The Underworld Podcast - The Rise and Fall of the Dark Web Fentanyl King

Episode Date: August 6, 2024

When Mohammed Alaa Allawi, a former US military interpreter, moved to Texas in 2012, selling weed was a side hustle. But when a company asked him to design a website, the young Iraqi soon realised his American dream was better forged online. Soon Allawi was making millions on the dark web, selling counterfeit pills with precursors from China—including the deadly opioid fentanyl. When a Marine OD’d on the gear, the heat on Allawi intensified. Before long he was trapped in a spectacular multiagency sting. FOR NEW MERCH: https://underworldpodcast.myshopify.com/ Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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How many discounts will you stack up? Tap the banner or visit usa.com slash auto discounts. Restrictions apply. It's March 23, 2017. And a group of four young men are living hard in Las Vegas. Camped out in the VIP area of Drays, a popular spot right in the center of the city's neon-soaked strip. It's one of the most expensive clubs in town, but money's no object for this oddball quartet. They're all dressed in flashy new suits and deep into bottle service, all courtesy of their leader. A diminutive Arab with short-gilled hair and an unkempt beard. Muhammad Allah al-Alawi doesn't look like the average drug kingpin, but boy, does he spend like one. Cars, homes, chains, sneakers.

The American Dream by way of Baghdad. Lil Wayne is performing on this particular Vegas night, and as he stalks across the stage, he spots Alawi and his crew passing round a massive bottle of Verve Clico. It's a trashy call, perhaps, but this is Sin City, and the bottle doesn't go unnoticed by the rap superstar. I don't know who these dudes is, he shouts out, but I need to be partying with them. It's only three years since Alawi was sleeping in his car, but in 2015 he'd set up a vendor account on the dark website Alpha Bay, under the name Dope Boy 210, importing a pharmacopoeia and reselling it via the mailman. Now, two years down the line, Dope Boy 210 offers no fewer than 80 products,

from Xanax and Adderall to fentanyl, the feared opioid tearing through America's cities. And Alawi is making huge amounts of cash. But he's a tech guy, not a pharmacist, and has hundreds of thousands of homemade pills flood the market, Dope Boy 210 begins to rack up victims and interest from law enforcement. In fact, just before the Vegas Bender, a mechanic had fished a strange black box out of the undercarriage of one of Alawi's luxury vehicles, a tracking device. The discovery had alarmed Alawi as well it should. But he'll later admit, I needed money and I had to keep things going.

The crew down their champagne and get over their car. come downs. Vegas is Vegas after all. But their empire is about to come crashing down too. Thousands of miles east at a house party in the town of Richland's North Carolina, some other friends are handing out a batch of Alawi's pills. For one of them, it'll be the last thing he does, and his death will send Dope Boy 210 and its high-flying Sions on a tailspin collision course with the law. This is the underworld podcast. and welcome to a weekly show presented to you by two reporters who've researched, organized crime, for some of the world's biggest media outlets, and have the failed mortgage applications to show for it.

I'm Sean Williams, magazine writer with Flob to Dead horse of print media to its mince, and I'm joined by a documentary maker and broadcaster Danny Gold in New York, who's about to tell us a funny story from, I don't know, Central African Republic, go. I don't know. The only hotel that was legitimately safe to stay in was like, a night, which was way over our budget, so I had to stay in a room with my insane cameraman who was very insane, but very talented, and would spend a lot of time arguing with his wife on Skype, very uncomfortable for me to listen in. And there was a shady Lebanese diamond dealer

who I'm pretty sure it was on government list who would buy us whiskey every night. And that's pretty much all I got for now. That's pretty good. Why are all photographers lunatics? That's something I need to know. Anyway, thanks for tuning in as always, guys. Check out the Patreon for bonuses. I think we've actually got quite a lot going up there this week. Thanks to El Mayo. Reading list, show notes and the odd short. And we're up on Instagram, YouTube, Twitter, TikTok. We're on TikTok, right? Yeah, our friend Lily does TikTok for us. So check that out. And yeah, patreon.com slash aneworld podcast for bonuses, as well as on iTunes and Spotify. You can sign up. All right, TikTok.

Very, very young and cool. That is who I am. Anyway, and Spotify, I think you can leave comments on the show now. So say nice stuff about us. Don't be like the weirdos on YouTube and moan about things they're getting for free. No criticism. Remember, guys. Just praise.

