The Dark Web and Illegal Marketplaces | Alphabay | ENDEVR Documentary

today the department of justice announces the takedown of the dark web market alpha bay [Music] the website was grossing close to half a billion dollars per year so we're talking about you know 300 to 500 billion dollars a year [Music] thank you [Music] my name's paul craig i'm the chief hacking officer at vantage point security so imagine that you have a lot of something that is illegal and you want to sell it you can't go onto carousel and place a listing for your product that you want to sell so the dark world's really filled that need it's become a marketplace for where people can sell things that are illegal [Music] so here we can get a diploma from almost any school for 0.1 of a bitcoin so a thousand eleven hundred dollars here we go we can buy a uk passport with the name of your choice for a thousand british pounds driver's license id cards big sale so do you want a driver's license from norway or denmark um a lithuanian id card that's what we're looking for one gram of colombian cocaine 75 pure uncut 40 u.s right here on the front page but we see that they've got some actually some quite dangerous things available for sale here because we've got weapons available ak-47s [Music] 500 this marketplace actually looks quite quite well designed it's quite new lucky it actually looks quite legitimate but this is all all illegal [Music] [Music] [Music] so think of it as ebay without the auctions or amazon marketplace it's exactly the same thing in spirit the only difference is that because the site is anonymous people do not are not shy about trading illicit goods alpha bay very much looked like a really simple cut down e-commerce site very very simple just had categories and lists of products and prices uh you would click on the link of the product and you could see a photo and a brief little description top-rated great reviews very strong lab tested and a lot of people had comments about how they secretly shipped their items so it would be shipped in a cd case or this will be hidden in a vars or something [Music] majority of listings on alphabay were narcotic or drug-related there were like hundreds of pages of listings for different categories you would see a lot of pictures of narcotics guns and things that are generally illegal [Music] marketplaces like alphabet are interesting in the sense that they bring the local drug dealer to the global scale so if you think about it the total drug market is huge you're talking trillions of dollars but your local drug dealer is not grossing a lot of of money the the revenues are fairly small because you have to have those face-to-face interaction there's also tons of risk associated with selling drugs on the street and so those operations tend to be pretty small but by moving them online they take the amazon model of electronic commerce and use it for illicit goods so of course it gives people a much larger pool of potential customers and a much larger outlet you do not just deal with your 10 or 15 regular customers you deal potentially with tens of thousands of or hundreds of thousands of potential customers worldwide these websites don't have much content other than here are my illegal goods for sale [Laughter] [Music] technology will not only allow legitimate business to thrive but will also allow criminals to use that technology in order to just have a better return on investment [Music] it definitely is a bigger threat to the overall communities and therefore it was a priority for the police to shut it down [Music] good morning today some of the most prolific drug suppliers use what's called the dark web uh which is a collection of hidden websites that you can only access if you mask your identity and your location [Music] during the lfb investigation one thing that became pretty clear was that the person who was in charge of the marketplace was somebody with the handle alpha-02 [Music] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Music] what was interesting with alexander kazus is that he started his online career as essentially somebody who was selling illicitly obtained online credentials he was perhaps coming from this hacker mentality and he built his marketplace based on that this is somebody who was you know technologically inclined he liked to run websites he liked to run an e-commerce platform and he had a business and his business was successful and it's quite human nature you have a business that is successful that is something that you like to do you perhaps turn very quickly a blind eye on what's going on in your business or you don't really realize what you're doing some of them start the marketplaces due to i would say ideological reasons they believe that government should not tell people what they can or cannot put in their bodies and they want to provide an online platform to do that but then when the marketplace starts to work quite well they realize that the money is rolling in they basically just get a thrill of operating those markets and that's essentially what leads them to their downfall [Music] foreign [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] foreign [Music] [Music] [Music] me [Music] [Music] he used an old hotmail account so of course it will lead to his history and to his additional digital footprint he also used some other side names across different platforms the same on the dark web as on the normal web in the visible web when you're running such a marketplace there's also a risk that some of your previous actions will come back to haunt you at some point so the point is