2014.01.05 01:02 BeerInTheBabySeat Did reddit hack my computer?
2013.06.08 07:50 tabledresser [Table] IAmA: I'm the CEO of an online underground black market, AMA
| Questions | Answers |
|---|---|
| Aren't you worried about bringing more attention to your site by doing something like an AMA rather then just relying on word of mouth? By doing something like this don't you run the risk of law enforcement agencies paying more attention to the fact that you exist? | We want to bring attention to the site and bring our vendors more buyers. Law enforcement is going to be aware of us (and probably already is) regardless of the way we choose to put our product out there. |
| What made you decide to go into the business of running such a site? Just the money? Or other reasons? | It was the appeal of providing a service that we believe in and a business decision. Prohibition is a backwards process. |
| We have taken technical measures to prevent and offset these risks if they arise. As for our identities being revealed, if a competitor is able to do it then law enforcement would be able to do it. That would be of a larger concern to us. We take many measures to protect our identity. | |
| There are many legal items for sale as well, but the bulk of our items are drug related. We have no preference over what gets sold (assuming it does not break our restricted items rules). | |
| We are indeed. We're looking for a web marketeSEO willing to be paid in Bitcoin. | |
| Im curious as somewhat of amateur SEO marketer, how does one market a Tor Site? Surely it can't be done in regular ways such as adwords, keyword optimization, etc, etc. | It is true that we can't use regular methods however we are after a person who can make YouTube how-to videos, create forum posts in various communities to increase the exposure to our site. |
| I've done some marketing and SEO, so just drop me a PM if you still need somebody. | Thanks for your interest plerer, please PM us with your experience. |
| So how many inboxes have you gotten from people asking for jobs? If you aren't sick of them already, I'm interested in at least more information. I'll send a message should you reply to this. | We've received about 20, but we're still looking. |
| Are you looking for resumes, cv's? how are you choosing a candidate? | Based off previous work, and whatever data the applicant is comfortable providing. |
| What are your restricted items? And why don't you allow people to sell them? | Restricted items include anything related to paedophilia, poisons, loans, investment opportunities, assassination services or anything which can inflict harm on another person. If you infringe on these rules we will terminate your account instantly. |
| Trading any digital currencies (for example Bitcoins, Litecoins, Ukash, Moneypak, Western Union, Moneygram, etc) is forbidden and will result in the items being removed and a warning or ban being issued to the vendor. This is to prevent scams. | |
| The trading of counterfeit money is forbidden, and will result in a warning or ban being issued. | |
| We also do not allow listings for 0.01 in the money section. Your items must have a full cost associated to them to prevent people processing transactions outside of the escrow system. | |
| We allow the purchase of physical fiat for Bitcoins and/or Litecoins (has to be legitimate currency; not counterfeit). This is the only exception to the currency rule. We do not, however, allow the reverse of these transactions i.e. customers mailing vendors real currency as this is outside the escrow system. | |
| As an example, if you were a vendor and you wanted to buy $1000 worth of Bitcoins/Litecoins you could do so by making a listing for $1000 labelled "Buying $1000 worth of Bitcoins/Litecoins", and then mail the real currency to the purchaser of your listing in exchange for their Bitcoins/Litecoins that are currently travelling through the escrow system. | |
| Why are investment opportunities banned? | Because they're commonly used as scam tactics. |
| What about fake Ids? Can you guys make/sell those? | Our vendors sell a lot of those. |
| Why is counterfeit money banned? Part of the "harm to others" rule? | It's frequently used in scams. When we allowed it, 100% of the counterfeit money sales were scams. It's also hurting local businesses etc. |
| Would you mind posting a link to the be-all, end-all, one stop tutorial installation page to safely and securely start using TOR, Bitcoin and Atlantis? | 1) Download and install the Tor browser bundle - Link to www.torproject.org 2) Download and install the Bitcoin client - Link to bitcoin.org 3) You'll need to obtain some Bitcoins. The most popular exchange is MtGox (www.mtgox.com). They offer a few ways in which you can convert your local currency to Bitcoins. 4) Using the Tor browser, visit Atlantis (URL can be found at /Atlantis) 6) Click on the deposit BTC link under account settings and transfer your Bitcoins to that address. You'll need to wait for 1-2 hours before the transfer propagates across the network. 7) You can then shop for any items you would like whilst being confident on security and privacy. |
