Hello, fellow banes of society. Ye olde shoppekeeper here. A recent attempt to purchase from our store by a subcontractor of the Office of the Inspector General prompted me to make this post.
You may have seen vendors insisting that you use your real name and/or that delivery to PO boxes is not offered. There have been several reasons for this discussed, but one reason that I have seen little light shed on is that it helps your vendor verify that you are a real person and that you are not acting on behalf of law enforcement. This benefits everyone (except the poor lost souls working for the powers that be) because it helps keep your vendor in business and minimizes the chance that they will be compromised (along with, potentially, any of your information).
Let me be Frank (I have to obfuscate my identity, naturally), people that work for the government are generally incompetent. If they excelled in their field, they would be able to demand much higher pay in the private sector. Instead, they find compensation and security working for an organization that gets its operating cash by stealing it from the public like the unskilled bullies they are.
So, of course they suck at things like reputation management. Or, say, creating a believable fake persona on the internet. That's why they stick out like a sore thumb when they attempt to make an order. They would probably be better off impersonating real people, but they are ironically and hilariously bound by the laws created by the same entity that they have sworn allegiance to, and thus have to more or less play by the rules, which means that identity theft is not an option.
Their only chance at maintaining any degree of anonymity is by using a PO Box, but of course with the proper verification procedures, even those can be scrutinized to reveal data about who owns/controls them.
We believe this is why we have observed LE and their subcontractors attempting to order products off various deep web markets using only a PO Box as their shipping information (no name given). We also believe, following our own extensive research, that this is not the sign of an any specific investigation but more likely subcontractors collecting evidence and compiling data about particular substances and their geographic origins to remit to the Postal Inspector so somebody over there can make a power point and convince someone else over there that they are doing a good job and that their job is relevant and essential.
This has been a bit of info and a bit of conjecture from your friendly shoppekeeper. Hopefully you buyers will remember that using a real name and address is good practice. If you happen to be someone stuck in an LE occupation who also likes to get high, I can't make any guarantees about other vendors but if you include that info with your order with us and use your real name, it will be a lot less likely to be canceled. We might even include extra to show our appreciation for your honesty.
And hopefully other vendors will remember that buyer verification is an important and vital aspect of opsec that should not be overlooked (and of course remember that it is still ok to ship to buyers who fail your verification, just make sure you leave all sorts of ridiculous, random dead-end clues with the order).
For anyone interested, unfortunately we don't currently operate on any dark net markets. You wish. In your Dreams.
Is buyer verification a common practice amongst vendors? It makes sense to do a cursory look to make sure the name given matches an address. But it would take some time to do so, a big vendor could spend a good amount of doing doing verification.