Hello reader. Lets assume that you graduate successfully at RSM and that you are smart enough to land yourself a high paying job in the financial sector of London. The bonuses on top of your salary are great and you are quickly able to pay your student loans. The hard part is to deal with the never ending working hours and the stress from last-minute requests by your superiors. You have heard rumours of employees at your company who use drugs to deal with the most intense days and you become curious yourself. You decide to buy some drugs to get you through the day.
Two questions quickly pop-up in your mind: Where can you buy drugs and how do you know that the quality of the drugs is good? You are new in London and do not have any friends here who have some experience with buying drugs. Asking your colleagues is out of the option, what if the rumours are not true? Envisioning yourself walking the dark alleys of London in search of a drug dealer does also not seem so pleasant.
Luckily, you have learned during your studies about the rise of e-commerce and was inspired by the CoolBlue guest lecture. You suddenly also remember one blog you read about black markets on the darknet (https://digitalstrategy.rsm.nl//2017/10/03/the-difficulties-of-dominating-the-dark-net-black-markets/). Did it not say something about criminals using online platforms to facilitate drug trade? You start your search on the internet by Googling for some information on buying drugs on black markets.
You type in black market drugs (without quotation marks) and one of the first results is this website: https://darkwebnews.com/dark-web-market-list/. It provides some tips on how to remain anonymous on the web, which black markets are currently active and a link to their websites.
You happen to be a person which does not bother to go the second page of a google search and there you find a wikipedia page https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Silk_Road_(marketplace) of Silk Road, the first popular black market. What is the vision to start a drug sales on the web?
You are familiar with the general reasons why online channels are more beneficial than offline markets. For buyers it reduces search and switching costs and for sellers it expands the market reach and reduces transaction costs. For the drug trade, the move online means a potentially reduction in the violence related to the trade. This reduced violences can be seen as a reduction in transaction costs.
“Meghan Ralston, a former “harm reduction manager” for the Drug Policy Alliance, was quoted as saying that the Silk Road was “a peaceable alternative to the often deadly violence so commonly associated with the global drug war, and street drug transactions, in particular”. Proponents of the Silk Road and similar sites argue that buying illegal narcotics from the safety of your home is better than buying them in person from criminals on the streets.” (Business Insider, 2015)
Your vision of a dark alley in London merges with some Narcos style violence and you are happy to have found a way to avoid a more digital approach.
Because you are a good student, you read all the required readings for the course Information Strategy. One of the papers (Dimoka et. al, 2012) talked about product uncertainty and seller uncertainty in online markets. Your happiness about the reduction in violence of your drug trade starts to fade a bit and your own uncertainty about the products and vendors offered online start to increase. What if the drugs have no effect? Or what if the effects of the drugs are completely different than advertised? You do not want to walk around the office space thinking you are a bird and are able to fly or something. What to do if you pay the vendor, but you never received your drugs?
Your memory, filled with all kinds of theories, does not remember anymore how these kind of product and seller uncertainties can be mitigated, so you search within Google Scholar for the specific article. A beautiful quote of uncertainty is given:
“Uncertainty is defined as the buyer’s difficulty in predicting the outcome of an online transaction due to seller-related and product-related information asymmetry.” (Dimoka et al, 2012)
The authors of the article tell you that uncertainty can be reduced with information signals such as:
- online product descriptions (textual, visual, and multimedia)
- seller reputation
- third-party product assurances
You hope that some of these signals will be there to provide some light on the dark net and guide your purchase. You feel it is time to explore the dark net. You check your anonymity measures and chooses one of the markets still active.
You are surprised to find out that the interface of the website looks something like this:
*Of course it will not exactly look like this, because we are in a hypothetical story about your future life and Alphabay was shut down in July 2017*
The marketplace gives multiple indications of the reputation of the sellers and whether the seller works with a refund policy. The reputation is split in a ‘Vendor level’ and ‘Trust Level’. You are not completely sure how to the two work, but according to Reddit (https://www.reddit.com/r/AlphaBayMarket/comments/5qw3of/vendor_level_trust_level_explained/) the two indicators are based on the seller’s actions performed, sales amount, feedback ratings and user votes. You can read feedback provided by previous buyers per product and per vendor. You have to smile a bit when reading the following feedback:
“Excellent vendor, great communication, thx bro!!!” one user wrote on the seller’s feedback page.
The vendor leaves a reply: “No problem, have fun mate!”
To see such a feedback system in place makes you relax a bit. Some vendors even work with refund policies if something goes wrong.
The product descriptions help you understand what product you are buying. The origin of the product and which areas it ships to is also provided. In the payment feature the status is ‘Escrow’ and you need to google the definition of this term. You find that the following picture helps you understand the procedure:
At the moment there is no independent agency (such as the Consumentenbond) for drugs to review the quality price ratio and provide some third-party assurance. However, with the textual product descriptions, seller reputation system and refund and escrow services in place, you feel confident. Confident enough about the quality of the product and the quality of the seller while accepting that there will always remain a degree of information asymmetry.
You order the drugs online. You close your laptop. A few hours of sleep before your next working day.
References in order of appearance without proper formatting:
2. https://darkwebnews.com/dark-web-market-list/
3. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Silk_Road_(marketplace)
4. Business Insider 2015, http://www.businessinsider.com/did-silk-road-make-the-drug-industry-safer-2015-5?international=true&r=US&IR=T
5. Dimoka, A., Hong, Y., & Pavlou, P. A. (2012). On product uncertainty in online markets: Theory and evidence.
6. https://www.reddit.com/r/AlphaBayMarket/comments/5qw3of/vendor_level_trust_level_explained/
