Sometimes, I laugh at the faith
that I had in a hole in a door.
You know, I stick my money in there.
Whatever you push back, I would smoke it or use it.
[ Scoffs ]
Thank God there was no Dark Web when I was using.
Abdullah: So, these just come to you packed up like this? Yeah.
Through the post office down here? Yep.
United States Postal Service -- Best drug dealer I've ever had.
No longer do you have to go down a dark alley
or, you know, these random, chance meetings on the street
where you risk your freedom, your safety, your privacy.
You just swipe a button.
Abdullah Saeed found out the Internet brought the streets
directly into your living room basically.
Man: [ Modulated voice ] It just becomes like Amazon --
just, you know, go on and fill up your basket
and wait a few days and check your mailbox.
Our goal is just to simply show the world
a window as to why people do the things they do
and where that desperation comes from.
¶¶
It's like they say -- When the system fails you,
you create your own system.
The Internet you know -- websites, videos, e-mails --
are all just a fraction of what's out there in cyberspace.
A vast, Deep Web outside of Google's reach
actually comprises the majority of the Internet.
Drug dealers realized this hidden part of the web
is a perfect place to do business,
so they set up shop.
And this illegal part of the Deep Web became known
as the Dark Web or Dark Net.
When most people think of drug trafficking,
they think of smuggling over borders
and distribution by a network of street dealers.
But thanks to the Dark Net,
anyone with an Internet connection can
now start their own drug-distribution operation
with just a couple of clicks.
So I want to see how it works and why so many people are
turning to the Dark Net to get their drugs.
For the past week or so, I've been talking
on encrypted chat to a guy who uses the Deep Web markets
to supply his illegal drug operation here.
Naturally, he's been a little sketched out
about having us come and hang out and film with him,
but I just got a text message giving us the go-ahead,
so we're pretty much good to go.
Let's go see how this guy sells drugs.
¶¶
Okay, so, we've got your laptop set up with the projector,
and what are we looking at here?
This is how any average person would create an account
and get started buying stuff on the online black market?
This looks pretty simple.
It's just like creating a Facebook account
or a Gmail account or something like that.
So, hit that blue button, and we're all registered, huh?
Whoa, okay.
So, 575 entries in the drug category.
Benzos, cannabis, dissociatives, ecstasy,
opioids, prescription, psychedelics.
So, what do we got here right on top?
A gram of cocaine -- How much is that?
$76 for a gram of cocaine.
That's pretty comparable to street prices, I would say.
Whoa, okay, so that's straight-up heroin that you can get.
It looks insane.
I mean, that looks like it came straight out of Afghanistan.
By using an encrypted browser called Tor,
we're able to access just about any illicit good
or service in what looks exactly like eBay for contraband.
Whoa, so, 10 U.S. passports there.
Not too many entries in the "weapons" section.
Makes me feel a little bit better.
What's under "erotica"?
"Used panties, heavy wear -- medium wear, light wear" --
Oh, wait, what's the price differential?
So, the heavier-wear ones are more expensive,
is that how this works?
That is bizarre, man.
Obviously, people would be looking at a market like this
and thinking this is, like,
a really illicit, sort of criminal place.
But what is it that you could tell everyday people
about these sites that would make it make sense to them?
¶¶
Abdullah: This revolution isn't just fueling mail-order drug buys.
It's supplying dealers who are using the Dark Net
to sell drugs all over the country.
So I headed to the suburbs to meet one of them.
[ Knock on door ]
Man: [ Modulated voice ] Yo, look up at the camera.
Yeah, he's good.
Yo.
What's good, man?
Nice to meet you, man.
Thanks for having me at your place.
Man #2: [ Modulated voice ] Absolutely.
That is one fat mushroom you got sitting out on the table.
Oh, my God, how much do you think this thing weighs?
-4.5 grams. -Yeah?
You got more of this on hand?
Yeah. Check this out, man.
Open these with me.
Yeah? What's in there?
-We're about to find out. -[ Chuckles ]
I ordered this a few days ago.
Abdullah: So, these just come to you packed up like this? Yeah.
Through the post office down here? Yep.
United States Postal Service -- Best drug dealer I've ever had.
Whoa, that's a whole bunch. How many mushrooms are in there?
Oh, this is two ounces right here.
And what would you end up paying
if you had to find these from a local source?
I mean, you wouldn't.
Like, there's no local source for it.
That's the thing. -You can't get mushrooms out --
You ain't got 'em here.
So, are you pretty much the only guy in town who has mushrooms right now?
Pretty much -- that I know of, at least.
You can charge whatever you want, I'm guessing.
Do you tend to gouge?
-No. -No?
Especially with psychedelics,
I like to spread the experience with other people. Yeah.
Why have price be a barrier to that?
