Ramp was down, what do customers do?

Well, they still want drugs, so they'll go to the other market.

Now, this is a very common thing we see it in darknet markets in the west too.

DDoS attacks are very, very common between Darknet markets.

It's the equivalent of having someone lock the door to your shop so that it drives traffic to the next place.

And it basically is a very effective way of making vendors and customers feel they want to migrate.

But essentially, that was the way in which Hydra won this war, which was securing some of the largest vendors from Ramp over to Hydra and then undermining Ramp's uptime so that it was unable to properly serve customers, and they went to Hydra instead.

Although there is some controversy around this, it appears that law enforcement claimed to have done so.

But those arrested were not the admins of the site and in fact, just a single Darknet drug shop.

After the destruction of Ramp, Hydra now reigned supreme and grew into a monster, dwarfing all competitors.

So Hydra was the largest Darknet market that we have ever seen.

And when I say that, I mean it both in terms of the amount of cryptocurrency that was going to the site, which was over the entire lifetime, I think around 5 billion, which is just insane.

I mean, you know, Western Darknet markets, even the most popular ones, tend to be in the millions.

Some have got as far as the hundreds of millions, but not very far beyond 100 million or 200 million or something.

To get to 5 billion over the course of a lifetime is just huge amounts of money.

The other thing about Hydra is that aside from the cryptocurrency aspect of things, it was just the sheer number of feedbacks that were left by buyers on the site.

As part of research I did for my PhD with some colleagues, we did a scrape of the Hydra darknet market.

And during that scrape, we collected all of the review data, all of the listings of the products and what have you.

But what we found really interesting was the review data, because on most Darknet markets, you'll see the number of reviews left on the entire market in these scrapes being around 100,000 or so reviews, you know, those kind of figures.

Whereas for Hydra, the number was around 5 million.

And that was considering the fact that Hydra doesn't actually list all of the reviews it has.

Hydra actually deletes reviews after a certain amount of time.

So that 5 million that we collected on that day that we did the scrape wasn't even the full scope of the review data that Hydra actually had.

And it's indicative just of how many sales were going through the site every day.

But I would say that aside from just the size, the other significance of hydra is how it has radically changed the face of russian drug sales.

And it's done this in a variety of ways.

So if we take a step back and we look at how darknet markets work in general, and let's talk about the west as a case to compare this to.

In the west, darknet markets exist in an environment of multiple different services.

So to use a darknet market, you're probably going to have to rely on one of these services or choose to use one of these services in the course of doing business.

So this might be, for example, some legal services, like a bitcoin exchange, right?

You're going to need to buy your bitcoin and move it to a darknet market.

It might be a news site so that you know which darknet markets are currently exit scamming or which ones are being closed by police, and which ones have some good security features.

It might be a drug testing service.

There are drug testing services that allow you to send in samples of drugs and have them tested.

And both customers and vendors in the west have used these services to make sure that their product is of good quality.

So there's lots of what we call ancillary services surrounding a darknet market.

And another popular one is a forum where people can talk about which vendors are good, which vendors are bad, talk about new technologies or concerns they have about law enforcement, arrests, that kind of thing.

Whereas on the western environment, all of these services are separate to the actual darknet market.

It used to be that darknet markets also had a forum when they first started, but now they don't even bother with that.

It's just the market, and it exists in this world of other services.

In hydra, they combined all of those services into one platform.

Hydra had things like a drug testing service where they would do mystery buys and test the product.

They apparently had a doctor service, trained medical professionals who would talk to customers if they were having an overdose or if there was some issue with the drugs they'd purchased.

They also created a school of cladmen, almost like an apprenticeship scheme.

You would basically join and they would talk to you about the various aspects of becoming a courier in a drug vending network, and the kind of things you had to learn, the kind of things you should be aware of.

And then they would put you on an apprentice program with a darknet market store that they knew was one of their top stores and guarantee you a job provided that you engage with all the training.

So it wasn't just a darknet market.

So just an absolute mega mark.

You know, the Walmart of the darknet.

One of Hydra's successor markets, Mega, has a mascot called Moriarty who will come to shortly.

But in one of his wonderfully produced videos, he retells the story of the history of Hydra, in which he described it as a drug supermarket on the darknet, and that the forums that came before it were prehistoric.

You see, alongside drugs, Hydra also offered other services such as ransomware as a service, hacking services, fraudulent identification documents, stolen data, counterfeit currency, and so on.

And that is one of the main reasons Hydra was targeted by German and US agencies, its money laundering capabilities, where it offered things like a bitcoin bank mixer.

According to the U.S.

department of Justice's indictment, these services were so popular that other cybercriminals, like ransomware operators, would set up fake vendor accounts or use compromised accounts just to get access to this laundering service so they could cash out their illicit gains.

And as we heard from Patrick, over the course of its lifetime, hydra processed about $5.2 billion worth of transactions.

And before COVID hit, they had plans to expand globally.

and German law enforcement took down Hydra.

German police seized its servers and confiscated 23 million euros worth of Bitcoin.

Interestingly, police said that there were 17 million customers and 19,000 vendors registered on the site.

