We Are A Blackmarket Internet Vendor that's sold over SR, BMR, and survived throughout! AMA!

Did you had any legal issues envolving those transactions or were some members of your staff busted by the police? Are you affraid that someday that might be an issue?

We had no legal issues from the bust as we were on vacation (we cashed out our BTC bank to buy more grow equipment, increasing our yield) and received news of the SR bust 3 months into our vacation. Needless to say we were relieved.
None of our staff have ever had any legal issues related to this operation.

We are concerned about possible future issues involving staff, however the group we have is reliant on each other and has equal involvement. There are very few situations where one member of our staff would have to rely on releasing confidential information as we have moved completely away from domestic transport (non-blackmarket) sales.

How do you see the future of the drugs business, do you think this will become the go to method for selling and buying drugs?

The future is quite promising as long as people that use these services start practicing personal security. This is absolutely the best, safest, and the future go to way for drugs.
While you do trade off convenience for anonymity and less risk, you also usually end up with a better product as well.

Why is everything so damned expensive?

Our products or blackmarket items in general?

If drugs were legalized, would you see that as ultimately a good thing or a bad thing for your business?

Good. Cannabis sales don't seem to be hurt as much as harder drug trades.

If you don't mind me asking, how much profit did you acquire?

Simply investing $5,600 in BTC when they were around $10 and selling at around $190 made us $110,000 - and this was entirely legal (although the actual amount received was much lower, to the amount of around 70%).

As of 6 months ago we had 1,270BTC total transaction over both sites. This equates to, at the current market rate of $320 per BTC, an amount of $406,400. However, we traded when they were multiple rates so the actual amount is closer to $200,000 in the last year.

DO you save your money to invest in your operation or do you save and spend on luxurious items?

We save for business ventures, although paying 4 staff makes it considerably less per person.

What do vendors do when a package gets lost? Has this ever happened to you?

Refund. The return address isn't our address so no worries on us being busted.
We hd a few packages get lost before we were online vendors.

i guess by implication this means you write a return address on the package, presumably to avoid raising suspicions?? if so - what sort of address??

Every package should have a return address, not putting a return address is a very obvious flag.

Whose address do you use? Are you using a real person's address, someone not connected with your website? If so, don't you feel guilty that you might get them into trouble?

Always use a legitimate return address, never a fake one.

But is it yours (or someone connected with your business), or someone else's?

The return address is a valid address that checks out with USPS by comparison of the name and address. False return addresses can flag a package.

Okay, you're clearly using someone else's address, since you won't give me a straight answer. I don't agree with you doing that; if you did that to me and a package were opened, I would lose my professional licence.

You are asking a blackmarket vendor about specific address details and where they ship their items from, no reputable vendor would give you a detailed answer.
That being said, the return addressee is not liable as every single vendor uses a return address that is not theirs.
Do you expect us to use our personal business address?

What is your views on 2.0? Will you be waiting to set up shop on there? Also, do you have confidence in the administration to run a safe market?

We are staying far from it. They were supposed to be a decentralized open source platform that ran on .onion and .2ip. They claimed they would release their source code open source.
As of now they have yet to deliver on some of the fundamental framework they (claimed) to be setting up.
They also rely heavily on the fact ehy were SR Admins - they are not Silk Road admins. They are the forum moderators, which have very little if nothing to do with the actual Silk Road backend.
They post a picture of the FBI SR bust is just a sign that they are immature and trying to "poke" LEO.
They have failed to address the fact that their staff should be highly scrutinized with the recent flips, but they do not seemed concerned.

Lastly they claim to be professional yet are trying to roll out a un-developed platform - the admin is actively changing the code as he releases new features as some do not work as intended.
This is SR2.0 - why no testing? Why so eager to roll it out undeveloped? Why stagger features claiming it to be to control traffic yet they are resorting to changing fundamental site coding.

We are staying far away from the major markets for the time being.

Hi,

I think you may be mixing up Silk Road with silk road reloaded

Also I don't know how you can say the developers are being unprofessional when your landing page directs users to connect to your site via onion.to tor proxy.

I believe there was always a silent developer besides DPR on the old silk road team, while what I say is conjecture I think it's not fair to say "they are not Silk Road admins."

EDIT. Cant find any info about where you are shipping from? Just to let you know this is a deal breaker for a lot of people

Apologies, we did mix up the two. The points remains that the admins were not admins of the site but rather moderators.

Our .com landing page has our direct .onion and .i2p as well as a .to proxy that is highly advised against.

We ship from the USA internationally.