Yeah, truth.
That's a lot of introspective evenings, huh?
[ Laughs ]
So, these are weed edibles right here?
Yeah, extremely potent.
They're all individually, like, two packs,
which is dope 'cause, like, they stay fresh.
And how much did you buy these for, per cookie?
4.
4 bucks -- 4 bucks a cookie?
and how much do they go for around here?
I mean, they can be sold up to $20.
So your margins are really good on these, huh? Yeah.
¶¶
Abdullah: A couple years ago, these guys might have spent
their afternoons getting high and passing the time.
But today, they're some of the most profitable dealers
in their town.
Man #2: Yo, I need you to scale these out.
Make sure we have two zips.
You got 41 grams.
You can taste that they're fresh.
-Really? -Mm-hmm, definitely.
Man #2: These actually look like the tastiest mushrooms I've ever seen.
This is a zip? This is a zip?
Is that what this is? Confirmed?
All right, perfect.
'Cause I got to drop these off today.
Abdullah: Did you grow up in this neighborhood?
Do you live here?
No, I don't live around here.
I live on the other side of town --
White, upper-middle-class.
I had the access.
That's why most of the people doing this are wealthier,
like, younger people.
Young, suburban, white kids, essentially? Yeah, yeah.
Does that make you feel like you're in a position of power
here locally 'cause you're the only one
who can get a lot of these drugs?
Yeah, it is a particular advantage.
I mean, I have the access. I, like, literally go on --
Anything I want, it's all there.
Who else has that? Where else will you find that?
¶¶ Abdullah: If you're a drug dealer,
the Dark Net offers you the ability to source your product
from the convenience of your couch.
[ Sniffs, sighs ]
Is operating on the Deep Web relatively safer
than, like, sourcing your drugs from the street?
Absolutely.
Arrests from the Dark Web -- like, very rare.
and are you paranoid at all about, you know,
being surveilled or being busted?
Not really because the cops are paying attention to other stuff.
So, have you butted heads with any of the local gangs
that are also selling the same drugs? No, no.
I'm friends with them all. Like, they sell hard drugs.
And, like, it's, like, a totally different demographic,
like, people who I would, like, not normally,
like, see or associate with.
Abdullah: Dealers like this guy can order online
and then turn around and distribute
in his neighborhood to buyers he knows.
Hey, man.
Hey, I'm, uh -- I'm on my way right now.
Yo, you're alone, right, I'm assuming?
Okay, all right. Yeah, no, I just had to check.
All right, see you in a bit.
I may break this down into two orders,
get a feel on the situation or whatnot.
And then, I'll let you know.
Oh, word, yeah, no doubt, man.
All right, no doubt. Take it easy, man.
So, this is what he was giving me, $850.
This is going to get him 500 Xanax bars.
Abdullah: In terms of security for when you're out,
you know, on these runs, how do you keep things secure?
Man #2: Well, I got some pepper spray right here.
This is if anyone were to try to run up on the car,
rob me through the window or whatnot.
This will send 'em to the emergency room, no doubt.
It's very strong stuff.
Let me see --
I got -- Right here, I got a machete.
I mean, this is honestly probably more like
for road-rage purposes than, like, self-defense purposes.
This right here, this is a -- This is a B.B. gun I have.
[ B.B. pistol cocks ]
It looks very real -- non-lethal.
It's just gonna hurt like a bitch
if you get hit with it.
It looks like you've got a bunch
of police athletic league decals
on the back of your car.
Are you a big donor?
Uh, no, that came with the car,
and I just figured, you know, leave 'em on.
Like, it could only serve to benefit me
if I ever get pulled over or whatnot.
I've got a Catholic saint here.
Maybe the cop's a religious type.
If it comes to that, I'm hoping one of those things
will kick in, prevent the car from getting searched. All right.
Yo, we're not gonna get pulled over.
I'm white.
The cops that are here are here for gang violence.
Like, I have weed in the trunk.
I have a sack of money like this.
I'm not concerned.
¶¶
Abdullah: The Dark Net is transforming the suburbs.
But how has it affected other parts of the country
where it's difficult to get drugs in the first place?
I'm on a quiet, country road in rural America,
and I'm headed to meet a guy who says he's been using
the Deep Web for years, ordering all manner
of illegal drugs and illicit substances
and having them delivered right to his doorstep.
[ Gunshots ]
[ Modulated voice ] You hit that tree up there, right?
Yeah.
Abdullah: Living out here in a rural place,
it must be pretty hard to get the kinds of drugs
that you're looking for.
Did these online black markets just seem like a godsend to you
when you first discovered them?
Man: Basically, yeah.
I didn't buy locally because it wasn't worth it.
You don't know if it's going to be real
or if it's gonna be some fake shit,
so I started talking to people online.
