This episode is brought to you by Dashlane;
Try Dashlane Premium free for 30 days at www.dashlane.com/infographics and never forget another password and keep
all your online accounts secure! If you’ve seen our previous shows on the
dark web you should now know what you can find there and how to find it. As you know the dark web can be accessed through
what’s called the Tor browser. Once you are in you should have complete anonymity,
meaning no one can track your IP address. What kinds of things can you find there? Well, as you also likely know the dark web
is full of people selling illegal things such as drugs, but there have also been reports
of people even hiring hitmen through the dark web. People might also just go there to talk to
other people about their illness, their strange habits, their darkest secrets. Today we are going to unravel something a
little more mysterious, in this episode of the Infographics Show, Can You Really Order
A Mystery Box from The Dark Web? Let’s first explain a phenomenon known as
“unboxing” as not all of you follow the same trends. Around a decade ago people would appear on
YouTube literally taking things out of boxes. This might be just people unboxing tech products,
and then explaining how that product works, reviewing it, playing around with it. This became such a hit that companies would
soon start doing their own unboxing videos or sending their products to popular channels
to be unboxed. It’s not all about How To videos, though. One of the most popular channels is Ryan’s
Toy Review, in which a 7-year old kid opens toys. Simple perhaps, but Forbes reported that this
channel made in the region of $11 million in 2017. We bet you wish you’d have come up with
that concept and perhaps hired your But for some people the thought of watching people
take things out of boxes and talk about what’s inside is quite dull. But what if what was inside the box was a
little more exciting than an iPhone iteration or a miniature plastic Tyrannosaurus Rex made
in China. That’s where today’s focus comes in. You see, a new trend is people allegedly ordering
mystery boxes from the dark web and then opening them up on YouTube or other video platforms. As you can imagine, what’s inside is generally
not suitable for 7-year olds and often doesn’t come with a digital personal assistant. The media tells us that in 2018 hundreds of
YouTubers have been unboxing stuff they bought in marketplaces on the dark web and millions
of people have been tuning in. Just search for this on YouTube and you can
find lots of videos, mostly containing young men expressing their shock while taking things
out of boxes. “Oh my God, there’s blood on it”, one
man says in one particular video while a car baby chair is being taken out of the box. The question is, how real is all this? Could you not just set that up from your own
home, using ketchup-bloodied props or bags of baking soda you’d bought from the brightly
lit supermarket? The Australian media tells us that indeed
people anonymously sell these boxes on the dark web and they go for anything from one
hundred to one thousand dollars. Those boxes have included girl’s backpacks,
bloodied screwdrivers, and at times they have even been empty. In another video on YouTube one unboxer finds
a note that reads, “Dear Friend. Life is a mystery — a very, very dirty mystery
at times you never know what you are touching or what you are leaving behind.” He is then told to wear gloves while he opens
the box and he subsequently takes out the contents. Those contents are bag of white powder, a
tool with a biohazard sticker on it and a CD. He plays the CD and hears children’s voices,
through which he hears the sound of a voice saying, “I see you.” Scary? Well, that depends on your disposition and
perhaps if you can suspend belief, because maybe all of this is just fiction. But the fact is, if you have a look in the
dark web you can certainly find these mystery boxes. Have a look if you don’t believe us. The fact this is possible is rather unnerving,
given that the box is untraceable. There is likely a very small chance that something
horrible could turn up in a box, rather than a Hello Kitty school bag. Mashable tells us this, “Although a lot
of this may sound alarming, there's also a strong a possibility that some of these unboxing
videos are faked as means of getting views and obtaining ad revenue.” Yep Mashable, we think most people are aware
of this. It’s seems fairly obvious to most of us
that if someone really did buy one of these boxes on the dark web and then video the contents
being opened, if those contents could lead to a criminal charge or at least start a criminal
investigation, then that video would not appear on YouTube. Sometimes the opening of these boxes is called
The Deep Web Challenge, but one must always be skeptical regarding how challenging the
unboxing really is. Perhaps the biggest challenge is acting shocked,
shamed, surprised, disconcerted, while making some creepy form of entertainment. Now we go over to Reddit, where one person
writes this in the intro to a long piece of writing, “I don’t know why I didn’t
realize a clear majority of these videos are fake and staged for their scare factor, but
I didn’t.” Lo and behold though, when he finally gets
around to purchasing a box, he is shocked to find something that chills his bones. It’s a book, he says, that contains photos
of the house he grew up in. Each numbered page contains polaroid photos
of places, things, but one page he says contained pictures of “a mask, handcuffs, a gag, and
a bottle of some sort of drug it looked like.” He sees his own parents tied up, himself as
a kid…Oh, and then he throws the book away and sees a hooded figure looking through his
window. It turned out by ordering his box he got his
parents killed. What this is of course is an old trope used
in horror movies wherein an added bit of realism is used in the form of skepticism, i.e. I don’t believe in the boogeyman, but then
this happened to me. It’s basically the camp fire ghost story,
and the best ones use realism to get you listening and then throw in the scare. Other stories have appeared on Reddit that
are similar, and it seems that some people believed the tale. “That is terrifying! I would contact the authorities right away. Wish you the best and please keep us posted!”