| Someone help me with step 3? Its just telling me I cant open the program. | That step is optional, you don't HAVE to use PGP. Especially if you just plan on having a browse. |
| Just commenting to find this later. | ) |
| Can you send me some drugs? Edit: Not a cop. | Our vendors can. |
| How do you rate yourself compared to the road? | We've had no downtime. |
| Our site is much more responsive. | |
| We have cheaper commission rates allowing sellers to make more profit on their sales and buyers to buy them for cheaper. | |
| We have automated PGP encryption of messages for the members who refuse to send their messages using PGP. We have an advancement fan management system, allowing sellers to reach out to all of their customers. | |
| We have a more 'modern' user interface. | |
| We have buyer feedback (none of the other marketplaces have this functionality). | |
| We have an anonymous feedback system that allows you to determine is feedback is fake, but at the same time does not reveal anything about your buying patterns. | |
| We support Litecoin as well as Bitcoin (the first market to support multiple currencies). | |
| We listen to our user feedback, we have a rapid development cycle and new features are constantly being improved upon and added. | |
| I'd like to personally thank you guys for everything you do to make online drug purchasing a safer and better experience. +altcointip 1 ltc. | That's very kind of you, thank you! :-) |
| We've had no downtime. What do you say to all of the rumors that you were funding the DDoS aimed at the Road when your site first came online to pull traffic? | We released an official statement regarding those accusations, it can be found on our forum. In short: We had nothing to do with it. It was speculative rumor. |
| What are you doing to cut down on scams and discrimination against new buyers? If your rules are that vendors are not supposed to deal outside of escrow, what are you doing about those vendors who require it in their policies? | > "Yes we have caught scammers, but we've banned them swiftly. We pushed out new changes earlier that helps reduce the number of scams, all feedback contains the amount of the purchase, preventing users from leaving fake feedback on $0.01 listings. It also contains an 'anonymous' user ID so sellers/buyers can confirm whether the user leaving feedback has left feedback before. This helps catch scammers leaving fake feedback. The ID is unique to the sellebuyer combination, so it cannot be traced across transactions to determine a buyers buying patterns." |
| Further to the above we've made it easy to report suspicious vendors, there's a button directly on their profile that will notify support. | |
| In regard to the vendors that require it in their policies, they will be warned or banned if they request FE without meeting our FE requirements (a minimum of 30 5/5 transactions). This system has already saved countless people from scammers. | |
| New buyers are encouraged to purchase small orders first to build their reputation and feedback and find vendors who are pleasant to deal with. I haven't seen a problem of buyer discrimination yet (apart from on scammer profiles saying 'you must FE because you have no feedback'). | |
| If I am not mistaken, the Black Market Reloaded also has buyer feedback. Not that I would know, as I never go to such sites... | I'm not sure, but I've heard its a haven for scammers, and they have no escrow process. |
| How about weighting reviews based on the amount of funds transferred? E.g., a $10 transaction review is worth 10x the review of a $1 transaction. | This is a good idea, however this would impact the freshness of the feedback if we sort it by the value. |
| Aren't you worried the authorities are tracking this ama? | They probably are. We aren't worried. |
| Why did you decided to accept Litecoin first? Also do you think Litecoin price will go up because of your site? Also how long did it take to prepare and set everything up? | We wanted to promote Litecoin because it has a few awesome improvements over Bitcoin, so we started with Litecoin. I think a lot of the value has come from Atlantis already, and more will come from Atlantis with our growth. It's taken a year to get the site where it is at the moment with a few developers working on it mostly full time. |