If it's highly advised against then why do you supply it?

We don't supply it, it's a proxy extension. It will work with any .onion site.
We offer the link because simply visiting our site is not illegal, the backend does not log any data, and orders have the option of being placed through PGP encrypted email separate of the site.

Well put.

How about /r/silkroadreloaded

Single developer that is slightly misguided.
He wants to release 24/7 video streaming over .i2p and .onion and does not seem to know how to remain bandwidth efficient. This includes "situations that are not conspiracy theories" which seem to us like they may be broadcasting conspiracy theories as well.
Aside from that they do seem promising although they do need a redesign on their site and subreddit.

Last question, what market in your opinion holds the most promise? Bad wolf?

Bad Wolf
TorMarket
The Marketplace

Link to bad wolf?

They are still developing their site(s) but they have a subreddit at /r/badwolfhosting

[deleted]

We heavily expected a Dr. Who reference

silkroadreloaded

I never stated streaming anything over .onion. In fact I stated it only over .i2p You are also assuming that I know nothing about bandwidth efficiency. Two corrections are needed, 1) i2p is actually capable of doing streaming video, several sites do this now, I only suggested this as an idea to supplement the lack of media currently present in the markets 2) I am extremely familiar with bandwidth efficiency. However not saying this would not and is not being addressed it is also noteworthy that i2p is fully capable of supporting torrents which Tor does not want due to the bandwidth inefficiency issue you presented which without realizing you were reflecting only on Tor. Research more on i2p you will find the benefits to be quite interesting.

I am and have been redesigning the layout on both and they both have been changed.

I also created a fully bootable client based on Tinycore Linux that allows anyone to get on Tor/i2p fairly effortlessly. It is only 200MB ISO and has firefox installed and ready to go for browsing, and basic file usage. I kept it extremely small, very clean and currently in the process of updating/creating the Wiki for others to follow that are not very familiar with something so slimmed down. Check it out /r/SilkRoadReloaded

You can stream over both .onion and .i2p, but it hurts the network - simply put there is no need for high bandwidth application over TOR/I2P. We do appreciate your site and it looks promising, and our only issue with streaming was not the logistics of it but the effect it has on other TOR/I2P users.

Cheers!

Please show where sr 2.0 said it was going to be 'a decentralized open source platform that ran on .onion and .2ip. They claimed they would release their source code open source.'

We mixed up 2.0 and reloaded to some extent, apologies. Original statement corrected.

how do you export your 'goods' safely across the world without them being intercepted? private shipping companies? or do you only supply nationally and use private mailing companies such as fedex?

United States Postal Service & meticulously careful packaging.
USPS requires a warrant to search, and with the recent bankruptcy of USPS they are even lower staffed than ever.
With a mix of around $10 spent on packaging alone (not postage) we make sure no orders are detectable.

Goodluck !

Thank you.

Can you talk about how common it is for your customers to encrypt their address when they message you? What proportion of your customers would PGP encrypt ordering instructions, and what percentage would send you their address in cleartext?

About 10% of customers encrypt their address. That's why we implemented automatic encryption on our order form.

Wow. That blows my mind that so few people would do the bare minimum to protect their privacy when making these sorts of purchases.

Would it be likely that anyone who had a plaintext shipping address in a dealer's inbox when the cops imaged the SR server had their address compromised?

Would it be likely that anyone who had a plaintext shipping address in a dealer's inbox when the cops imaged the SR server had their address compromised?

Absolutely. You'd be surprised how many based on our personal experience, there are a large amount of buyers that are probably quite nervous at the time.

How do you vet your new staff? Ever turned down someone on a gut instinct?

We have two types of staff - the ones that physically know each other are as close as family (quite literally), and we have very no personal staff that we question beyond the normal capacity (we are blackmarket vendors, we all get overly paranoid sometimes).
As far as remote staff, we simply maintain anonymity and make sure that no information is given that could ID us. These are mostly just IT outsourcing for data entry or small scripts.
We have turned down several members that have either accepted a job or those that simple message us asking if we need staff. Most of these have been blatant LEO.

LEO

?

Law Enforcement Officers

How do you ship out 10lbs a week without alerting authorities?

I understand if you can't go in depth here but any attempt at an answer would be appreciated :)

We have never shipped 10 pounds at once - everything is quarter pounds to pounds. We simply make sure we can drop it off anonymously (dropbox or blue bin).

How did you get into all of this (deep web?)?

