With increasing law enforcement pressure on darknet sites and some major market disruptions, drug transactions are also occurring on encrypted apps and even on popular, mainstream social media platforms.Īs the drug trade has gone high tech, agents are also seeing a new generation of dealers.

Darknet market activity from kids, at risk individuals, or those who are suffering from addiction is something to keep an eye out for.”įBI agents who support a digital organized crime task force in southern Ohio stress that these darknet sites are not the only source in a drug trade that is rapidly moving online. If people can't get to that site and if they can't purchase products, then it’s not working. “They’re running a marketplace that’s designed to sell products. And cryptocurrencies, the preferred method of payment for these sites, have become mainstream and easy to use. You don’t need special equipment or technical knowledge. The Drug Enforcement Administration’s One Pill Can Kill public awareness campaign reported that two out of every five pills the agency seized and tested contained enough fentanyl to be potentially fatal.īrennan also wants parents, educators, and family members to understand that these darknet sites are not hard to use or hard to access. Prescription drugs, and certainly prescription pain killers that contain opioids, can and have caused overdoses and deaths, but counterfeit pills that hold an unknown amount of fentanyl present an even greater risk. They’re not coming from a place where people are following policies and procedures to create medication or other products in a way that’s safe.”įentanyl is a powerful, dangerous synthetic opioid that is now present in many street drugs and also used in most of the pain pills sold illegally online.

“But these are pills pressed with fentanyl in somebody’s home or a warehouse. “These markets give an illusion that what you’re looking at is from the supply chain or it’s from a professional in some way, shape, or form,” said Katherine Brennan, a management analyst with the FBI who supports the JCODE initiative. But the markets themselves look like standard e-commerce sites, complete with pictures, customer reviews, and listings for not only drugs like cocaine and methamphetamine but what sellers claim are brand name prescription medications. Tor offers additional levels of privacy by obscuring the user’s IP address and encrypting information. These sites exist on the dark web or darknet, an area of the internet accessed through a specialized browser called Tor.

Quez stresser fbi backdoor