| I've checked out atlantis, purely out of curiosity. I don't do drugs at all, but it seems that the prices are higher than street prices. Why do people prefer to buy on Atlantis? Is it due to knowing they're getting good quality? It seems riskier than buying drugs on the street. | Greater quality, ease of access, safer than dealing with unknowns on the streets. A lot of people don't have access to a friendly in-person dealer. |
| The prices vary, some are actually cheaper then what you can find on the street. | |
| Some of the main reasons why people choose to purchase off Atlantis include; | |
| 1) Quality of the merchandise. Because of the sites feedback and reputation system, you can be certain that you will be receiving an unadulterated item. | |
| 2) Order in the comfort of your own home and have the parcel delivered to you (with tracking). | |
| 3) Thousands of items to choose from. Sometimes a local dealer will not have a product you are after. | |
| 4) Deal with currencies which can be used to purchase items without the reliance of fiat. | |
| 5) Encrypted correspondence, more secure then messaging/calling your local dealer. | |
| So how is it possible to get delivery anonymously? i mean, at some point don't you have to give your name and address to the seller? And if they are ever busted and you are in their database as a customer; aren't you kinda...you know...fucked? Thanks for the AMA by the way. | Some purchasers use fake names to hide their identity, others don't. We have a strict rule where vendors must remove all information about their clients once the parcel has been shipped (e.g from their computer). Also, once the order has been shipped, the address is automatically purged from our database. |
| How do you enforce a rule like that? what's to stop a vendor from simply writing an address down on a sticky note? | Unfortunately we can't enforce it, we can only advise them to do it. Our system also permanently deletes this information after first viewing. |
| So...you're an online drug dealer? How is this legal or how are you skirting laws to keep yourself from prosecution? I don't know of any countries/territories where selling Heroin would be legal. | We're not a dealer, we provide the platform for dealers to sell their products in a secure environment. The Tor network hides our service from government officials. You can have a look into "Tor hidden services" if you're interested. |
| How do you usually guarantee the safety of your "company' and the buyer? | We use a Tor hidden service to hide our service from the prying eyes of government officials: Link to www.torproject.org |
| Do you ever deliver in bulk? | This allows our servers IP address and location to remain hidden. |
| Are there any suppliers that you deal where they are a legal company on the surface? | Users must access our site using the Tor hidden browser, protecting their identity: Link to www.torproject.org |
| What are your personal political views? What about certain topics like child pornography, necrophilia or any other cultural taboos that are usually at the expense of another unwilling person? | We don't deliver anything, but our sellers commonly deliver in bulk. We facilitate the platform, the sellers are from the general public. |
| What are your top non-drug related products? | See above. |
| Is your company white collarish or do you have people who work with you that use violence and intimidation? | We do not allow listings such as child pornography and necrophilia. We do take a moral stance, there's a large difference between child pornography and drugs. |
| Is government bribery common with your company? | Probably porn. |
| We don't use violence or intimidation, nor do we have any need to. We're an online platform. The idea is to move away from the violent streets. | |
| No, that doesn't happen (or hasn't happened yet). | |
| Oh I see so basically your site is like the middle man am I correct? Alright that does make a lot of my questions moot. | That's correct. |
| Have you had any scares before? | None. |
| How illegal is Atlantis? I mean, not for the vendors/buyers, but how illegal is it as the CEO of the website? (Basically, how much trouble would YOU get into, if shit hit the fan?) | Google "farmers market bust" for an example. |
| What did those men do wrong, and do you think you've solved to that issue? | A lot of silly mistakes and using very traceable means of trade. |
| A screenshot of a website doesn't really prove anything. Do you have any proof that you are the CEO of this company? | I've added a link to the AMA on the footer of the website. |
| Without going into any personal details (obviously) what brought you to this biz? I.e. formal versus informal education... comp sci vs. Mba-type edu... or whatever ur able to say. | Can't go into education specifics sorry. |