One of our members was a technically oriented individual that was looking into Bitcoins as a means to invest in our grow operation. We were a couple hours away from going to CVS to drop off money for BTC when we stumbled across the alternate BTC uses - including Silk Road.
From there we bought an account next day, and started probing everything we could about the site trying to prove it was a scam or LEO.
When we couldn't, we started vending. The first week was one of the only times we came too prepared - we expected 4 pounds and got around a quarter pound ordered our first week, grams and 8ths.
The second week we met 2 pounds and had enough to establish our "lifetime goal".
Over the last 2 years we have seem over 1000 BTC in sales, markets rise and fall, over 2000 unique customers an over 3000 unique shipments, 1,293 PGP keys (although most are not longer valid for contact as they use tormail), and almost enough cannabis to fill up a deuce and a half.

Whats your grow set up like and are you planning any breeding projects so you could sell your own specific strains?

Eb And Flow with drip ring setup, (16) 10 gallon grow containers per 55 gallon reservoir. All natural nutrients used, chilled and decontaminated water (we have water table issues in our area), redundant water pumps and overflow prevention.

Each system (pumps, electricity, sensors) are redundant in at least 2 counts, meaning if one pump or sensor fails there is always a second to take over.
In the event of a power outage we have a manually started 10,000W generator for extended power failures.

We have 2 separate buildings for sativa and indica, with one having a large amount of floorspace and low overhead, and the other having massive overhead for tall plants. Feminized seeds means we don't have to worry as much about isolation.

We primarily run a sea of green with 40 - 60 plants at any given time (overall, not harvesting) and around 10-30 plants in their own cycles.

Thats an awesome sounding setup man, you quite obviously know very much what you are doing, do you plan to ever go 'legit' so to say?

We are Caregivers in our state, we just don't let our patients or the State onto our "extra" plants. All products are either grown by us or another state approved medical facility.
EDIT: Caregivers are not registered in any way. Caregivers are not state registered dispensaries/growers, they are not doctors - they are normal people who grow cannabis in a legal state.

We are legitimate Caregivers in our state

Doesn't that narrow down your location some?

Yes, to the already obvious cannabis friendly state. Beyond that caregivers are not registered - growers and dispensaries are but caregivers are not and can be nearly anyone, they just have to grow cannabis.
We are not a business, state registered dispensary, or state registered grower.

Yes, that was a ridiculously stupid thing to say.

There is more than enough information in this thread to narrow down the identity.

If you are an online drug dealer or somebody else who wants to remain anonymous, i'll give you one tip: shut up. It only takes a few paragraphs of text to identify a person via unique writing style. The OP here may as well call the DEA hotline and leave his name.

Yes, that was a ridiculously stupid thing to say.

There is more than enough information in this thread to narrow down the identity.

Caregivers are not registered - growers and dispensaries are but caregivers are not and can be nearly anyone, they just have to grow cannabis.
We are not a business, state registered dispensary, or state registered grower.

The OP here may as well call the DEA hotline and leave his name.

What makes you think this is a single person, or at that that Modern Culture would not know about handwriting forensics prior to doing an AMA?

It takes much more than a paragraph, current analytical techniques use several thousands of words to build a rudimentary analysis.

It isn't the one data point, it is multiple data points that go towards providing the 33bits required to id someone. You really aren't as anonymous as you believe you are, and each bit of information you provide doesn't eliminate one person, it eliminates half of all people - and very quickly (like compound interest) you don't need many bits to get to a single person. see reports such as this one (pdf).

My suggestion: say nothing, do nothing, don't infer anything, etc.

And if one (or more) of those points were falsely represented with "black flag" information?
Also we are not giving out our personal information - the 33bit method would be hard to apply, as this is more of OPSEC issue.

When you are a blackmarket vendor it is quite hard to "do nothing say nothing".

Do you feel like what your business does is ethical? Do you thinnk law enforcers trying to catch you are in the wrong?

We do feel it is ethical. We don't supply anything other than cannabis, a drug that has been proven time and time again to not be the horrible substance as portrayed by 1930's culture. We take to a more modern culture in the belief (and supporting scientific evidence) that while cannabis does has negative side effects, it's positive side effect outnumber the bad effects significantly.
THC and CBN can not only shrink but help prevent some cancer growth.
CBD is a natural pain reliever. Just CBD does not get one "high".

The Law Enforcement are absolutely in the right. We do not expect even a LEO that may side with us to have that effect his job. We are doing something blatantly illegal in US jurisdiction ad we expect nothing less than them doing their job as required.

While we are not open about this business, we do support our local Police Department in events as they have a generally "by the books" reputation compared to some more corrupt areas.