Okay, cool. Let's go. So this week's show is going to dive into the life and crimes of Mohammed Allah, Alawi. Sorry to Arabic speakers, aka dope boy 2010, or dope boy 210, aka the fentanyl king. We've got so rich of dark web drugs, even Lil Wayne wanted a party with him. A lot of the episode is coming from a great 2023 wired feature by Benoit Marenne, who's currently down in Houston, Texas, covering the shell and LNG industries for the Wall Street Journal, which is a bit of a right turn after this piece.

So please click on the site, read the story, subscribe to WIREPage journalists, folks, keep all the tech sheds for killing the business altogether. You want to know a scary fact about local media in the US? Sure, yeah. 7% of all reporters now work. for the New York Times. Ouch. And, you know, don't worry if you can't guess if a reporter works for the New York Times.

They'll tell you 12 times and like the first five minutes you're talking to them. So she'll be all right. You'll be fine. This story, though, it's a real doozy. And I'm going to get into some other dark web shenanigans that have made headlines in recent years. Not least the Russian site, Hydra, which I actually discussed with a friend of the Podnico Vorobrio

about a year ago, I think it was now. But the story of the fentanyl king, that begins a long, long way from Las Vegas or North Carolina in Baghdad, Iraq, which in 2003, of course, is invaded by troops belonging to the US, UK, Australia and Poland, which I didn't know was part of the coalition. You don't need me to tell you that this is a brutal campaign and one which drops soldiers from nations who don't understand Arabic language or culture, and coalition forces soon realize that they're going to need an army of interpreters if they really care about winning the hearts

and minds of the Iraqi people. Now, Mohammeda Allah-Alawi is a 13-year-old suburban kid when the war begins, and his doctor-uncle persuades him to learn English from a young age. Five years later, the 18-year-old Alawi, he applies to become an interpreter for the US Army. He's one of over 50,000 Iraqis and Afghans who interpret for Americans during those two campaigns, and it is a perilous existence. Interpreters are considered traitors not only by al-Qaeda operatives, but pretty much everybody in the country, and they're stalked by gangsters and, death squads on a daily basis. I mean, I wouldn't say everyone in the country. Like, the Kurds in the north certainly didn't feel that way.

I mean, they, you know, have statues of George W. Bush because they hated Saddam so much. So, you know, but a lot of people probably definitely south of that line demarking the KRG from the rest of Iraq. That's fair. What's going on right up there at the moment? I think it's pretty stable in Iraqi Kurdistan, right? It's always been the most stable area by far. But yeah, some issues, I'm sure.

I haven't paid too much attention, to be honest with you. It's always a perilous existence. You know, Turkey's bombing them. Iraq is being Iraq. And yeah, anyway, moving on. Yeah, the Kurds are always getting screwed at some point. Anyway, Alois is scared enough that he goes around on patrols in gloves and a mask in case anybody recognizes him. Since 2016, by the way, the non-profit no one left behind.

It estimates that over 300 interpreters of dark. but many more are in danger too. Alawi claims that one of his friends is tied by insurgents to the back of a car and dragged around the streets until his limbs tear off. Another is hung from an electric pole and left for days as a warning. But he makes good money with the Americans around $1,350 a month, which is very, very good in Baghdad. And despite their many cultural missteps,

he makes really good friends with the troops as well. He's also got a good nose for a side hustle. For a while, Alawi provides. steroids to troops on base, the things are all over the place, and he makes a tidy profit. Then he's kicked out of the US Army for that, but he immediately finds work with one of the many private contractors working in Baghdad, where he's put to task translating operation manuals for Humveys, those giant four-by-fours, which the US is reselling to Iraq. That is of course boring as hell, but sitting at a computer, Alawi realizes that he's got a knack

for IT, and he spends half his time learning to code and hack, which is correct. and good and something all human beings should do, especially journalists, of course. What Alawi does next allegedly is pretty awesome, or pretty underhand. According to a friend, Eric Goss, Alawi hacks his boss's email, grabs messages to his mistress, and sends them to his wife. He also hacks into the firm's wireless network. This guy is pretty formidable, and he uses his newfound skills to form a dating site aimed at connecting Iraqis called Iraqia.