writes one person after reading a wicked tale of a mystery box. We can only congratulate the writer of the
post and hope that he or she has a great career in fiction writing. Are we being too skeptical? We don’t think we are, but that doesn’t
mean some of those videos are well made, well-acted or well told. We agree with this person writing on Quora,
“The whole idea behind mystery box is all scam, I have watched many videos on YouTube
about mystery box but later come to conclusion that no sane human-being will be willing to
buy a piece of garbage.” That’s not to say you can’t buy a mystery
box on the dark web. We haven’t ordered one at the Infographics
Show, so we can’t say for sure. We can, however, go on videos and research
and conclude that people are unboxing to create an audience. It’s a show, nothing more and nothing less. Sure, you can find media, mostly of the tabloid
ilk, all over the world talking about YouTubers opening these “sinister” boxes; videos
“guaranteed to freak you out”, “100 percent genuine”, that “you won’t believe
are real”, but those media are just getting on the bandwagon and generating their own
audience. You might also accuse us of doing this, but
we are at least trying to give you an informed piece of entertainment. We are calling these videos out as fake, but
at least well-made videos for the most part. This isn’t to say of course that you can’t
find white powder often grown in Colombia on the dark web. It doesn’t mean you wouldn’t find that
in one of these mystery boxes. One very real journalist writing for the Independent
newspaper did explore the dark web and did buy illegal things. But when he talked about mystery boxes, he
too was skeptical. “There were dozens of videos with millions
of views, yet there was something that didn’t seem quite right about them,” he said. “The contents of the boxes seemed to fit
the stereotypes of the dark web so much that it seemed staged.” What did he do? Well, he tried to order a mystery box of course. Finding one wasn’t that easy, and he had
to do a lot of searching. He writes that he finally found one trusted
vendor willing to sell him a mystery box. He not only sees that others that had bought
such a box gave them a thumbs down, but the seller wanted around $1,500 for the box he
wanted. That is a bit out of the price range for a
journo, so he asked the advice of someone who has written two books about the dark web
and has spent years going through it to see what she could find. Her name is Eileen Ormsby and a quick search
will show you that she is certainly an expert on the dark web. This is what she said to the journalist. “Mystery boxes are just silly. The ones on YouTube are primarily total hoaxes
invented by the YouTubers themselves for the clicks.” She did add, though, that now such boxes are
popular no doubt someone is taking advantage of that and selling them, but they are just
“full of junk.” They don’t contain murder weapons or possessed
dolls; it’s all just a great big hoax, as we said. During her investigations into the dark web,
that lasted years, she failed to find many of the gruesome things that supposedly exist
in this place. While arrests have been made of people doing
horrid things in the dark web, it’s not something all over the dark web as we are
sometimes led to believe. As for mystery boxes, the only mystery to
us is how some people believe those videos of them are real. As you’ve seen Mystery Boxes are really
nothing more than a scam, but the fact that your passwords could currently be for sale
on a dark web marketplace should be a serious concern for any internet user. With Dashlane you can store passwords and
credit card information across any device, and safely checkout with just one click of
the button. Plus with their monitoring services you’ll
be immediately notified of any suspicious activity on your accounts, and their free
dark web scan will search dark web marketplaces for your personal info like Social Security
Number, address, or phone number, and notify you so you can take proper action. Head on over to www.dashlane.com/infographics
for a free 30 day trial, and if you use the coupon code ‘infographics’ you can get
10% off a premium subscription today! But of course we’d love to hear your thoughts
on this? Tell us in the comments. Also, be sure to check out our other video
How Can Hackers Steal Your Identity?. Thanks for watching, and as always, don’t
forget to like, share and subscribe. See you next time.