But again, like we saw with RAMP, Lenta Ru reported that those proclaimed to be the admins of Hydra were in fact just a darknet drug shop called Hydra, which operated on the Hydra marketplace, not the admins.

But the story doesn't end here.

Hydra had completely changed the game with the fall of Hydra.

As befitting the name, when one head is cut off, two more sprouted in its place as the darknet market landscape servicing Russia fragmented.

Which brings us to today, no one market has reached the monopolistic levels of Hydra.

But new darknet markets such as Mega, Blackspruit, omg, omg, and Kraken have certainly picked up the baton.

Visually, Hydra was nothing like the darknet markets in the west, which are kind of basic looking.

These sites look really good, highly stylized and user friendly with shops that seem to really care about the brand image, albeit those brands are often taken from some western sources.

So there was this one that called itself Pokemon Go and rather appropriately used the character Psyduck as one of their main characters.

Then you had the more obscure things like Wagon Wheel Chocolate snack.

You had the Jon Snow shot which showed the Game of Thrones character Jon Snow with white powder on the end of his nose.

You had Batman, Google, Elon Musk, DuckTales, Johnny Bravo, Mike Tyson, Bayard, Scooby Doo, even one named after President Putin.

But my particular favorite was the shop named after the cartoon Pinky and the Brain.

Darknet markets in general, I've seen lots of them come and go.

And one thing that's pretty consistent in Western Darknet markets is what they look like, the visual.

So you go onto a Darknet market and on its landing page you'll see a string of different drugs, sometimes with the name of the vendor written on a piece of paper next to the drugs to prove that the vendor has the drugs that they're advertising.

And it's a pretty straightforward e commerce market.

Not a lot of great visuals necessarily and it's pretty standard stuff.

When I first went onto a Russian darknet market and got into Hydra for the first time, what really struck me straight away was the visuals.

Because the level of graphic design on the landing page for every single vendor's store was just so far beyond what had been achieved in the West.

And also the focus was on the vendors rather than the products.

This attention to the visual visuals of the website and wider marketing strategies have been taken to another level by the current crop of markets as they compete for customers.

Here's Max, what they had to do, unlike Hydra, really, they really had to sort of show off.

And they really had to say to everyone, you know, Russia's huge drug buying and also drug producing market, they had to say, look, we are the big guys.

Let's look at a couple of the net markets and how they market themselves.

First, let's focus on online, specifically Mega, which is fronted by the paternal character of Moriarty.

Here's Patrick, one of them, where Moriarty kind of talks a lot about the film Limitless.

For those of you who remember, this is a film about a man who gets given a drug that allows you to access all parts of your brain and become super, super intelligent and turn into a mini superhuman and live his best life.

He basically is describing aspects of how you should live your life as a young man in Russia, whilst clips from this film are being played.

And he's doing this kind of Jordan Peterson, like, you know, Clean your room, be more real about getting a job, wake up every morning as early as possible and get on that hustle and that grind.

It's like a mix of the red pilled work culture and politics and hustle culture all mixed in with actually selling pills and Russian darknet markets.

So yeah, it's a unique social media product and I haven't ever seen anything like it before.

So Moriarty is a smartly dressed, golden skull mask wearing professor and it's a fascinating choice of name.

For those that don't know Professor Moriarty was a character from the Sherlock Holmes novel.

He was the archetypal supervillain described by Holmes as the Napoleon of crime Watson.

He is the organizer of half that is evil and nearly all that is undetected in this great city.

He is a genius, a philosopher, an abstract thinker.

He has a brain of the first order.

When you take this quote and then analyse the videos that are released, mega's Moriarty likewise takes on this philosophical, particular, paternalistic, moralistic and yes, criminal Persona quite well.

It's a fitting name in my view.

Here's Max.

A lot of this marketing is done with extremely high quality, very well watched videos by these sort of figureheads of these organizations.

For example, Mega Market has got this guy called Moriarty who some of his videos have been watched millions and millions of times.

He's a bit of a sort of a, you know, he's a masked guy, you know, very high quality visuals and music and imagery and graphics.

Definitely the sort of, you know, Hollywood pop star level video quality.

Persuading people how a career in the drug trade is, is the best thing to do.

There are other characters associated with these darknet markets.

The studs glitter and sparkle as she moves like Moriarty.

Jessica's videos are highly produced and cover topics as diverse as how to keep your area safe and how to protect yourself from fraud.

Both important issues for sure.

And it's always welcome getting advice such as this, particularly when it comes from a darknet marketplace that sells nothing but illegal products and services.

There was this one video from Jessica Ocean that made me laugh.

She was interviewing a cladman, Jessica in her beautiful silver all over head mask and the cladman wearing a black balaclava with sunglasses.

Now what makes this funny is that the voices are clearly recorded separately.

So essentially you're just watching two people gesturing in a bizarre way.

Jessica's movements are quite unnatural, to put it mildly.

For some reason, she reminds me of a lava lamp.

Her head moves like one of those bobblehead figures and her hand flicks around like a conductor.

The whole thing is just weird.

Moriarty is much more effective in his performances.

