assuming the two numbers after your name are your year of birth; it is really not that much different from buying drugs the old way except you are using computers and dealing with various foreigners and wildly fluctuating currency rather than folk in your own country. Although some stuff is good quality; ripoffs and mislabelling are not uncommon. You are after all often dealing with the same people who send spam emails to older folk and nick their credit card details ; contrariwise I’ve never met one real life dealer who would rob an old granny; and I used to consume about a half kilo of amfet per year in the 90s. In fact some of them who were Catholics would give 10% of their profit to the nuns as it apparently kept you out of the hot place :laugh_at:
You need some medium level to advanced computer knowledge; the data traffic is immediately flagged up by equipment at British Telecom and offered to GCHQ to have a look at if they wish. They cannot easily decrypt the data but they can work out what region/town it comes from. This is basic science; I have a much less sophisticated (and cheaper) device for my work than GCHQ and BT use which I can connect to any copper pair or coax cable and it tells me what signals are on it (it doesn’t decrypt them) and most importantly how long the cable is (and if there are any shorts, opens, or the whole cable is dis at one end). So all they need to do is literally follow the cable (if its fibre optic the signals always travel at speed of light * delay factor of the fibre. The telecom companies can use maths and a very accurate clock to locate the traffic; which are readily available at any local science uni.
They do that all the time to make sure the internet works correctly and there are not DDOS attacks or other stuff disrupting it.
The biggest danger of darkweb is its effort-intensive; most people who use it buy stockpiles of good drugs to hoard but there is always a temptation to resell them to friends to recover some of the time/effort or make a bit of cash to buy new computer equipment etc. NCA acknowlegde its created a whole new load of dealers, addicts and even somoe casualties which wouldnt’ have occured before but its in the context of drug use declining globally and the distance means there is less physical violence amongst drug users.
but if the “baldy men” notice a lot of TOR traffic in one area and the cops/NHS report an increase in problematic use (anything from ODs to anti social/sketchy behaviour); they know where to look.
the dark web and NPS selling protect the dealers more than the users; they might be good in short term but they come with some dodgy political agendas and I personally think they are no substitute for the European method of tolerance, harm reduction and decriminalisation which is engineered in such a way to also help recover the costs to our public health services.
