How a Russian Dark Web Drug Market Outlived the Silk Road (and Silkroad 2) [RAMP]

This is an interesting article that covers the Russian market RAMP. We don't hear much about it here. I some of the future darknet market proprietors could learn a thing or two. I think this style would be very beneficial to large vendors since sales figures are hard to determine. Another strength is dealing over IM (w/ OTR) provides encryption for everything and its probably easier than PGP.

Silk Roads come and Silk Roads go. But after every law enforcement crackdown shakes the dark web, one Russian black market always seems to survive.

For more than two and a half years, the Russian Anonymous Marketplace, or RAMP, has maintained a thriving business in the Dark Web drug trade, offering one of the Internet's widest arrays of narcotics to its Russian-speaking clientele. That's roughly as long a tenure online as the original Silk Road achieved before it was seized in an FBI bust in October of last year. And it's far longer than the new generation of anonymous drug markets that followed the Silk Road, including more than a dozen sites taken down last week in a massive coordinated police action. The largest of those seized sites, Silk Road 2, lasted exactly one year to the day.

RAMP, which like those sites runs on the anonymity software Tor, has outlived its western counterparts to amass more than 14,000 members. But the exact amount of uppers, downers, and psychedelics of every description it sells can't be easily measured--and not just because the site is exclusively in Russian. RAMP functions less like an eBay-style e-commerce site than a loose-knit, Craigslist-like web forum where buyers and sellers can find one another.

full text


Comments


[32 Points] kanad3:

It oulived SR because nobody outside Russia cares about Russia.


[3 Points] earthmoonsun:

isn't evo also supposed to be run by russians?


[2 Points] ciphersexual:

Very interesting, thanks for posting it here.

Does anyone understand how the Moscow access licenses work? Is there a separate Moscow-only sub-section of RAMP?

I've often wondered when we'll see our first regional or local market. Or more similar to RAMP, markets that restrict searches to a granularity finer than "ships from <country>"


[2 Points] sonnyburnett3:

I think the main reason the russians sites don't fall is because a lot of them are real criminals not just people who are good at coding and decide to make a website. Most of them probably have connections to launder money, hitman, and other real life criminal connections.


[1 Points] None:

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[1 Points] None:

I like this idea a lot. But more likely than not, if the operators were living in the US the FBI would be on it already.


[-1 Points] xeddmc:

Only sketchy thing about this man, is over IM, how would you know who is a fed or who is a legit customer. I, personally, would be wayy too sketched out using IM for drugs legal honest goods, unless it was a seller who I dealt with on a market, and I had his PGP.


[-7 Points] None:

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