that even before he even dreamed about running alphabet we were talking about something that took place almost a decade prior to his arrest some of those elements were used to actually be able to link different online personnels with each other and that's very important to remember whatever is on the internet it's on the internet forever so if you use an identity somewhere someday it is there and might burst any time with your information nothing that you have put there is completely deleted [Music] [Music] motorcycles [Music] ching [Music] so oh [Music] leo [Music] many countries even in southeast asia they have a law the government can collect the data from the internet for protecting their national security they call lawful interception [Music] many countries in europe they can do many well-developed countries singapore hundred percent but in thailand we don't have such law and many hackers in the world know that thailand don't have a such kind of the law to submit a collective information unit and they can think it is a heaven for them [Music] solid picture cat is a world-class big case we are the sort of the ip address that attack sony picture we found that we have been hacked by the foreign hacker or the ipa death of the attacker originated from usd and the hotel in bangkok they compromised the server and they used that computer server to head into the sony picture we have medicare not only sony picture we we have care that we have into the other government in asia in europe in the united states they come to our country and they compromise hack the server everybody's attack attribution [Music] [Music] the breaking bad syndrome so breaking bad is this very popular tv series and you see the evolution of the character uh over the series um to change from a very nice you know abstaining citizen to an absolutely horrible criminal even more than money there is kind of the thrill of doing this business and realizing how powerful you are they get addicted to their own product and that product is not drugs it's the thrill of running an illicit website nphabi is an online anonymous marketplace that is running anonymously on the internet anonymous browsing works at a high level using the following principle instead of me talking directly to the website that i want to visit i'm going to talk to an intermediary who is going to talk to an intermediary who is going to talk to an intermediary and so forth [Music] it allows people to sell illegal products or illegal services without any fear of being caught without any fear of being identified you could be in any country in the world and it would be quite challenging to prove that you were the one selling something on the dark web first link would be download tor you can download tor for free online um it's very simple very very straightforward to download and install and within seconds you can be running the tor browser so on the typical internet the general internet that people know um you'll see com.net.org on the tor network we only see the string of random characters dot onion so there's no even where to track the domain name it's just just a string of random characters so you can quite clearly tell that that is on the tor network originally tor was a by-product of the office for naval research to provide a mechanism for intelligence agents and spies to communicate back to the us government anonymously over time the use cases have expanded so journalists would be a great example journalists researching a topic inside a country that might be considered politically sensitive we need to be able to do things that might be censored by their government [Music] so the torn network by itself is really not that harmful you can share information it may be unregulated and uncontrolled um but there's no way of buying products or services through tour itself directly but when you add in cryptocurrency which has the same level of anonymity and privacy all of a sudden these two things together really do create the perfect storm um so you can list products and receive money for products all anonymous [Music] when i was working on the sort of great project of my life back in 2013 and trying to figure out things like how could i get this archive of material to journalists so how could they see things in a safe way that's uncontrolled there's a question of well do i need server infrastructure of my own maybe the answer is yes okay how do i pay for that anonymously maybe maybe someone like me may have used bitcoin for something like that this is um 0.4 of a bitcoin for a dutch passport that would be about 4500 given today's rate of bitcoin which is about 10 000 for one bitcoin yeah we accept all cryptocurrencies cryptocurrency is definitely the payment choice so that is my bitcoin wallet and this gives me the qr code if someone else wants to send me bitcoin they just scan this qr code and then it goes to my bitcoin address then the bitcoin will come into my account bitcoin can be used for many legitimate things uh many legitimate reasons it just happens to also be the number one choice for people selling things on the dark web there's no way of tracking it or there's no way of tying a cryptocurrency wallet or address to a person traditionally a lot of crime has been caught by busting the trail of money because money always leaves quite a trail opinion bangalore so you can send millions of dollars to someone else in the other end of the world um and receive goods in return without anyone in between actually seeing or knowing the growth of cryptocurrencies it's been very much pitched directly on the growth of the dark