In addition to these, markets have used influencers to push their websites.

For example, Julia Finesse, a once prominent social media star, frequently talked about where to buy illicit drugs and was paid by Kraken to tattoo their logo on on her neck.

Her boyfriend, a rapper, was also paid to advertise the markets.

Aside from the online world, these darknet markets have practiced some high profile guerrilla marketing tactics in the real world.

Just a few months later, in December of that same year, Kraken like Hydra choosing a mythical beast as their name and a market clearly trying to emulate the look of Hydra.

And when you look at their logo, you can see the similarities.

Anyway, a black bus with the Kraken logo on it was left sprawled across a couple of lanes of the new Arba Avenue in Moscow.

Now this is a major street.

It takes you right into the heart of the city.

Here's Patrick.

There have been a lot of these publicity stunts.

They're kind of guerrilla marketing events.

You mentioned the bus that was plastered across two lanes of traffic with Kraken emblazoned across it.

We've also seen recently outside the Duma, they released a balloon with a banner for Kraken Market with a QR code underneath it.

So it was just flying over Red Square.

And we've also seen billboards.

There was one for Black Spruit Market showing its mascot, Jessica Ocean, next to a gas station somewhere.

We've had sometimes a van with speakers in it blasting music with the market and a QR code written on the side.

And not just the markets themselves who've done this.

I've seen this happen with vendors as well.

So the vendor networks.

So in one video I have, it shows a shopping mall and someone is throwing money off the top of the shopping mall.

And stamped on each note is the name of a drugstore on its telegram group.

So it's just a very sneaky way of getting people to pay attention to something.

But that's the kind of high level stuff.

And at the lower level, you know, every day you've got people who are hired by markets to go and put graffiti out for drugstores.

Individually, but also for Darknet markets.

And you have these telegram numbers or links to Darknet markets pasted up in all cities of Russia.

And it's a problem.

It's a serious problem.

These brazen marketing campaigns were also combined with attacks on one another.

Since the fall of Hydra, the different heads that emerged have fought on and offline for supremacy.

But as part of this monitoring, early on we started hearing about this group called Killnet, which is a pro Russian hacktivist group run by a hacker who went by the name Killmilk to.

Airports in the US and one attack on Latvia led to the government there designating the group a terrorist organization.

But at the same time, Killnet had a connection with Solaris, one of the markets that emerged after the fall of Hydra, carrying out attacks on rivals such as Rutor.

Eventually, Solaris was taken out and absorbed by Kraken.

Now killnet has suffered some internal issues and a change of leadership.

Killmilk was sidelined and the operation was handed over to another group called Denon Club.

Don't worry, I'm getting to the relevance of this Little Detour.

The Kraken platform will cease to exist within two months.

You may not believe me now, but so that no questions arise in the future, we have warned you.

After Kraken, we will end the existence of Blackspruit.

The patriotic hacktivism doesn't pay as well as Moriarty, I guess.

You see, it appears that Denon Club has allied itself with Mega.

Soon my colleague Moriarty and I will provide you with a new place to spend time, as well as secret knowledge.

Meanwhile, whilst the dartnet markets vied for position, the structures put in place, first by Ramp and then Hydra, have continued to flourish.

And the dead drop method has become the way to purchase illicit drugs.

And no position is more emblematic than the Cladmen, the couriers we heard earlier about.

The Cladmen's Bible, which teaches and advises prospective Cladmen on how to operate, where to stash drugs, how to do it, and so on.

For example, if you go to a forest on the edge of town and it's been snowing, bury the drugs and mark the spot by placing a stick in the ground.

Take a picture and then send it to the buyer.

Then cover your tracks in the snow.

Sounds like a great idea.

Right, here's Patrick.

I was reading this one guide and it was written by a cloudman.

He was addressing his fellow Cladmen.

He was saying, a lot of you think you're really smart because in the winter you do this thing where you'll attach your little amount of drugs to a stick and you'll go into the forest and you'll just stick the stick in the ground so it looks like a little shrub that's poking out, and on the bottom of it is the drug packets.

And it's very easy to take a photo.

The snow hides everything else.

It's great, right?

The problem is, is that a lot of you use the same sticks.

And so me and my friend went into the forest this week and we just started pulling on every stick we could see, and this is what we found.

And he shows this picture with this big bunch of sticks with lots of little drug packages on the bottom of them.

And he's like, we just basically took, say, about 11 or 12 drops just by putting on sticks.

It's like, so you think you're being innovative and you're not being innovative, you're being an idiot.

Yet Patrick shared a video from Mega, and there was one vendor who was advertising Cladman job opportunities.

These adverts included the terms and so on.

But what was most interesting was the reviews from people that had taken up the opportunity.

And this is just one store of thousands across the marketplaces.

I would put the number somewhere between four, four and 5,000 different vendor shops.

And when I say a vendor shop, I mean four or five thousand networks of people where there is someone at the top who is managing the whole process.

There is somehow some drug supply going on, whether that's imported or produced.

And then there are drug runners who are couriers and people who are storing drugs who are out in different cities in Russia going and delivering packages.