So, say, you know, you log-in to a market.
How do you establish enough trust with that person
to know that, you know, they're going to give you
what you're paying them for?
I learned my first lesson about online drugs and trust --
There was a very large acid deal.
Got a lot of friends in on in it,
and I lost all my money.
I lost their money, too.
How much did you loose?
-$5,000 or $6,000, I think. -Oh, man.
Abdullah: It's not just getting ripped off by sellers.
The sites themselves often disappear overnight,
along with tens of millions of dollars of buyers' money.
There must be a big lack of confidence,
you know, in the new marketplaces
that are popping up.
I mean, you would think people would learn their lesson.
These new sites that are popping up,
they'll sell anything.
What includes "anything"?
I did find one person in particular who --
You could buy a certain amount of weed,
and they would give you your money back
in counterfeit money.
So you're getting a free ounce,
but the money that you're getting back is counterfeit.
They don't have any of the security features
or anything like that, but they give you tips
on how to get rid of it and how to spend it.
You basically just give it a light spray.
You can already see
it kind of brings out the colors a little bit.
And what kind of legal issues have you run into personally,
you know, while doing this business?
I've had things seized
by the Department of Homeland Security.
I've had things seized by federal postal inspectors.
I've had letters sent to my house
harassing me and my family,
saying the cops are gonna come in and raid the house,
and they don't do anything.
They have not done a single thing.
¶¶
Abdullah: The reason why the feds have never visited
buyers like this guy is they spend most of their energy
trying to take down the sites themselves.
The Dark Net started to become popular in 2011
when sites like Silk Road were set up
to act as a middle man between buyer and seller.
But in 2013, the government shut down Silk Road
and sentenced its founder to life in prison.
But thanks to constantly evolving encryption techniques,
an anonymous web browser called Tor,
and Bitcoin, a virtual currency not backed by any nation
that can be spent anonymously,
these marketplaces and the dealers who use them
are seemingly always one step ahead
of the feds who are trying to shut them down.
¶¶
Abdullah: Now that dealers can hide online to buy
and sell illegal drugs,
how does law enforcement keep up?
I spoke with Eric Feldman
of the Homeland Security Investigations Cybercrime Center to find out.
We're tasked, as HSI,
with enforcing more than 400 laws,
so anything that moves from the virtual world
to the Internet, whether that be
the theft of intellectual property,
it could be narcotics, it could be firearms --
It's really important that we just look
at any criminal enterprise that's looking to move
to the Internet because they're using the Internet as a tool.
We're literally seeking out the bad guys
the same way we do on the street
and trying to use whatever tools we can develop
to attribute them, right?
At the end of the day, we got to figure out
who that real person is behind the nickname.
The Department of Homeland Security can
also use the anonymity of the Dark Net to their advantage.
We are online operating in an undercover capacity,
meaning you don't know
if, as an administrator of a website,
that you are dealing with another fellow bad guy,
or if you're actually dealing with a special agent from HSI
whose job it is is to figure out who you are in the real world.
¶¶
Abdullah: Another way law enforcement can bust players
on the Dark Net is to follow the money back to a bank account.
Dark Net markets use virtual currencies like Bitcoin
to try to stay untraceable.
Now we're back in Brooklyn,
and we're going to go meet a very different kind of dealer.
If you want to buy Bitcoin without leaving a trail,
you can't use your bank account or a credit card.
That's where guys like Todd come in. Hey, Todd?
He's a street-level Bitcoin dealer.
So, Todd, so, I've got 200 bucks in U.S. dollars here
that I want to turn into Bitcoin.
Can you help me with that? -Yes.
I'm going to give you 170 spendable for $200.
Abdullah: Todd takes a 15% cut of every transaction,
and in about 10 seconds, he added $170 worth
of completely anonymized Bitcoin into my virtual wallet.
Where can I spend this? What can I do with this Bitcoin?
Expedia takes it, but I don't think
that's going to get you very far.
If you Google it, you'll find a number of places.
And then, there's a number of places I could buy stuff from
that you'd probably rather not know about.
Abdullah: What Todd's doing is perfectly legal.
But some of his clients are likely using
the Bitcoin he supplies to launder money,
buy drugs, or make illegal transactions.
So this line of work puts Todd in contact
with some dangerous clients.
The crooks figured out that we carry cash
and we carry something worth cash.
A kid calls me, somebody I had dealt with a few times.
"My brother wants 2,000 in coin" -- no problem.
As soon as I jumped in the backseat, shut the door,
the kid turns around with a revolver.
That was it, and I didn't have much cash.
So they took that. They took the phone,
And that was the end of it for the incident.
Emotionally, boy, that'll shake you up.
I stopped selling coins, like, for a month after that
just to fall back and re-evaluate the thing.