This thing gets so big that Alawi is making. he's five grand a month off it. That's at a time when Iraq's GDP per capita is only six and a half grand a year. He's rich. He's a tech bro. He's going to be a star, but that doesn't stop the fact that Alawi's home city is a basket case beset by violence, terror, suicide bombs. So on September 12, 2012, using a visa given to those who'd helped Uncle Sam in Iraq, Alawi hops on a plane from Baghdad to San Antonio, Texas, where he's going to start a new life in the US. I guess there's not a direct flight for that route. Now, when he first rocks up in the Lone Star State, Alawi is hooked up with a driver's license,

food stamps, a 200 buck per month stipend and a place to stay courtesy, not of the state, but a bunch of Catholic charities. And Alawi, he flies right at his American dream. He enrols in a pre-nursing college course, but the tap, or full sit, I guess, begins to get turned off. The food stamps and rent run dry after six months. Alawi gets a factory job, but the salary barely keeps his car running, and the tuition thieves paid.

So he moves into an apartment with a fellow former interpreter named Muhammad Al Salihi, who's working as a bouncer, and they rent a spare room on Craigslist to a young woman who's a bit of a party animal with a ponchant for weed. It's a shame this gets dark because this kind of has the makings of a great sitcom right now. It would be awesome, actually. according to alawi which he tells the report of benoit meren there's an american saying quote if you hang around the barbershop too long you'll end up with a haircut uh danny gold an actual american is this a saying i mean i i haven't really heard it maybe it's like a texas or like southern

thing but but i approve of it you know it's a pretty pretty logical conclusion and i always respect barbers yeah i mean if you go to a barbers shop you're probably going to get a haircut right that's just going to a barbershop anyway i don't know it's not oscar wiser wiser you're but I suppose we get the point. Alawi starts selling weed. But dealing weed is not the Sinolawa cartel, although the Silenowah cartel very much are selling weed these days. Yeah, it kind of reminds me of a certain internet crime personality

who claims he was selling weed for the Sinola cartel. But no, you were definitely not. Anyway. This is dipping your toes into a podcast beef, is it? No, not really. Despite all of his wheel of dealing, Alawi is evicted from his flat in 2014 for failing to pay $500,000, $590 in rent.

For a while, he sleeps in his car. Then he switches up and he sells blow on the streets. But this is, of course, a pretty shaky living. On January 14th, 2015, Alawi's arrested while driving around San Antonio with a local dealer, and cops find a small amount of gear, 10 Adderol pills, at around 100 Xanax. He gets done for manufacture and delivery of a controlled substance.

But Alawi doesn't have a criminal record, and he's handed a community sentence. Again, Alawi at this point turns back to computers. An Austin company asked him to design a website, but just as he's done back home in Baghdad, Alawi uses the access to build something way, way bigger on the side. You could argue that 2015 is a kind of high point for mass media hysteria over the so-called dark web.

That is, according to Kasperski, a hidden part of the internet not indexed by regular search engines access through specialized browsers like Torr, which hosts both illegal and legal activities offering anonymity, but also posing risks like scams and illicit content. I'm sure we got plenty of techie listeners, but a quick rundown. The internet is basically comprised of three layers. So the surface webs are stuff you can actually see. And access with traditional browsers like Chrome or Safari, that's about 5%, just 5%.

If you're visualising this as an iceberg, this is the little time. tip poking out of the ocean. Next there's the deep web. This is about 90% of everything online, and it's anything from private databases to intranets, legal files, messaging at caches, online store backends, so on and so forth. It's stuff you can't search for, but the vast majority of it is legal and safe. But the dark web, so the remaining 5% of the iceberg, I guess you could characterize it at the bit at the very bottom, obscured from light, and accessible only via a special built submersible able to scour the cold, dark depths of the ocean.

Yeah, sorry, I am continuing to hammer this metaphor home with as much skills of Russell Brown monologue. So that submersible would be a piece of software like the Tor browser, which you need to access the dark web, something that was actually developed by the US Navy in the mid-1990s using something called onion routing or routing, which is layers of encryption that peel away, yeah, like an onion. It's not rocket science,

leading you to hidden and secure sites that aren't index, i.e. able to be found by surface level search engines like Google. This is why everyone's listening to this show, isn't it? Exema is unpredictable. But you can flare less with ebbglis. A once-monthly treatment for moderate to severe eczema. After an initial four-month- or longer dosing phase, about four and 10 people taking ebbglis achieved itch relief