All of that, Those job roles are all under one store, and there are 4,000 to 5,000 stores.

I hopped onto one of these.net sites and found an advert.

From the questionably named gangbang shop offering work as a cladman to get the position, you had to pay for the pleasure.

This down payment was 3,000 rubles, which is around $30.

But not everyone has the money to pay, so they're required to share something that is, in my opinion, far more valuable.

Their personal details.

Here's Max.

The shops don't know who the couriers are, the couriers don't know who the wholesalers are, all this kind of business.

But where that anonymisation disappears is sometimes when a courier wants to join a shop and they don't have, say, whatever it is, 20 quid, 50 quid deposit that they have to give before they start the job if they have literally no money whatsoever.

So it's obviously all the, the poorest couriers who have to do this.

They have to provide their passport, their ID details to the shop by way of a deposit.

So if they mess up or the shop wants to get hold of them, it's that much easier for the shop and its thugs to track them down if they've got the photo and the name and address and all this stuff.

In Max and Patrick's report, Breaking Clad, they interviewed a shop owner who had a store on Hydra before moving to Telegram and now Kraken.

He told me that he operated in two cities in Russia.

He employed 40 clad men, so that's 40 couriers.

He had three warehouses.

So those are the warehouses is the place where the produced drugs, the drugs that they buy off the producers are stored in big amounts and then they are then portioned out to go to the couriers who then lay them out in various parts of the city.

He also had this interesting character that he described as a mentor, but you could also describe as Fagin.

So he was basically someone whose job was to train up the couriers as to how to properly dead drop drugs, what materials to use, where to do it, what not to do.

That was quite a key person in his organization.

It also meant that he never had any contact with the couriers himself.

So there are thousands of these shops.

Obviously each shop will vary massively in scale, but we're potentially looking at a huge workforce of cladmen across Russia and it illustrates the size of this market and the potential opportunities for those willing to take it.

Almost immediately, you were getting Russian soldiers buying dead drop drugs.

Using telegram, buying stimulants and cannabis online shops, alerting people that there were drugs to be bought.

They were advertising for clad men, advertising for producers making special offers for new subscribers.

Even though there were problems with access to necessities such as water at the time, in places like Mariupol, Kherson, you were getting ample supplies via the darknet dead drop system of mephedrone and alpha PvP.

Now, who makes up the couriers is an interesting question.

In November last year, in Apatiti, right in the very north of Russia, near the border with Finland, Finland and Norway, three people were arrested, two of which were just 17.

These were cladmen.

They had taken a large cache of drugs and split them into 32 smaller packages and distributed them around the town.

Because of the age of two of the defendants, term limits are limited to a maximum of 10 years.

And according to a Russian lawyer interviewed by the GI who specializes in representing those arrested on drug offenses, most couriers are aged between 18 and 25.

To get one of these positions, many of the adverts are on the Darknet markets or associated social media platforms like Telegram.

You can safely assume that the prospective cladmen had some knowledge of the platforms themselves and have probably used them before.

I would think that most people who are couriers are probably drug users who have been involved in buying drugs on these forums and using these apps on Telegram.

On the darknet, they're very familiar with the whole system.

They know how to do it, they picked it up tons of times for them or their friends and now they're turning their sort of hobby into, into a job.

So I, I think probably a lot of them are occasional drug users.

But there is a very real risk that if you are addicted to drugs.

The old moniker of don't get high and you're own supply, as Frank Lopez prophetically warns Tony Montana in the Scarface movie.

Yeah, don't get high on your own supply.

Like it's particularly in Russia, it would be extremely dangerous thing to do is to start if you've got a terrible addiction and as soon as you see some drugs, if you're a courier, you want to kind of like snort the lot.

I mean it could be potentially deadly in Russia specifically, you know, even though it's run by this supposedly anonymous system, the punishments and the downsides of it are a lot worse.

If you mess up, you can get a beaten within an inch of your life and if you get caught, you can get eight years in a flipping prison in Siberia.

And this is an important point.

It's the couriers that are at the most risk.

They are the front end of the entire system.

And Russia has extremely strict policy on the possession of illicit drugs, where culturally drugs are seen as symbolic polluters of the country.

You see, there is a law called Article 228 and it concerns the illegal acquisition, storage, transportation, making or processing of narcotic drugs.

And then 228.1 which covers the illegal making, sale or sending of narcotic drugs.

According to the law, depending on the level of the crime committed, a person can be sent to jail for up to 20 years.

As we heard earlier with the recent sentencing of the founder of Hydra, sentences can actually be much higher.

So for those that are caught who in the context of the darknet markets are usually cladmen, they can get heavy sentences, or they could join the army and fight in Ukraine.

Recent legislation passed in Russia has closed a loophole that limited the enlistment of suspect suspected criminals or convicts.

Although we know that the Wagner group have already heavily recruited from prisons.

The majority get between three to five years.

But it's worth saying that these tough sentences have contributed to the rise of the dead drop method, because it's highly anonymised from production to purchase to delivery, with less of an opportunity to be caught.

Now, there is a high turnover for cladmen, but there is also some scope for career progression.