What do you mean you "support our local Police Department in events?" Monetarily? If so, why? How does this benefit you?

Our local PD still has police events/charities/fundraisers.
Great food and upstanding charitable members of the community are not suspected of international trafficking.

By "Great food" do you mean Los Pollos Hermanos?

We believe that's reserved for DEA charities.

I am wanting to order from one of these types of sites, but I am worried about the receiving end, and the risks. What can you say to alleviate those concerns?

First, always research your vendor. All the security in the world doesn't matter if the end recipient is untrusted.
That being said, always use PGP. Never send messages without encryption.
If you are concerned with your home address being shipped to then we've never had issues with PO boxes, just make sure a signature is not required.
Never order to a fake name, vacant address, or large distributed mailing centers such as dorm rooms.

I don't understand why everyone always suggests using PGP. I may be wrong here, but this is how I understand it: I send a message (address)to you via PGP. You unencrypt the message and see my address and then ship. What happens if you copy my address to your desktop or another file (like a print program). Or you get busted and give up your PGP key. Am I right in thinking that PGP is only as reliable as the other party? I hope I am missing something here, I would like to feel more secure about the technology.

Nearly every security/anonymity options offered are useless if one of the involved parties are leaking data. PGP, Encryption, TOR, I2p are provided to help one remain anonymous, they do not make you anonymous without the end user also maintaining personal security.

Why is it a bad idea to order to a fake name? After all, there's plausible deniability either way.

USPS keeps a constantly updated address database. If the name doesn't match the address you run the risk of a package being flagged.

How does shipping work? (Of course I don't expect you to reveal your secrets, maybe an example of how it could look like hypothetically)

Was any of your packages ever discovered before reaching it's destination?

Multiple layers of mylar and vacuum seal, opaque layers, and false items.
In our individual days we had a few intercepted, but this was before we were even selling online. We have since improved very much.

At that point, doesn't the government try to arrest you?

No, they don't have any information. No fingerprints, biological material, legit but false return address, anonymous tracking.

Just because you intercept a package doesn't mean you know where it came from.

A single intercept also does not warrant a warrant.

How do you deal with cashing out large sums of bitcoin back into the bank.

Do they not question how you made X amount of money per year with no real/legal job listed?

The money never touches the bank, it's all USD and silver bullion.
We claim all money made and pay the appropriate taxes, although we do have cash reserves that we do not claim.
We are all employed outside of our business venture.

What's BMR?

Black Market Reloaded

Why do you ship bud? Is it for the money? Ethics or some other personal reason?

I'm guessing you're from a state that has legal medicinal bud at the very least, so why not go legit and sell to dispensaries and/or other legal persons? Sure, the money may not be as great, but you lose a lot of risk of LE busting you. On a side note, what kind of money do you make legally vs illegally? $1000 per pound more when you sell online? I'm curious.

Thanks for doing this AMA!

Money for sure. Locally we can sell cannabis for around $10 a gram, however we would much rather keep a streamlines anonymous exportation plan rather than deal on the "streets".
We make around 25% to 40% more selling online. We feel that the risk is worth the benefits.

[deleted]

We do ship to Europe, we offer tracking and if the tracking indicates a package does not arrive we send an automatic refund after 12 days or at request. We previously offered reshipments on BMR and SR, however we found that often it is simply a logistics problem that cannot be fixed by a reship.

Do your parents know? :)

Of course ^not

How do you see yourselves as different from other established clearnet cannabis websites such as budmail.biz?

We ship both to the USA and internationally (budmail.biz does not ship to US, Sweden, or Norway) and use an encrypted form of hosting.

Would you ever do it again?

We never stopped, we just made our own vendor store.

[deleted]

Temporarily yes. Our order form stores orders until we delete them or if no action is taken in 14 days. All stored data is encrypted via PGP, and upon package arrival all information is destroyed.
We do keep customers emails for future reference with repeat customers.

Is it possible to insert packets of malware into Tor, as it is being downloaded?

It would be quite hard if the end user validates the download. Download spoofing would be a more likely malicious method.

How do you not get caught in the Deep Web if the Govt. own a portion of Tor

Source - Times Mag

Because the Govt. does not own a portion of TOR and TOR has yet to be shown as insecure.

The tor project gets government funding. In and of itself that should tell you something.

I believe the future of darknet markets is in .I2p. It is much more secure than tor. This isn't my opinion. I am too uneducated to have one. This comes from those much more well versed in programming and net sec issues.

That should tell you that TOR was developed by the US Navy and nothing more. Government funding =/= owning portions of TOR.
Most likely a private company owns the majority of TOR exit nodes.