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something really stupid of course like posting with their name. And this here, this is where the illegal stuff happens. Counterfeit currency, forged documents, arms trafficking, credit card fraud and of course drug deals. You'd be shocked how old this is. In fact, the first e-commerce transaction was a drug deal. Want to guess how old? Well, I'd be impressed if you said 1971, because that's the year a bunch of Stanford University students

use ARPANET, which is a kind of proto-internet, to buy an undetermined amount of cannabis. Yes, one of the first uses of the internet anywhere on earth was to buy weed. And future so-called dark web marketplaces from the hive in the 90s to something called the Research Chemical Mailing list in 2003, the year the US invaded Iraq,

are used to buy drugs and share tips and skills on how to make them. If you want to know more about this stuff, by the way, check out Mike Powers Drug 2.0, a very cool book about how the internet transformed the narco industry. I feel like around 2012 there was like a realization among, you know, some people that like nerds always had and like engineering kids always had the best drugs because they'd figured out all the stuff that we're getting into right now and, you know, they would get like pure MDMA and other things of that sort just chip to them.

UPS, you know? Yeah. I remember when we were students at uni, some friends of mine were just getting like incredible high grade stuff posted through the mail. And yeah, it was a bit of a relation. I guess it was like a similar kind of time, like 2005-16. Anyway, the biggest breakthrough since ArpaNet for Doug Webb drugs, arguably arrives a few years later in 2011 with Silk Road, founded by Texan Ross Albrecht under his pseudonym Dread Pirate Roberts. This marketplace combines tour with Bitcoin for complete anonymity, and its notoriety skyrockets with the publication of a June 2011 Gawker article by Adrian Chen called the underground website where you can buy any drug imaginable. Making small talk with your pot dealer sucks, writes Chen. It's not always the case,

is it? It is. It is. It is. What if you could buy it and sell drugs online, like books or light bulbs? Now you can. Welcome to Silk Road. Sounds like one of our cold opens. Anyway, we're obviously going to do a Silk Road angle at some point down the line, probably by the time we've done like episode 698 on female bandits on these Timor. 2,304 an Inuit space dealers to the sons and daughters of Tajik dictators. But if you're listening to this show, you probably know that in 2013, when Alawi himself is struggling to settle into his new American life, feds arrest Ross Albrecht on seven charges, including drugs and money laundering ones.

They order him to forfeit almost $200 million and hand him. a life prison sentence. They also shut down Silk Road. Nick Bilton's American Kingpin is a great read about the rise and fall of Ubrick. I think it's pretty pulpy thriller, good fun. But of course, this being the dark web, when Silk Road disappears, another bunch of markets just pop up right in its place. Agora, Agora, Agora, Agra, I'm not sure,

Utopia, the Real Deal, and even Silk Road 2.0, which is founded by Admins of Allbrick's former site. By 2015, the biggest of these sites is something called Alpha Bay, opened by a Canadian citizen living in Thailand named Alexander Kays, and it's this site that Mohamed Al-Alawi turns to, when he decides to leverage his Austin web design job into something far more lucrative. At first, Alawi purchased a $600 manual pill press on eBay. Then he switches up to a five-grand model,

able to spit out almost 22,000 pills an hour. Then he gets to work. Buying inactive ingredients for drugs like dyes on eBay and other more controlled substances like methamphetamine. It's quite a bit more controlled than a food die on the dark web. He mixes them up, throws them in the press and boom. He's basically packaging low-grade Yaba pills as fake Adderall and Xanax and selling them to students on Alpha Bay under the username Dope Boy 210,

210 being the area code for San Antonio. Yeah, don't put any sort of identifying material in your username if you're using the internet to do to do crimes, you know? Yeah, that is, that is solid advice. I mean, I feel like I made a mistake when I made my, like, email Sean Williams-85 because now I'm old and useless and unemployable, and it shows the second I send an email. But anyway, Alawi doesn't care about what seems like a pretty big misstep, and he graduates from his fake study pills to fake OxyContin,

which he laces with fentanyl bought from China on the dark web. seems a completely great business model. You guys all know about fentanyl up to 100 times more powerful than morphine, deadly even in tiny doses. Because of that dealers love it, they can cut it up with other drugs in tiny amounts and make thousands of pills. And Alabi is not alone in doing this.