For example, the most trusted couriers can become wholesalers, sometimes called stockists or warehousers.

This role involves working with the carrier or transporter who moves the drugs around the country by various means of transport.

The wholesalers then store large quantities of illicit drugs, replenishing the master stashes for the cladmen to access.

But of course, if you get caught, you will go to jail for some time.

And so it's well paid.

Wholesalers and carriers must provide a large deposit to secure a position.

But both positions can be lucrative.

A wholesaler can earn up to $21,000 a month.

Carriers can earn $5,000 for a week's work or $2,000 per trip.

But carriers are vulnerable because if they get caught, not only do they get long prison sentences, but it also puts law enforcement in charge of the drops.

So the wholesalers and cladmen are also at risk of arrest.

The carriers are the ones that receive the drugs directly from the producers.

And that brings me to the other progression option for cladmen.

Becoming A producer or chemist.

There was one advert in the Breaking Cloud report from Blacksburg and it was for a chemist, the producers of the drugs the AI produced.

Image has a man in a white coat surrounded by glass bottles and scientific equipment.

Behind him are shelves of bottles like an apothecary of old.

And to his side is a blue and white bird that looks like an ice phoenix.

And it says Chemist highway to heaven.

And this is it.

These platforms actively encourage people to become producers.

Hydra had some amazing how to videos.

You can literally watch a step by step guide on how to produce different synthetic drugs.

Here's Patrick.

It basically had a beautiful graphic logo of Hydra at the beginning.

Then some Russian techno music as a guy in a lab coat began to construct all of this in front of you step by step and show you exactly what material you needed and exactly when to turn this on, to turn that off.

Like it's.

You could not get it wrong.

It's that simple to follow.

That's not a vendor who's done that for other vendors to learn from.

That's the market that's done that.

That's the platform itself.

So they're aware that they make money when people make sales.

And so they're actively encouraging and helping grow the number of methadone producers, the number of alpha PVP producers within the country, because they know that if there's more people producing it, there's more people needing to sell it.

And where are they going to sell it?

They're going to sell it on Hydro, they're going to sell it on Kraken, they're going to sell it on blacksmrug.

And so I actually think that it's a really rare case where we're seeing Darknet markets really affecting the drug appetites of an entire nation or an entire region.

This encouragement and push to create more and more producers has helped push synthetic drugs further and further into Russia, even into the most remote parts like Siberia.

Markets have dedicated spaces on their sites to purchase equipment and precursors.

They have production forums and even consultations with producers to learn how to set up a lab.

Prospective producers can even buy precursor kits which allow people to quickly create drugs and sell them to a network for profit.

They also provide testing services so that producers can be certified, just like Hydra used to do.

These markets have legitimately driven consumption by democratizing the production of synthetics.

And then other than the shop owner, you have the most important position, the shop operators.

According to one advert, they are the key employee of the shop.

They are the operators, operational Managers and work purely online and are well paid for their services.

They deal with orders, locations, recruit cladmen, and direct the couriers to the master stashes.

And they sometimes help cladmen who were caught by law enforcement.

One former operator who spoke to the gi worked for a shop that sold methadone, methadone and alpha PvP as well as cocaine.

He said that one of the shop's best cladmen was arrested, and so they helped to sort out a bribe to get the courier released.

Alongside all of this, they also dealt with customer disputes.

And so what if you do have an issue with your order?

Like you couldn't find it?

Well, these sites, of course, offer complaint services.

I jumped onto one of these marketplaces and had a look through some of the complaints.

First, there was one complaint about a store that was accused of not actually depositing the drugs.

The store sells empty addresses.

The second purchase is also not successful.

The treasure was not laid.

It has no connection with the cladman.

A second complaint has been opened.

He cannot specify the place and a photo of the treasure.

The information that is attached to the order is not enough.

The store does not conduct fair business.

I ask you to return 50% of the purchase price.

But most of the decisions seem to fall in favor favor of the stores.

The store violated the rules by selling another substance instead of the purchased one.

According to the evidence provided, both the courier and the store admitted their mistake.

The store employee even asked me to request a refund.

But today I saw that the dispute was closed in favor of the store.

The moderator acted unfairly.

I ask you to reconsider this decision.

Honestly, if you were able to conduct some word frequency analysis on these forums, I bet one of the top phrases would be something like, I do not agree with the moderator's decision.

Here's Patrick.

If you look at what customers say about their experiences on darknet markets, they will often report that most disputes go the way of the seller rather than the way of the customer.

So let's say I don't find the package that I've been promised and I go into the platform.

Then the marketplace is meant to look at the seller, what their trust score is, and then look at me as a customer and assess, okay, who's telling the truth here.

The difficult thing here is that I'm unlikely to have as much of a trust score as the seller.

So this seller, this network has handled, I think some of them are in the high hundreds of thousands of sales, right?

So, you know, they've handled so many sales, whereas I have only made two purchases on the site.

So what's more likely that this well oiled drug selling machine is lying or that some guy is just trying to get lucky, take his drugs and then say, oh, I didn't find them, I want my money back.

