Fascinating piece recently published by Talking Drugs
Telegram is host to a plethora of flourishing drug markets that have become a serious contender to darknet markets, offering users a far lower technical barrier to entry. Anyone with the app can access Telegram drug markets with an invite link from a friend, and an understanding on how to buy and send cryptocurrencies. If that is too complicated, there are even Telegram-based drug services that, for a fee, will allow you to make a regular bank transfers and settle payment with your vendor in cryptocurrency.
Thanks to end-to-end encrypted messaging and a simple interface, Telegram has become a popular platform for drug purchases – although it is impossible to know to what extent law enforcement are monitoring the activities of vendors and customers.
This report explores UK Telegram drug markets, their contents, culture, and business models. It’s not an exhaustive list and does not represent offline markets or Tor browser-based darknet markets.
The researcher & data privacy
This report is based on extensive primary research. Data was collected by a sole researcher who has now left all of these groups and will not be passing on any information or data to law enforcement or any other individual. The researcher has no interest in creating legal issues for Telegram vendors and has opted for anonymity for their own protection. By the time this is published, all data that contains vendor or group names will have been disposed of in an unrecoverable manner and the account used for data collection deleted. At no point did the researcher order drugs from any of these vendors.
Data collection
Data was collected for a period of 18 months, from March 2022 to August 2023. A total of 60 different vendors were recorded selling over 30 different drugs, but there were many more on offer. In total, there were 1,730 different listings recorded in the data. A listing was recorded if it was posted by an established vendor and its value was of over £1,000 although some listings advertised for well over £30,000. Only one listing was recorded per drug from each vendor in one month.
22 different channels or groups were recorded, most of them with over 1,000 members. Some of these channels were run by single vendors, others were multi-vendor groups where customers and vendors could chat freely. A minority of vendors used bots with an administrator taking orders and making sure payments are received. Many others use bot technologies to allow customers to place and pay for orders without dealing with any humans.
Business models
None of these transactions are conducted face-to-face: similarly to the traditional darknet, British vendors use the Royal Mail. As with the darknet, discreet vacuum-sealed packaging was the norm across markets. According to the Telegram chats, it was very unusual for a package not to arrive. For those that didn’t, customers and vendors would suspect a postal worker had stolen the package rather than it being seized by authorities. Suppliers seem to operate largely unfettered by law enforcement, although there were a few instances where a vendor was reported to have been arrested. Some vendors appeared to have been using the same handles for many years. From the information available to this researcher, it seems reasonable to conclude that, in 2022, the postal strikes disrupted Telegram-based drug markets to a greater extent than law enforcement did.
Many of the larger vendors operate in teams, usually with a manager and a main supplier with an administrator taking orders and making sure payments are received. There might also be a packer (or different teams of packers) who package the orders and send them out. Each member could be in completely different parts of the country and may have never met each other. A small number of vendors were drop-shippers, taking orders from their customers and ordering from another vendor, thereby making a profit without actually handling any drugs themselves.
A few vendors would occasionally argue with each other, claiming that the other’s product was adulterated or fake. Some accusations were made through disinformation campaigns aimed at discrediting others. A small number of vendors were happy to ship internationally, with Australia seen as a particularly lucrative market. One vendor with an extensive menu offered their services across three different European countries, with drugs delivering from within that country. The researcher found two separate services that act as ‘holiday plugs,’ who take a nominal payment of £10 to connect you with a local drug dealer when you are abroad, with access to truly impressive databases of street-level dealers around the globe. There were also large channels that functioned solely to advertise other vendors.
Market culture
Topics discussed within groups ranged from the quality of drugs available, mental health peer support or very occasionally violent criminality. One channel purchased drugs from different vendors, tested them through various drug testing agencies and published their results online. Counterfeit banknotes, card fraud, document fraud and weapons were also topics of discussion, although many of these types of criminal actions were forbidden within drug-selling groups. It was clear that many other groups existed to facilitate fraudulent activity but were not the focus of this research. There were also many scammers present, with customers often complaining of being ripped off by copycat vendors.
Read full article at the link