Folks are buying huge amounts of fentanyl from China by 2015, supercharging an opioid crisis that's been kicked off by the pain merchants of Purdue Farmer, the creators of OxyContin. In 2011, barely 1,600 Americans had died from a fentanyl overdose. By 2016, it's hit 18,335, overtaking prescription painkillers and heroin. And the DEA at this point is waking up to the fentanyl crisis, well, arguably. And it gets involved in a Lawi's case when a student cop who's found out the pills are all over campus at UTSA,

that's the University of Texas, San Antonio, contacts local cops who are in on a joint, taskfuls with the DEA. But officials know seemingly next to nothing about dark web markets despite Silk Road. They realize they're going to actually have to buy drugs from Alawi before they can shut him down, but so behind the curve a higher-ups that investigating agent has to wait until March 2016 for a green light to use Bitcoin at all, which is the only payment Alawi will take. By this point, the DEA is all over Aloi's operation in real life, however. They're tapping his phone and that of Al Salihi, his former interpreter, a pal who's

working with him, and an accomplice named Benjamin Iter Uno, who's basically his bag man. These three guys, plus Eric Goss, Alawi's old army friend, are the four main guys in the operation. One agent follows Uno from Alawi's home to a post office where he delivers three boxes and a trash bag full of envelopes. Pretty suss. And then comes the online sting. An agent buys 500 so-called Adderall for 1,400 bucks in Bitcoin and an ounce of blow for another 1,200.

He lists a mailbox at UTSA, and he presses send on the order. More money for Alawi and his co-conspirators. He's making crazy amounts of money by this point. He's living in the suburb of Houston, but he's got property in San Antonio too. He's got cars, flashy clothes, a collection of expensive sneakers, gold chains watches the lot. He's got a condo in LA's upscale Westwood District and he throws around cash at upmarket clubs. He gets glowing reviews on Alpha Bay, including one the DEA would later use in his case. It reads, quote, definitely takes a few extra days than states, but always shows up and always has extras.

Exclamation mark. Nice. Probably gets like two stars judging by our reviews. He's not actually quite so generous with his deal. He's unwittingly done with this DEA agent, though, who after a week of making the all-downs, picks up 447 pills and no cocaine. The agent opens a dispute with Alpha Bay, but he's off to the races. Here is more than enough evidence to raid Alawi. The following month, Alawi gets an order from a young marine for Oxycontin.

Pauses his homemade concoction, including fentanyl into a ninja blender, throws it in the press, and gives it to a member of his crew to post. Bonjour, compadre. It's the... Priceline negotiator! How do I negotiate so many great travel deals? My greatest gadget. The Price Line app.

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and the signature Southern Country Rock of Eric Church on July 19th. Tickets on sale now at Yamavat. Theater.com, only at Yalava Resort and Casino, celebrating its 40th anniversary. You in? Must be 21 to enter. The member's name is Sergeant Anthony Tonieti, and he's made the order with Corporal Marcos Villegas. They're both stationed at Camp Lejeune, near Jacksonville, North Carolina, and they take the pills to a party in a nearby town of Richlands. That night, Villegas hands appeal to a 20-year-old corporal named Mark Mambalalel.

The next morning his fellow revelers find him unresponsive and they get him to a hospital. But it's too late. Mambalal dies. Other people have close shaves with Alawi's pills, which isn't surprising given he's mixing them with all the skill of a hungover TGI Friday's barman. Taking him is a total lottery, Russian roulette, and the users have no idea. Dope Boy 210 is a death trap and the DEA decides it's high time he was taken offline. Alawi discovers a tracking advice around this time and his boys go on their Vegas bender soon after that. On May 17, disguised electricians, agents knock on the door of Alawi's Houston home. Sorry, powers out, one tells the occupants, who are Uno and another man.

We're going to be working on it for a while. I'll let Benoit Maren take it from here at Wired. At 1.38 p.m., men sweating profusely in hazmat suits swarm the house, lending an other-worldly look to this ordinarily quiet neighbourhood. The suits were meant to protect the agents from fentanyl. There were two pill presses, carpal boxes from China containing ingredients and enough drugs to pull a lardwe away for a long time. 500 grams of fentanyl powder,

500 grams of meth, 500 grams of cocaine, 10 kilos of fake oxycodone tablets laced with fentanyl, 4 kilos of fake adorol lace with meth, and 5 kilos of counterfeit Xanax tablets. Agents found a Ruger Revolver and a Sigseye's pistol hidden in a couch in the living room. They walked out of Alawi's bedroom carrying an AR-15-star assault rifle and a loaded glock pistol. Ouch, he's in trouble.

