​This Deep Web Site Maps the World's Drug Dealers

The rise of deep web drug markets has made connecting paying customers and drug vendors a relatively straightforward task. But now a deep web site is trying to make the process even more efficient by offering to map the location of the world's drug dealers, or at least the ones who sell marijuana.

The site, called "Map Dealers legalize world," points out the rough location of a vendor, and is presented on a handy Google maps interface. It is not a live location, but just an indication of the area that the dealer typically operates in, given by the dealer themselves.

Countries include Morocco, Australia, the United States, Russia, and the majority of mainland Europe. There are just under 50 listings on the site at the moment.

Most of the adverts consist of the dealer's pseudonym, some method of contact—most being an encrypted instant messaging service or link to their marketplace profile on Agora or another deep web site—and then a short description of what they purport to be selling. One example says "This quality Skywalker phenome has been grown under the African sun at a secret location deep in the Swaziland mountains. Outdoor grown weed has a deeper color and some seed is to be expected."

But it's not just dealers with a presence on the online marketplaces. An advert from Iran has a phone number as the means of contact, with the dealer's name as "jordan." I rang the number, and someone did answer.

On the face of it, it seems pretty stupid for a dealer to broadcast their approximate physical location, along with their contact details and an open advertisement for their product. But remember that most of those who sell on deep web marketplaces already state where they ship their drugs from. This is to allow customers to make the decision whether to buy their narcotics domestically, perhaps to avoid pesky borders checks and expensive postage costs, or to source their drugs internationally for the best possible product.

The site says "Only cannabis! Do not crack, not cocaine, not heroin, not LSD, MDMA is not." However, the single Chinese listing included on the site links to an Agora vendor who sells pretty much everything except the relatively harmless herb. "Alchemy industrial limited" stock a dizzying cornucopia of research chemicals, touted as alternatives to MDMA and amphetamine. Judging by this, it is not clear what vetting process Map Dealers utilizes for its dealers, if one at all.

For a dealer to get their listing on a site, they need to pay Map Dealers 0.06BTC (approximately $11 at today's exchange rates). According to the site's FAQ section, the locations are updated once a month, at which point, those listing their services have to renew their advert with another 0.06 BTC.

I sent the administrators of Map Dealers a request for comment through the site's feedback section, but I did not receive a reply.

Initially, I thought Map Dealers might have been a phishing scam: an opportunistic page set up to fool people into entering their Agora login details, for example. But the .onion URLs match the real sites, and I couldn't immediately see any signs of foul play.

It's important to remember that Map Dealers is not a deep web marketplace in the traditional sense: no transactions actually take place on the site, as they do with Evolution or the now seized Silk Road 2, and Map Dealers doesn't make any assurances at protecting your money with an escrow system. Instead, the site acts more as a meeting point for dealers and customers. Indeed, the popular Russian site RAMP has operated in this fashion for years.

This leaning towards a decentralised approach, where the actual trading of drugs for money takes place away from the main site, is likely to become more popular. As Operation Onymous shut down some of the deep web's most popular sites, it highlighted the problem of having the advertising and purchasing of drugs in one place. Once a site such as Silk Road is shut down and its assets seized, both customers and dealers loose any bitcoins stored on the site, as well as the easiest way to communicate with each other, if the forums are targeted as well.

If more sites such as Map Dealers pop up, which essentially act as an intuitive list of classified ads for drugs rather than an marketplace, those problems can be mitigated, and dealers and customers will be able to communicate more directly and conveniently.