That's part of this, which is that, you know, there's, there's more data on the side of the seller than there is on the customer.

But that's one explanation for it.

The other explanation for it is that the Darknet markets themselves, like Kraken and Blacksmith, are charging the vendors rent to be on their platform, but they also want to retain the top vendors.

They want to retain the ones who are doing the most business because that's how they drive customers to their site.

And so it may be that there's just a certain amount of you scratch my back, I scratch yours, and they decide against the customer anyway.

But yes, essentially the review system is not perfect.

And that brings me to the dead drop locations themselves.

Now we've already heard about the Cloudmen's Bible, a document that describes essentially how to do the job well, including pictures of example hiding places and the pros and cons of each, how not to get caught, how to dress, and so on.

But the problem is, if I know this, then I can guarantee that many others in Russia much more familiar with this dead drop method of dealing are as well.

Have a listen to this complaint, which starts with an expected line.

I do not agree with the moderator's decision.

I made an order on the Kraken site, arrived at the place, immediately, saw the difference in photos from afar, took a photo before the start of the search, search opened a dispute, sent a photo to the store with a description of the problem.

The store invited a moderator referring to the fact that I did not search well and the treasure should be in place.

And how can you search well in a wall there is only a hole and bricks, then made a decision in favor of the store.

I do not agree with this decision because the treasure was stolen by someone and the place was touched before me.

Indeed, what if someone is watching the cladding admin, maybe even following them, watching where they stashed the treasures?

Well, that is a real problem.

And these sneaky individuals have a name.

They're known as Seagulls.

Here's Patrick People who are aware of the trade but don't have the money or don't have the inclination to actually go and buy drugs this way.

So they just go out into the streets and they try and find people's drops without having to pay.

And so they'll go and look in all of the normal places, like window sills and what have you.

They'll go into the forest and see if anyone's making drops and try and follow them around.

One complaint talked about how the Cladmen had placed the drugs inside a wall.

The purchaser couldn't find it on the first attempt, so went back armed with a hammer and started hammering into the wall.

This was the exterior of a tower block.

Well, that story you've just told us is actually, actually, you know, emblematic of a problem this creates.

That is true in the Russian context and not true in the west, because people are going out and they're placing drugs in public, right?

And there's all sorts of risks to going out and placing drugs in public.

It's not like in the west where it's coming to someone's house and it's in a package and it's got their name on it.

So it's very unlikely anyone else is going to open it.

These drugs can be found by dogs and pets and kids and whatever, but also if there's a problem with the delivery, someone can end up doing damage like you've just described, hammering into a wall to find a package.

But being a seagull is a risky game because if you get caught, you will likely get a visit from a sportsman.

So the thing is about Darknet marketplaces, the idea around them, at least initially, initially, was a place where users could safely get hold of their drugs, reducing the risk of violence against customers and users that surrounds the illicit drug trade.

Indeed, some academic papers at the time described the Silk Road as a paradigm shifting criminal innovation and a massive, relatively safe worldwide market for drug dealers who sold there.

But unfortunately, even the Silk Road, with all its libertarian ideals, could not avoid violence.

Ulbricht himself ordered the murder of a Silk Road moderator who he believed had turned on him, a death which was faked by US law enforcement.

The whole Silk Road case got very messy towards the end.

A number of US agents were caught up in a scandal over stealing Bitcoin from the site.

But it's been over a decade now since Silk Road collapsed.

Today, in Russia, where the markets are much more sophisticated and make a lot more money, violence is also quite prevalent, and it comes in the shape of a position known as sportsman.

Now, these tufts have long been associated with organized crime in Russia.

Often recruited from gyms, they comprise wrestlers, weightlifters, boxers and martial artists, hence the nickname for the Darknet marketplaces.

Shops advertise for these positions.

Some claim to have dedicated teams specifically for their shop.

Some freelance sportsmen offer their services on Ruter or Telegram.

Sportsmen work under the guidance of shop operators.

An advert from Mega, which you can find in Max and Patrick's report, Breaking Clad shows an AI generated picture that looks like something from the Street Fighter video game with a caption saying that they are looking for athletic punishers to join our team for the punishment of guilty couriers and that the job is suitable as a part time job with a smiley face emoji.

One job can get you between 15 and 50,000 rubles.

That's about 150 to 500 US dollars.

They are people whose job it is to make sure that everyone who is in the network has a sense of fear about their job.

So basically, if you're accused of stealing from a Russian dead drop network, then it's likely that sportsmen will visit you and two guys will turn up on your door and they might talk to you and threaten you.

They might just set fire to your building or to your home and they might pick you up, put you in a car, drive you out to a forest somewhere and beat you up, cut off your fingers, break your bones.

I mean, there's a whole range of different punishments that happen online.

And then they film this act and then they put it on Telegram so that everyone can see what happens when you steal from a darknet market.

There are several sportsman channels which are dedicated to just sharing these videos.

Patrick shared some of these channels with me and some of the videos you find on there are truly horrific.

There are thousands of these videos circulating online.

Young Russians being beaten, abused, sexually assaulted in their bones broken whilst being forced to apologize to the darknet vendors they've deemed to have offended.