Alawi by this point is living over a thousand miles away at his L.A. condo. And he knows he's on borrowed time. That June, he and Eric Goss head to a club and order champagne. Alawi is quiet, though, and he drives back in near silence. Then he tells his old friend, quote, I feel like I'm a martyr. All my family's taken care of. If I die tomorrow, it wasn't in vain.

Days later, the entire crew is swept up in raids across the country as part of what the DEA called Operation Desert Eagle. You know, I can't believe they hadn't used that name before 2017. I know. I mean, it's a cool name. But, yeah, I feel like, I don't know. It's so weird, isn't it? And in July 2017, Alawi is indicted for conspiring to just

fentanyl, meth and cocaine, plus firearms and money laundering offenses. It's estimated he sold at least 850,000 bogus pills across 38 states, netting him at least $14 million. Wow. I mean, it really, really was the American dream right there. I know. I know. He's done pretty well off the backs of some dead people.

Authorities sentence him to 30 years in prison. Quote, the United States welcomed Alawi into our country from war-torn. Iraq in 2012, says US Attorney John Bash. But instead of taking advantage of the many opportunities this country affords, he decided to make money by peddling a deadly narcotic to Americans in the grips of addiction. I'm proud of our office and the law enforcement partners who uncovered and destroyed this conspiracy. 30 years in federal prison is a just sentence for this despicable contact. Alawi's gang caught really long sentences too. Fernando Becerra, he's held accountable for all 850,000 pills alongside his boss and he's given 22 years.

I'd like to apologise to the court and my family, Bessera, says in court. I take responsibility and want to see if I can get a second chance. We all make mistakes. The judge snaps back at him. That's a big mistake over quite a period of time, he says. I mean, we're not talking about a few joints. The fentanyl, he's been well and truly dethroned. A month later, authority shut down Alpha Bay.

but does either bus stem the tide of fentanyl flowing through the dark web into the United States? Of course not. Just as it happened when Silk Road went down, a host of Alpha Bay wannabes just pop up in its place, offering ever greater quantities of illegal substances. One of them is a Russian site called Hydra, which between 2016 and 2019 processes over a billion dollars' worth of illicit transactions way more than Alpha Bay ever did.

Hydra is even more sophisticated than its forebear. Rather than making vendors pay to open an account, it makes them pay rent of between $100 and a thousand bucks a month, and it even has chemists and human guinea pigs to test products, plus medics on standby if anything goes awry. Here's friend of the pod Nico Vrobbyov writing in vice in 2022. Quote, there is a sub-forum when these test results are posted

complete with graphs, analysis and photos. If the gear's not up to scratch, the administration hands out penalties. Anyone trying to pass Oregono as high-grade chronic will get kicked off the site. No fentanylars allowed and neither are weapons, hit men, viruses or porn, although drugs, fake passports, dodgy sim cards and counterfeit cash are sold. Like a real live video game, the online stores in Hydra employed drug dealers known as cladmen, treasure men or droppers, I think in Russian, whose job is to stash drugs in GPS tagged hiding spots

ready to pick up by online buyers. It's a street tech workaround in a country where the postal system is slow, and unreliable and regular street drug dealing is highly risky. It is basically Pokemon Go for drugs. I interviewed Nico on Hydra last spring, so check out that on the Patreon if you can. German authorities shut at the site in 2022, but there are still tons more sites out there today, from Brian's Club to Toursa Market, Abacus. They're selling fake goods, guns, precious metal, malware, drugs and even

contract kills. Isn't isn't the contract kills thing like always fake? I didn't there wasn't there something about that recently like you know at least the people offering them not sure about like uh yeah I it just I think there there was something reported like it's always like it's never actually been done it's always been like a sting operation or it's always just been fake. I saw like one recent bust where a woman had hired a contract killer to do a husband on the dark web but yeah I know what you mean there's loads and loads of weird stuff about that. I think that's one of the things that is questionable about the Silk Road case as well,

because they did him on like a murder-for-hire plot, which I think has always been considered pretty shaky. But yeah, I don't know. I mean, when it comes to dark web stuff, like authorities and the media are still, they're just always like a several steps behind, so you get a lot of weird reporting. Anyway, there's been a role call of follow-up Alawi since 2017 too. In 2020, for example, Feds bust the nationwide dark web trafficking network of Utah-based Aaron Shamo, who distributes fentanyl-laced oxycodone at the storefront Farmer Master.