| Also, as someone who is intrigued and has made half-assed attempts to get a bit/litecoin account setup and given up after hitting various obstacles, am I right to assess your biggest barrier to growth are the hurdles customers need to jump through to make transactions? Or am I just a stupid brain? | If you'd like any assistance getting set up let us know, we can point you in the right direction. The seeming complexity of cryptocurrency is definitely a barrier to growth. It's all relatively simple once you get your head around it though. Bitcoins/Litecoins are far easier to obtain in certain countries than others. |
| Do you keep lawyers on retainer? | We have a few lawyers using our platform to offer legal advice for a fee. |
| Hi. I have never posted/commented on reddit before, after about 5 years of being a lurker. This is too cool an opportunity not to. | It's progressed to a full time job for us at this point. There isn't a day we aren't working on Atlantis. |
| How many hours a week on average do you work? What do you do outside of work for fun? What kind of music do you listen to? | I'd love to answer those questions but they're a bit revealing sorry. |
| What is the biggest security threat you have had? | We did a lot of planning in relation to this and haven't had any security issues so far. Our biggest concern would be if a security flaw was discovered in the technology we rely on (e.g flaw in the onion routing protocol or the Bitcoin protocol). |
| I've heard these sites are much more common than people realize. How much traffic do you guys get? | We're one of the largest markets, and the most refined. We get thousands of visitors and hundreds of orders are processed through Atlantis a day. |
| How come you can post this here and not be instantly arrested? | Link to www.torproject.org |
| Link to en.wikipedia.org | |
| What does one sell on a black market that falls under the "Home & Garden" section...? | Ikea lamps... |
| And nutrient dense soil, growing equipment, CFL's, HPS lamps, etc. | |
| Why do buy / sell these types of items on the black market rather than any major online retailer? | Since we use cryptocurrencies its a good way for people to use them to buy other items. Think of it like eBay but with a twist. |
| Are you worried that your usage of Tor contributes to undermining its image as a legitimate utility for online anonymity, in the same way that Bittorrent is often immediately associated with piracy? | We hope that our usage does not tarnish its perception of being a legitimate tool. The core of our operation is to give people access to a 'true free market' whilst still protecting our users and ourselves. However just like a knife - it can be used for good and for bad. |
| We can only hope that the media and government doesn't portray Tor as a tool used by 'terrorists and criminals'. | |
| Have you caught any scammers yet? | Yes we have caught scammers, but we've banned them swiftly. We pushed out new changes earlier that helps reduce the number of scams, all feedback contains the amount of the purchase, preventing users from leaving fake feedback on $0.01 listings. It also contains an 'anonymous' user ID so sellers/buyers can confirm whether the user leaving feedback has left feedback before. This helps catch scammers leaving fake feedback. The ID is unique to the sellebuyer combination, so it cannot be traced across transactions to determine a buyers buying patterns. |
| Whilst you have swiftly banned sellers, can't they just make a new account? With the nature of TOR you couldn't ban their IP could you? | That is correct, we cannot ban them by IP (there is no distinction on the Tor network). They would need to pay a new vendor account fee every time they create a new vendor account. |
| What are you doing to cut down on scams and discrimination against new buyers? | We have implemented a few metrics in the feedback system, these include; |
| 1) Buyer and seller feedback, rated in quality (out of 5). | |
| 2) Total purchases made. | |
| 3) Account age. | |
| 4) Item price in feedback history. | |
| 5) User hash which allows people to identify if the buyer is unique or the same person leaving fake feedback whilst still keeping their username anonymous. | |
| We are currently working on two new metrics, these include; | |
| 1) Was the parcel received. | |
| 2) The users historic purchase total. | |
| Unfortunately new buyers will always be a risk for vendors however with parcel tracking and the escrow system, these risks can be mitigated. | |
| What's the best selling item? | The most popular item is Cannabis. |
