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http://www.wired.com/2014/11/oldest-drug-market-is-russian/

How a Russian Dark Web Drug Market Outlived the Silk Road
(And Silk Road 2)
By Andy
Greenberg

11.14.14

Getty
Images

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 Internets widest arrays of narcotics to its Russianspeaking clientele. Thats 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 its 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 cant be easily measuredand 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.
While RAMP does offer a Silk-Road-style escrow system to help users avoid fraud in high-value transactions,
most sellers seem to seal their deals informally beyond the forum. They often communicate over the encrypted
instant-messaging system known as Off-The Record messaging and pay in bitcoin or with the Russian payment
service QIWI. Then drug purchases are triple-vacuum sealed and mailed, or in the case of some Muscovite
buyers, delivered to a dead drop location where buyers are instructed to pick it up.
Users often return to RAMP to offer reviews and feedback. In the nose, it is without foreign flavor and is not bitter
in scent and it does not burn, writes one cocaine reviewer on the site. This is the first coke that I felt right away in
the moment.
Even without taking commissions on those off-site transactions, RAMP is pulling in serious revenue. The site
charges 42 top dealers $300 a month for their own private forum sections. Some pay another $700 monthly for a
banner ad at the top of the site, flashing images of cocaine rails and marijuana leaves. And for the privilege of
selling the most profitable drugscoke, hashish, and amphetaminesto the lucrative Moscow market, dealers
are required to buy one $1,000-per-month license for each drug on that restricted quota list that they wish to sell.

Some of the Russian-language banner ads advertising drugs for sale at the top of RAMPs homepage.

Make your business successful with RAMP! Immediate sales! the sites advertisement to potential dealers reads
in Russian. Sellers of quality hashish, amphetamine, and cocaine in Moscow, were waiting for you.
It isnt exactly clear how RAMP has managed to avoid the same fate as Silk Road and its successors. The
explanation may be as straightforward as the fact it targets users in Russia, where law enforcement often turns a
blind eye to online crime. Or it may be that RAMPs simpler, more decentralized system has helped protect the site
from law enforcement. Less involvement in the deals between users means fewer staff members who could be
exploited as informants, or who might be undercover agents.
Nicolas Christin, a Carnegie Mellon professor who has closely studied Dark Web drug markets, suggests the
sites simplicity and lack of its own payment system could reduce its attack surfaceless code means
less hackable bugs for law enforcement to attack. Its more like traditional drug dealing with online support
than a real full-fledged anonymous marketplace, says Christin, comparing RAMP to Silk Roads simpler
predecessor OVDB, or the Open Vendor Database. To some extent its very primitive. But to some extent it
clearly works really well, because these guys are still alive and kicking.
The Dark Web is still reeling from the impact of Operation Onymous, a joint campaign by the FBI and Europol that
last week seized the Tor-protected websites of the Silk Road 2, along with popular drug market competitors like
Blue Sky, Cloud 9 and Hydra, and dozens of others. The security community and administrators of those sites
have speculated that the takedown may have taken advantage of an unknown weakness in Tor, suggesting that
perhaps distributed denial of service attacks forced traffic over relays in Tors network that were controlled by law
enforcement, allowing cops to match traffic at the hidden site with its IP address.
But that theory doesnt explain why several of the top drug sites running Tor hidden services, including RAMP and
its top western competitors Agora and Evolution, were spared by Operation Onymous. Nicholas Weaver, a
security researcher at Berkeleys International Computer Science Institute, speculates that the remaining sites
may have been hosted in countries beyond western law enforcements reach. Id now bet that all surviving
darknet markets are hosted in Russia, China, or similar countries that say F U to US requests, he wrote last
week. Its far easier to be a cyber-crook with a Moscow address.
Weavers theory could explain RAMPs longevity, if it in fact hosts its servers in Russiabut thats difficult to
confirm, given that Tor masks the sites IP address. And RAMP may simply not be a target for Western law
enforcement, since it caters exclusively to Russian speakers.

Since at least September, 2012, RAMP has been

run by a figure known as Darkside, who didnt
respond to WIREDs request for an interview.
Using an avatar of Edward Nortons character
from the film Fight Club, Darkside has laid down a
strict series of rules for the sites users: RAMP
allows no weapons, stolen credit cards,
counterfeit documents, or even legal pornography
to be sold on the site. Thats far more restrictive
than Agora (which sells weapons) and Evolution
(which sells both weapons and stolen credit
cards).
Promoting violence and nationalism, or even
talking politics at all, can lead to being banned
from RAMP. Darkside doesnt use any of the
revolutionary rhetoric of the Dread Pirate Roberts,
the Silk Roads libertarian founder. His comments
seem limited to the day-to-day administration of
his lucrative drug business. The only hint of
character he reveals at all are a series of semiinspirational quotes from figures like Mark Twain,
Marcus Aurelius, and Bruce Lee that rotate at the
top of the site.

The Ed Norton avatar of Darkside, RAMPs administrator.

Each of Darksides own messages is also signed with a Russian-paraphrased quote from Albert Einstein, one that
might capture the security strategy that has kept RAMP online longer than practically any other drug market on the
Dark Web: Everything must be made as simple as possible, it reads. But not simpler.
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