Shamo calls himself a quote, white-collar drug dealer, drawing in former co-workers from a stint at eBay, and signing off messages with smiley faces. One of his customers is a 21-year-old Californian named Ruslan Cleuev, who dyes in his bedroom with one of Shamo's pill-filled envelopes at his. his feet. He's the only death for which Shamo is directly charged, but there are many, many more. An agent at Shamo's trial which ends in him getting life imprisonment compares his process to making chocolate chip cookies, only if too many chocolate chips ended up in a cookie, whoever ate it, would drop dead.

Actually, it's not a bad analogy. Yeah, I prefer to go with like a kimoire salad, but with too many sort of like goji berries and it could screw you up. Anyway, says Utah Attorney General Sean D. Reyes, Quote, in 2016, Shamo sold 1 million fentanyl-l-laced fake oxycodone pills to unsuspecting buyers in every state in the Union. While the total harmy calls can never be measured, at least 90-90 of his known customers have died from overdoses.

Shamo, of course, isn't alone. It may last year the DOJ arrest 288 people and seize 850 kilos of drugs in the US, Europe and South America, as part of an operation called Spector. Specktor, get it? Hello, fellow kids. And just a couple months ago, an Orange County, California resident named Tenzin Orgill,

where is that name from? It's like Turkish or Mongolian? Was sentenced to 168 months in federal prison for orchestrating a dark web meth and MDMA ring cooked up in a clandestine lab. Here's Merrick Garland noted online expert and U.S. Attorney General channeling Liam Neum Neasen, quote, our message criminals on the dark web is this.

You can try and hide in the furthest reaches of the internet, but the Justice Department will find you and hold you accountable for your crimes. As if it even needs saying, I think we do so many stories now that touch on this, fentanyl overdose deaths have only continued to rise since the takedown of the fentanyl king. In 2022, of almost 108,000 total overdose deaths, fentanyl accounts for almost four-fifths. From 2020 to 2021, the number of arrests of DEA made from fentanyl grew 36% overtaking arrest for heroin for the first time. Alpha Bay is back now, by the way, and there are tons of guys just like Alar Ali, only with far less interesting backstories. Yeah, it's too much hassle, you know, from law enforcement.

Just like start getting, you know, peptides from China, get some Ippamorlin or some Melanotan. Just sell that. Like, you're not going to get rated by the feds for that. All right. Don't Instagrammy crimes and sell whatever that is. Yeah, that's some good advice. And actually a lot of this is... Research, research chemicals.

Okay, cool. Yeah, I'd never heard of them, but if that's what you're into, that's cool. And actually, a lot of this is put in the plight of Ross Albrick, who is Silk Rose Dread Pirate Roberts, founder, of course, into sharper focus. He has always claimed that he was one of a clique to set up the site, not its sole mastermind. And contrary to early reports, it didn't offer hitmen, child porn or guns, though there was a murder for higher plot, which again, I'm not going to get into

because we don't have time. And it was like weird, but it did happen, but it was more like, screw you, I'm going to kill you, I'm going to do something. Like it was, I don't know, like it didn't really check out. And actually, this may, none other than Donald J. Trump promised to commute all overick's sentence in an attempt to woo libertarian voters who've made the 40-year-old a champion of their cause. And this was just after Trump said he pardoned the capital writers so you can make your own conclusions about whether it's ingenuous or not. But yeah, the fentanyl king, dark web drug marketplaces, Alpha Bay, Hydra, Silk Road. This is now a staple of the narco world besides the big cartels. And it is not going away anytime soon, despite what

the Attorney General says. Yeah, it's a, I mean, that's a movie right there, man. It's a crazy story. Yeah, it is. I hope he's got an option deal for that because that was a really cool story for why as well. Security program on spreadsheets, new regulations piling up, and audit dread? It's time for Vanta. Vanta automates security and compliance, brings evidence into one place, and cuts audit prep by 82%. Less manual work, clear visibility, bastard deals. Zero chaos. Call it compliance or call it Compliance. Get it? Join the 15,000 companies using Vanta to prove trust. Go to VAA. nta.com slash com.