| What non-legal things other than drugs are done through your site specifically what's the most common things non-drug? | Popular non-legal items other then typical illicit drugs include money handling services, identity services (generating passports) and cybercrime (malware). |
| The most common popular legal items include books, digital goods, legal money services and erotica. | |
| So the site says I can get a FREE half gram of hash... do they actually send you that? | Yes, vendors commonly offer free incentives to gather good reputation at the beginning of their seller career. |
| How did you get your first customers ? How did you advertise the site like this in the first place and create the initial market base? | We posted an announcement in two cryptocurrency community forums and the news spread quite quickly. |
| We also offered incentives for vendors at other market places to sign up and take advantage of trading with no commission fees. | |
| Where does your revenue come from, if you have no commission fees? Is it purely from cost associated with becoming a vendor? | When we were running the 3 month commission free special, our income solely came from the vendor registration fee. |
| Our current commission structure can be seen below; | |
| Value less than or equal to $50 6% Value less than or equal to $150 5.5% Value less than or equal to $300 5% Value less than or equal to $500 2% Value less than or equal to $1000 1.5% Value greater than $1000 1% | |
| Do you have a retirement plan? Like quit and let someone else take over in a year? Everyone does gets busted in the end. Hell even anonymous. Usually via neverending greed or pride. | We don't plan on retiring anytime soon, we've only just begun :) |
| How much do you make ?(give us a range ?) Is the money vs risk worth it ? | Unfortunately we can't give you specifics on how much we earn however all of our profits have been used to enhance our platform. We take more pride in forming a true free market place rather than the dollars earned. |
| That's actually pretty cool, thanks. Oh also what made you want to get into this buisness? | We love cryptocurrency, libertarianism, technology and saw an opportunity to make a free market place when SR was experiencing frequent down time. |
| Are you a regular customer at Atlantis yourself and what do/did you buy? | We do everything on Atlantis except for buying products on it ;) |
| What is the craziest item you have ever sold? | The top two items would be used sex toys/underwear (female vendor) and fig tree cuttings. |
| Fig tree cuttings? Can't someone just buy that on Ebay? O.o | The ones from Atlantis are prettier. |
| How pure is the coke? | It depends on the vendor. They advertise the purity on their product, the majority of it seems to be in the 85% range. |
| Why would the purity matter, and wouldn't someone prefer 100% pure over something that was cut with other items? | Purity matters because you require less of the drug to get the same effect. Other than that it's mostly irrelevant. Yes, you would prefer 100% purity. 85% purity is very high compared to most street cocaine. On average, street cocaine is around 50% purity. |
| What exactly is usually put in cocaine other than coke to dilute the purity? | Benzocaine, Caffeine, Phenacetin and sugars are the most common impurities. |
| Doesn't "CEO" relate to corporate organizational stucture? Why is a black market operating as a legal company would? | We're still an organization and an organization requires leadership. |
| What's up with al the cats??? | Incognito mode. |
| How much does your physical location matter to run a business like yours? Would it be any easieharder if you were in say, Somalia or on a ship in the ocean in International waters? | We have team members in various different countries. I would say physical location is relatively irrelevant. We can access our systems from anywhere, and our location and the server location is protected by the Tor hidden service network. |
| Is there anything that you will not sell on your website? | Restricted items. |
| Restricted items include anything related to paedophilia, poisons, loans, investment opportunities, assassination services or anything which can inflict harm on another person. If you infringe on these rules we will terminate your account instantly. | |
| Trading any digital currencies (for example Bitcoins, Litecoins, Ukash, Moneypak, Western Union, Moneygram, etc) is forbidden and will result in the items being removed and a warning or ban being issued to the vendor. This is to prevent scams. (See exceptions below for exceptions to this rule). | |
| The trading of counterfeit money is forbidden, and will result in a warning or ban being issued. | |
| We also do not allow listings for 0.01 in the money section. Your items must have a full cost associated to them to prevent people processing transactions outside of the escrow system. | |