Some have even been killed.

There was one video that particularly stuck with me and it was of a young girl, maybe in her late teens, with long hair.

It's dark and there are some masked men standing over her.

The camera is lighting up her face and she looks petrified.

A sportsman kneels in front of her and brandishes two pairs of scissors.

He's telling her to cut her long hair and she is crying and pleading with them.

It's hard to watch.

She tries to get up but they shove her to the ground and she is wailing with fear.

Eventually, one grabs her by the hair and she is cowering and crying in front of him, yanks her head back, takes the scissors and starts cutting and cutting her hair.

The sportsman then takes his hand and holds it over her mouth to keep her quiet before grabbing a small plastic bag.

Inside is a bottle and he begins to pour it over her head.

And you can see the confusion on her face as she feels this liquid on her head.

And she tries to wipe it away, but that just spreads the liquid further and it's all over her hands, face and head.

It's bright green.

And then they seem to let her go and she runs off camera.

That liquid is important here.

They've marked her with something called brilliant green.

It's a green solution used in antiseptic products but can also be toxic.

But it also sticks to the skin and can be very, very hard to remove.

And people know what this mark means.

What's very unique about this is that this is the first time we've seen violence in Darknet markets as a regulatory mechanism.

We were obviously aware of violence.

Everyone is in drug networks at the street level across all countries.

But it's never really been seen in Darknet markets in the way it has with Russian Darknet markets.

And finally, the person overseeing an entire shop, the shop owners themselves.

What about them?

We heard earlier from Max about an interview he conducted with a shop owner who worked in the regions rather than the major cities like Moscow and St.

Petersburg and ran a decent sized operation including 40 cladmen.

Here's Max.

He employs a lot of online staff to keep the whole thing running.

On a good Friday he sold 400 grams of methadone, which is a pretty sort of decent amount.

It's certainly not small scale.

And he was saying overall he estimated he made the equivalent of almost $1 million a year revenue.

And in saying that, he said that he had never had any problems with the law.

He'd also never seen any of his friends shops being busted.

And when I asked him what the best thing about his job was, he said that it was the money and the freedom which his job and that money gave him to not have to rely on the Russian regime.

And he's also a massive fan of London.

He's visited London a lot of times.

One shop owner told the GI that thousands of shops are dismantled every year, but the shop owners are almost never arrested.

And that's it.

These people are like shadows.

The anonymized nature of these darknet markets means that shop owners at least currently can just rebuild, adapt and carry on.

Whereas Cladmin and the like, well, things don't look good.

The low hanging fruit will always get picked up.

Police in Russia, in Georgia, in Kazakhstan, you know, a lot of the countries which are operating these, this Russian drug dealing model they're all getting wise to the dead drop system.

They know the usual places that people dead drop, so they hang around there and you know, lay traps for, for people.

So, so they're getting pretty good in picking up the young amateur couriers and slinging them in jail obviously sometimes to get carded off to die on the front line.

In Ukraine, there's a lot of quite big drug seizures, a lot of wholesale level methadone seizures, not just picking up the little kids with the methadone.

So things are being done but like there is definitely evidence to show that none of the big shops and none of the big platforms have been got into by the Russian authorities.

So how have Russian law enforcement responded to this illicit market?

Well, there was this one story from a small village called Obukovets in Leningrad Oblast, not too far away from St.

Petersburg.

The man behind it was sentenced to life in prison.

His three accomplices were given between 17 and 20 years for their part.

That case was, was interesting.

You know, I think it shows that there was a drug lab found.

So these criminals who were involved in stolen cars were also involved at one stage of the drug industry, I production.

That's not surprising that there will be a group who will be good at stealing cars, but they will also have someone who knows how to make methadone.

So they'll have a little methadone lab going on as well in the, in the sort of the back room of, of the stolen car lot or whatever it might be.

They'll know their shop that they sell that, those drugs to, but they'll just be sort of like a bit part player in a much, much bigger edifice that's going on behind them.

Obviously this is just one case, but law enforcement essentially stumbled upon this production lab.

But what about the wider discussion and action against this illicit market?

Some of you may have heard of Ekaterina Mizulina, the head of the Safe Internet League, one of those banal names that governments use across the world to actually mean censorship.

Ms.

Olina seems to scour social media for things she dislikes and then calls them out publicly, sometimes threatening people with military service in the process.

Remember I mentioned that social media influencer Yulia Finesse.

And this is Where Moriarty from MEGA returns to our story because he was involved in a very public spat with Misalina.

In one typically well produced video, he congratulated her for helping to draw attention to Mega and then goes on to explain why her campaign against MEGA and other darknet markets will fail, including highlighting the good they do through their medical services.

There was even one video shared by Mizzalina which showed a huge bunch of flowers allegedly sent to her by Moriarty.

She, with the help of two men as the bunch was that large, subsequently threw them in a skip before saying, I don't accept flowers from enemies of Russia.

It's worth noting that currently none of the major markets have been shut down by Russian law enforcement.

So the question is why?

There is no doubt that the overt marketing and increased consumption of illicit drugs will not please state officials at all.