I2P is recently reguarded a safer because of the misconception that any of the pasts busts have been at fault of TOR, which is false. All vasts were social busts, where admins made mistakes in withholding their identity.
I2P has just as many theoretical flaws as TOR does (actually quite a few more) but neither TOR nor I2P have ever shown to be insecure.
I2P is no safer than TOR if you don't practice personal security. Both are secure and (currently) unbreakable as of this time.

why dont you see BMR as one of the top upcoming prospects..? backopy already proved loyalty by refunding all BTC when the site was taken down, due to a potential security flaw.

Don't get us wrong, the vendors can be A+ on BMR however the fact that backopy A) Used a VPS to reduce amount of work B) Chose a unreliable VPS and C) never address the amateur coding issue.

Since we got the root we have since distanced ourselves as we saw that it was relatively insecure coding from what the index page indicated.

How long does that free shipping take domestically?

Generally 3 days, however it can take up to 5 days.

What are your views on the sheep marketplace?

Out of the major markets (SR, BMR, SMP) it's the best looking and, from what we can tell, has the best coding. That being said it is still a unstable site and many, many people widely regard it to be a honeypot.
We've sold on there before (previous to SR bust, not under same alias), it's not all too bad but we feel that it's simply trying to compete with BMR (and then SR) with it's features.

I understand the honeypot concept but surely if vendors move BTC daily out of the site then all they've lost is the vendor fee. Why do you believe its called a honeypot? Most answers seem to be because its called sheep

Honeypot means Law Enforcement Sting.

Yes i understand that, but if vendors and customers are safe then they have nothing to worry about. Im wondering why sheep is regarded as a honeypot. The only answer i have seen is because of the name 'sheep'. Why do you believe its a honeypot?

Out of curiosity could you link us the discussions where these assumptions were based off of the site name?

Heres a few on reddit - http://www.reddit.com/r/SheepMarketplace/search?q=honeypot&restrict_sr=on

The reason for my questions are that I am considering heavy investment in becoming a vendor myself, so I am weighing up my options as to which is the most suitable marketplace. Thanks for your answers so far

It seems most are simply speculation, and most arguments are literally because the sites name is sheep.
The downside to sheep is that it is a foreign hosted site (India) and support can be a bit touchy, but otherwise if you use PGP for orders you shouldn't run any risk.

Interesting how did you find its hosted from india?

Linguistics from Support

What are some of the legal problems your customers face? Have you had any reports on these?

We've never had any reports of customers that have legal issues regarding our services.

Cops

Not a concern to us.

Why? How can you feel so safe when you promote yourself like this? (actual question, not rhetorical)

We do not expose ourselves in any way, and assume that in any possibility exists of data leaks then we assume that data compromised.
We use TOR and I2P over VPN. For some applications we use TOR over I2P over VPN.
We always use PGP encryption, and have native live encryption for all of our terminals.
Lastly cops are not our concern, intelligence agencies are. Despite the view on Law Enforcement we (in our own view) support our local law enforcement in our area (not suggesting all police departments are as fine and to the books as ours), so we don't have the "We Hate Cops" attitude - they are simply doing their job and are the lower level of enforcement.

When you say "TOR Over I2P over VPN" do you mean that you combine them or do you just prefer to use TOR and I2P on different situations. And thanks for doing this AMA

I believe that he means combining them. "Over" as in "via". Although, I'm no expert, that's just how I interpreted it.

Edit: I say this because in other answers, he states that he prefers I2P to TOR, so saying he uses TOR "over" "I2P" wouldn't make sense in that context.

would it be like He logs into Tor then from there logs into I2P OR would it be like Him saying that he would use I2P before he would use Tor. I'm so confused sorry

Log into your VPN, then log onto OTR or I2P. In exteme situations you can tell I2P or TOR to use a certain port to forward it though it's counterpart (TOR through I2p or I2P through Tor)

In extreme situations we connect to a VPN, then connect to I2p, then configure TOR to run through I2P.

By making this thread and reddit account i assume you could still not be traced?

Of course not.

How do you justify using VPN after the NSA PowerPoint came out and revealed a few dozen of the top VPNs were already compromised, back in 2007 or so.

Do you just ignore the threat of intelligence agencies and hope they wouldn't risk exposing "parallel investigations" to bust you?

We are not effected as we only use private VPN's.

I'm too stup-itt use TOR. Can I get some pot anyway?

We have a .com site that explains everything and provides links on how to download and use TOR and I2P.