| We allow the purchase of physical fiat for Bitcoins and/or Litecoins (has to be legitimate currency; not counterfeit). This is the only exception to the currency rule. We do not, however, allow the reverse of these transactions i.e. customers mailing vendors real currency as this is outside the escrow system. | |
| As an example, if you were a vendor and you wanted to buy $1000 worth of Bitcoins/Litecoins you could do so by making a listing for $1000 labelled "Buying $1000 worth of Bitcoins/Litecoins", and then mail the real currency to the purchaser of your listing in exchange for their Bitcoins/Litecoins that are currently travelling through the escrow system. | |
| Regarding the IT infrastructure, Do you own the servers that host the website? How are the servers connected to the internet? Is it a corporate leased line or just some dodgy hacked cable modem :) | Without going to depth, we use dedicated servers provided by a hosting company. All servers are equipped with a 100Mbit WAN link. |
| I'm probably misunderstanding Tor a bit here then, but how come the hosting company doesn't get into hot water and told to stop hosting Atlantis? | Tor traffic looks similar to SSL and our hosting provider doesn't snoop on our servers :-) |
| Do you pay for that in bitcoins? Is the server encrypted such that someone with physical access couldn't discover its contents, should they choose to? | We pay for the servers via anonymous methods and the disks are encrypted. However when running certain applications, the vulnerable point would be RAM. |
| I'm not sure if the second is possible whilst also offering an internet service, you must have unencrypted stuff in RAM? | We also monitor the data center for unauthorized access. |
| . To me hosting seems to be the weakest link in your personal security (I'm sure users are fine with your encrypted messages). Have you considered distributed hosting on other darknets like freenet? | For all the services we offer, we have redundant servers ready to fail over to. |
| I hope i'm not late to the party, but do you have any thoughts/reactions towards the current chatter regarding PRISM and the NSA? Maybe you can talk about some precautions you took or are taking as a result? | Never too late. It's quite scary actually. Tor, SSL, PGP, OTR, all of these technologies are your friends. |
| Although I will say this is nothing new, the NSA has been doing this for years now. I guess it's finally caught up to them. | |
| We haven't started taking any new precautions as a result, we were already using them. | |
| Would you say that those tools are your friends even if you're not interested in anything too illegal? Props for your efforts though, must be interesting to run that kind of company :) | Definitely, with PRISM making headlines this week its always good to protect your privacy. |
| What is the airspeed velocity of an unladen swallow? | I believe it's 11 meters per second. |
| Had anyone ever been caught in sting operation? | We haven't had any incidents reported to us yet (most vendors are very careful and security conscious) however we have read a case in the past where a vendor was caught on a different market place. The market place wasn't to blame, it was just that the vendor wasn't careful with his operation and thus got discovered. |
| Whats a "virtual credit card"? | Prepaid virtual credit cards aren't issued by a bank, have no contract, usually have a set amount and can be used online. |
| Can't access your site (yet) but do you have vendors in Australia? | We have a few Australian vendors, yes. |
| You're probably not still around, but is it even possible to order items on your site from Japan? I have not even looked at Atlantis or SR because I don't think it's even possible. | To my knowledge yes. But don't quote me on that. I think I remember seeing a few Japanese located vendors. |
| How does a typical black market starts up? | For us, we love cryptocurrency, libertarianism, technology and saw an opportunity to make a free market place when SR was experiencing frequent down time. |
| When deciding for your brand or website name. What other names did you consider besides Atlantis? I like the name it has now just curious to know of the brainstorming behind the site. Also I love your website! Thank you! | I can't actually remember any of the other names we considered, probably because they were all bad. Atlantis stuck from the beginning! |
| And you're welcome, thanks for using it. |
2013.04.12 01:29 Derpcoin How to buy these cheap coins right now
2013.01.24 00:12 Rodejers Is Moneypak from Paypal reliable?
2012.11.21 07:39 ColdisWarned [Short] The FBI wants my money!