And yet, you decided to come back to the game.
Did you see that it's actually worth the risk
to be trading in Bitcoin?
It's not for everybody, but for me, it is.
Why is that?
This is just the best fit ever.
I finally found myself at 40-something.
I love my job. I love where I live.
And, yeah, I couldn't make this money doing anything else.
How many coins do you buy and sell in a given week
or a given day now?
Cash value -- $30,000 to $75,000. In a week?
I made more money in the last year and a half
than I made the entire 40 years before that.
Does it bother you that people might be using Bitcoin
that you sell them to, you know, do illegal stuff?
You know, if you gave me change for a $20,
would it bother me that you might spent my $20
on a bag of weed?
It really wouldn't. [ Laughs ]
-It's just money, right? -It's just money.
Would you turn someone's business away
if you knew what they were doing with it? Yeah, I've turned a few people away.
Too much information, you know?
"Now it's a crime.
I don't want to be involved in that." Gotcha.
But if you don't know, then you're in the clear, right?
That's probably a gray area.
¶¶
Abdullah: I'm back at the Vice office now,
and I've got 170 bucks worth of Bitcoin.
I'm going to go on the Deep Web and see what I can find.
These sites sell a lot of coke, weed, and heroin,
but some of the bestsellers are
what are known as research drugs,
popular prescription drugs sold overseas
that aren't classified as controlled substances
in most states, so they're technically legal
to buy here in New York.
What we're going to look for is etizolam.
Etizolam is a drug that's similar to Xanax or Valium.
It's a muscle relaxer, but it's not approved
to be prescribed here in the U.S.,
and it's still considered an unapproved research chemical.
¶¶
Okay, we've got a bunch of listings for etizolam.
This guy looks like he has what we're looking for.
It's as simple as that.
So, that's it.
With a few clicks, my order is placed,
and within a certain number of business days,
I'm going to get a package that's got etizolam in it.
Abdullah: Now I'm on my way to the mail-sorting facility
at JFK International Airport
to see how the U.S. government stops contraband
from coming into the country through the mail.
Nice to meet you. -It's a pleasure.
Thanks so much for having me over at your facility.
Thomas: Any time.
This is the largest mail facility
in the United States in CBP.
We get about 600,000 to 700,000 packages a day
into the facility, okay, for us to examine.
They select some parcels that come down,
and then we'll x-ray and open, and we'll take a look.
Right now what our officers are doing is exactly that.
They selected the mail from the express-mail area,
and then they're gonna be going through this mail
and looking for contraband.
We have IPR seizures, counterfeit pharmaceuticals,
hard narcotics, soft narcotics,
controlled substances.
We're looking for that needle in the haystack.
Abdullah: These Homeland Security special agents
are searching mail coming in from overseas,
but they only have enough agents to search a fraction
of the incoming packages.
And they're not allowed to open mail sent
within the United States without a search warrant.
That gives Dark Net buyers and sellers here in the U.S.
a huge advantage.
Thomas: So, going through, right now, like,
one of these officers actually found Viagra.
So this would be Viagra pills, sildenafil.
That's the name of it is, but it is Viagra.
¶¶
Everyone still thinks it's 1986.
They still think it's keys of cocaine
and a boat flying into Miami
when it's actually e-commerce flooding the marketplace.
It's been a huge strain on the border issues
and Homeland Security here in the United States
just because instead of having to go to channels
that we are familiar with from all kinds of smuggling
throughout history, now every single person
who has a computer and Internet connection
can start ordering contraband into the United States.
So, it's been about three weeks since I ordered my etizolam.
I've been checking the mail pretty much every day.
Still no sign of it,
but let's see if it's in there today.
This says "Ginseng and ginkgo, small sample."
That's definitely not something I ordered.
I think this might be my etizolam.
Let's pop it open and see what's inside.
Well, ask, and you shall receive.
It looks like we've got
30 vacuum-sealed pills of etizolam.
And a nice little, friendly notice that says,
"Laboratory region only. Keep in a safe place.
Not for human consumption."
¶¶
Despite high-profile drug busts, sites that disappear overnight,
and the dubious logic of popping a blue pill mailed
from a stranger, a recent study estimated
that Dark Net drug markets
are taking in $100 million a year and growing.
Do you think you would have gotten into the business
of selling drugs if it wasn't for the Deep Web?
No.
Deep Web gives me the advantage.
And without that, like, I have no special skill.
Do you feel like you're kind of part of a new movement?
I wish I could say, "As law enforcement,
we have all the answers and all the tools that we need to find you."
The answer is we don't.
It's a constant challenge to keep pace
with the illicit activity on the Internet
because it's constantly evolving.
Abdullah: This black market seems too big, too lucrative,
and, as we found out, too easy to use
to be shut down any time soon.
¶¶