Drugs on the Darknet, are you over?
According to Europol, the "golden age" of this traffic on these corners of the Web, invisible to the general public because not indexed by search engines, ended after the vast operation, made public on Tuesday 22 September.
It resulted in the arrest of 179 online drug sellers.
This is "one of the most important operations" against drug trafficking on the Darknet, confirms the specialized site Wired.
Police in nine states worked together for several months to bring about these arrests, most of which took place in the United States, but also in five other countries (Germany, the Netherlands, Sweden, Austria and the United Kingdom).
The consequences of the dismantling of the Wall Street Market site
The US Department of Justice, in particular, welcomed the arrest of five thirty-something suspected of being at the head of "one of the most important American networks selling drugs online".
This net helped seize $ 6.5 million and 500 kg of drugs, mainly from the opioid family, such as fentanyl, heroin, or even oxycodone.
"It is clearly an operation that is part of the fight against the opioid crisis in the United States", notes Félix Aimé, cybersecurity expert for Kaspersky and who worked on cybercrime on the Darknet, contacted by France 24 .
The operation, dubbed DisrupTor, was made possible by the dismantling in May 2019 of Wall Street Market, which was the second largest online drug store on the Darknet, according to Europol.
"Like other large similar platforms, it had tens of thousands of sellers and hundreds of thousands of users," says Félix Aimé.
On the occasion of this virtual "descent", the investigators were able to get their hands on the servers of this "Amazon of narcotics".
Enough to provide them with all the personal information necessary to proceed to arrests.
From the point of view of arrests, Operation DisrupTor had a much greater impact than the high-profile closures, in 2013, of The Silk Road, considered to be the ancestor of the Darknet drug sites, and of Alphabay, which was, until 2017, the undisputed king of narcotics e-commerce.
The end of a golden age ... which no longer existed
But is this enough to claim victory in the war against the sale of drugs on the Darknet, as Europol has done?
"This is not the first time that authorities have bragged about having dealt a fatal blow to this business, before a new site has rebuilt an empire from the ashes of the one who has just disappeared. So let's wait and see." , reminds France 24 a British expert in the sale of drugs online who preferred to remain anonymous.
"This may have an impact on supply in the short term, but it's not what will make demand disappear, so the market may adapt," said Joe Tidy, specialist in cybersecurity issues for the BBC.
For his part, Félix Aimé doubts anyway that there is still a real "golden age" of drug supermarkets on the Darknet.
"In the heyday of The Silk Road [at the beginning of the 2010s, editor's note], we could speak of a real craze for this sector, but it has already been in decline for several years," he believes.
In his eyes, Operation DisrupTor may be very important in its scope, it is nonetheless a blow to an already badly damaged enemy.
The confidence of buyers in these platforms on the Darknet is no longer good since the police around the world have stepped up operations against these different sites.
"They exposed one of the major flaws of this system: it is centralized. Suddenly, when the authorities manage to seize the servers, and they are doing it more and more, they also have access to information that could lead to the 'user identification ", summarizes Félix Aimé.
The era of instant messaging
"This new net is, in fact, a paradigm shift in the landscape of online drug sales," adds this expert.
More and more consumers are abandoning the Darknet, suspected of being riddled with police, to turn to drug dealers' new best friend: instant messengers.
Telegrams, Viber or even WhatsApp all provide "decentralized platforms where communications are end-to-end encrypted", emphasizes Félix Aimé.
In other words, resellers and buyers are less worried that their personal information will end up in the hands of the police who, in turn, do not have a centralized server to enter to access the information they need.
These messaging systems also have the advantage of being more responsive than sites on the Darknet.
You just need to know the right channels, and discussions - live - can begin.
Transactions on Wall Street Market and the like can be more laborious: you had to place an order, wait for the seller to acknowledge receipt and the purchase to be validated by the site.
The problem with big media announcements, like the one about the 179 arrests, is that they may do good for police morale, but they also cause consumers to search for their goods in other ways, such as through courier services. snapshots.
And as Félix Aimé reminds us, it is much more difficult for the police to track down the traffickers.
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