web and financial services on the dark web [Music] people have been selling drugs and other illicit goods on the web pretty much since the 1990s so what was different with silk road well what was different with silk road is that it's tried to provide what i would call an end-to-end anonymity platform it combines network anonymity through the use of tor so that an observer cannot tell which machine is connecting to which server to do those transactions you might have thought well the police has shown that they can arrest those people and so you'd be foolish to enter this line of business because you're going to get caught this is the exact opposite of what happened people were convinced that there was demand from customers and that there was a valuable business id in there okay so for this one we need to register an account now you can see they they use pgp authentication so quite privacy focused let's see we can find another marketplace okay we need username password for that one i think the alphabay was quite unique um that it was so quick and easy to um to get on board and to get in definitely contributed to its success initially it was not the largest website it was a very small website they were primarily selling credit cards and other digital goods so in 2015 alphabet really got into the spotlight for selling stolen uber and talk talk information now this is just a great example of an illegal product data in this case being sold online and i imagine very cheaply because this information there will be a lot of it so people will be selling person by person a few dollars but there are a lot of accounts that were being sold on alphabay not just things like uber also netflix hulu these are the things i think people would buy quite frequently because it's considered not so illegal but something that they want but reasonably quickly they became dominated by drugs the first vendor on fba was probably alpha 02 selling credit card numbers he had access to and then as the business picked up and other offenders joined he didn't you know say no when people started to sell drugs [Music] it's very interesting to ask yourself how many people does it take to run a darkway marketplace and the answer is surprisingly few in general a lot of the people who start those marketplaces they are not drug syndicates they are not courier criminals they are people with a very strong id background this is really white color crime which makes sense for the operator of the platform after all operating a website is a nighty job but what is interesting is that you see the same marketing techniques that are being used by legitimate businesses social networks like twitter reddit and they have some quote unquote social media consultants that are essentially promoting their brands on those social networks you have a certain ego present within the community [Music] the knowledge that the general public lacks understanding about cyber security that makes some of the cyber security hackers thinking that they might have almost like super powers and they are so good that no one will find them cumin seeds it's got to be a little bit exhilarating for those people it's got to be something that provides a thrill a high so to speak no pun intended [Music] in the particular case of alpha bay marketplace and the reach and the amount of users that that particular marketplace reached probably the owner had a feeling of success a feeling of being untouchable because he reached a certain level that they didn't find me until now i don't think they will catch me foreign [Music] foreign foreign help seeing someone's laptop logged into the marketplace also shows that intent it shows that you are actually the person who's admin in this marketplace so people that are using uh tor cryptocurrencies will almost certainly be using extra security precautions on their laptop so if law enforcement came you just close your laptop it's a giant encrypted brick there is nothing more watertight than being logged in as an admin to an illegal marketplace you're clearly involved [Music] be [Music] [Music] foreign [Music] password most people use very simple past wheels like password or i love you or baseball or things like that people who run those marketplaces use hard to break passwords if you think about a past phrase not a password but say a phrase that's a paragraph from a book all of a sudden becomes very very challenging to try and guess that trying to break one of those passwords would take an enormous amount of resources it's not even clear that it's possible and breaking the encryption itself is basically infeasible with today's technology my [Music] people thought that alphabear had committed an exit scam the platform was still there but you really couldn't take money out of it the reason why the police did this was to lead people who were on alphabet to go someplace else to go to a different market [Music] so this is a landmark operation alpha bay was roughly 10 times the size of the silk road so we're talking about multiple servers different countries hundreds of millions of dollars in cryptocurrency and a dark net drug trade that span the globe [Music] [Music] [Music] so [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] oh

Channel: ENDEVR

Views: 1,365,923

Keywords: Free documentary, documentaries, full documentary, hd documentary, documentary - topic, documentary (tv genre), Business Documentary, alphabay, dark web, dark web marketplaces, online marketplace, illegal marketplace, online crimes, online criminality

Id: VLF7WCbLw28

Length: 45min 53sec (2753 seconds)

Published: Tue Mar 08 2022