Here's Patrick, you do have aspects of the Russian government debating this stuff and coming out and saying, you know, this is bad and we should do something.

Think about it.

What's unclear is what can they do about it because these markets are extremely wealthy.

And it's not just the markets who are doing these paid promotions.

It's individuals who are seeing an opportunity to make money and engaging in a bit of entrepreneurial ship and saying to a market, hey, I reckon I could do a big publicity stunt for you.

Would you pay me to do it and what have you.

And so it's hard to see how you solve for that problem given how widespread it is and how much money is accessible for doing a publicity stunt like that.

In November last year, officials within the State Duma raised concerns around Mephedrome, specifically seeking more stringent measures to combat drug trafficking and education for young people about the dangers of drugs and drug addiction.

Another official suggested that all Russians need to be tested for drugs, starting with government employees, before going on to suggest that law enforcement need to focus on the producers and the shop owners, not just the cladmen.

And finally, Deputy Chairman of the State Duma Committee on Health Protection, Alexei Kurini said that this is a state problem and it should be addressed by the government using all available resources.

And this is certainly an uphill task.

According to Lenta.ru who did another investigation into the Mephodrome market, they reported that across 15 cities in Russia, production is estimated at 40 to 60 tons per year.

And finally, tackling the darknet markets could also be tricky because according to one journalist interviewed, the infrastructure behind the darknet markets is located outside of Russia.

In the case of the Takedown of Hydra.

Those servers were located in Germany, which means without international law enforcement collaboration.

That is a difficult issue to solve in the current geopolitical climate.

Here's Max.

To fight crime, which is absolutely global and international, you have to fight that with global police forces.

And that's what's slowly being done.

And you're right, you know, Russia is, it's isolated economically, but it's also isolated in terms of law enforcement because it doesn't have the ability to reach out to other countries and get help with tackling this particular iteration of organized crime.

So it really is sort of trying to fight it with two hands tied behind its back.

You know, the, the lack of technical expertise within the police and government compared to the people running these things, which I suppose they're probably more likely to come from the hacking community.

So they're going to be more like sort of people with their brains all over computers and cyber and technology, rather than your better known Russian thuggery and organized criminals, you know, the Vori and the thieves in law.

And there is a serious point to this.

If we park the apparent medical specialists claimed by the net markets to one side, the spread of synthetics using the dead drop method is causing hidden health problems in Russia.

That's the thing that this particular journalist was, wanted to get across to me as someone who was living in Russia, who lives in Russia still, he was really concerned about a lot of his peers.

A lot of the people that he knows, a lot of people he bumped into, were starting to get a problem with Mephedrone.

Mephedrone is the most popular drug in Russia and it's, it can be seen, more of a party drug.

But he was saying that a lot of people have ended up, you know, as, as happens with cocaine and speed and crack and other stimulants in the west, you know, some people, for whatever reason, get too heavily involved in it.

There's a lot of reasons why he's worried about young people in Russia who are having a difficult time of it at the moment, but they have this incredibly Moorish cheap drug which they can run to within a few minutes and grab.

He was genuinely worried about that and he thinks that it's, it's something that's going to come back and bite Russia up the ass.

He really seems it's a kind of a hidden problem.

But from what he's saying is that there is a sort of looming problem amongst the sort of younger generation of quite damaging drug addiction, mainly to this drug, but also, as you say, you know, Alpha PVP is also in the mix and that's just more of an extreme stimulant than methadone.

And it's linked to sort of mania and impacts on mental health.

And so this dead drop method began and perfected in Russia, has completely revolutionized the illicit drug market in the country.

But what about elsewhere?

For a long time it's been in Ukraine, so it almost started up at the same time in Ukraine as it did in Russia.

And that system has also spread to many other countries bordering Russia, most notably Georgia, Belarus, Kyrgyzstan, Kazakhstan and other countries too.

And again there you're starting to see similar drugs being used, the rise of methadone in those countries and generally the rise of synthetic drugs.

You're seeing labs starting to pop up, you're seeing public graffiti by way of PR and social media.

Hey, you need to get onto this site, you need to become a courier, you need to become a chemist.

So we're seeing all the same things being mirrored in these countries bordering Russia.

Basically, you know, Russian speaking countries again, some of them with their own online shops, but they're using the same method.

We are seeing these pop up also in some countries in Europe there was a sign that we saw in Liverpool recently advertising for couriers and make drugs.

And I think most prolifically in South Korea.

We're seeing huge amounts of arrests of people involved in darknet dead drop drug markets.

The similar thing here is strict anti drug regime.

So if there is a way of buying and selling drugs which adds an extra layer of security for people and anonymity, then this is why this system, the Russian system, is so important for me.

That's it for this episode of Deep Dive.

I'd like to thank Max and Patrick for speaking to me.

For more information on this topic, you can find a link to the paper Breaking Russia's dead drop Drug Revolution in the podcast notes as well as any other relevant links.

For other research on organized crime from around the world, head over to our website, globalinitiative.net this has been Deep Dive from the Global Initiative Against Transnational Organized Crime.