六 名誉是一切，即使在暗网

在良好的客户服务方面，暗网上的毒品交易者可以教给我们什么？

Depending on how strictly you want to define the terms of an ‘online trade’, you could claim that the first thing to be bought and sold on the internet wasn’t a CD or pizza, it was a small bag of weed. In the early 1970s, a group of students at Stanford University and Massachusetts Institute of Technology made an online drug deal via ARPANET, the precursor to the internet we know today.1 Since then, it has become remarkably fast and easy to score drugs online, through the so-called ‘darknet’.

You can’t get to the darknet using your regular web browser; it can only be accessed via an anonymizing software called Tor (an acronym for ‘The Onion Router’). Instead of a web address ending in a .com or .org, darknet URLs are a hash of random letters and numbers that end in .onion. Originally developed by the US Naval Research Laboratory for the purpose of protecting government communications, Tor has become a handy privacy tool for journalists and human rights organizations that need to mask their browsing activity and hide their identity and location. Of course, its subterranean nature means it also attracts criminals who can exchange drugs and other illegal goods, from guns to child pornography, online and in relative obscurity.

Stumbling into the darknet is like stumbling into a shadowy and mysterious parallel universe, where everything looks oddly the same as on the regular web–strangely familiar–except that its consumer sites are selling AK-47s or counterfeit passports, instead of pre-loved Hermes handbags and Jamie Oliver cookbooks. It means a visitor doesn’t need to be a hacker or computer whiz to navigate it; it’s remarkably easy to find and buy illegal goods and services. Google doesn’t search onion sites but Grams does (FYI, the address for Grams is: grams7enufi7jmdl.onion) and its site looks incredibly similar, from the brightly coloured rainbow logo to the ‘I Feel Lucky’ button.

Let’s say you type in ‘ecstasy’ on Grams. The search engine trawls cryptomarkets such as BlackBank, Mr Nice, Pandora and SilkRoad4 (now on its fourth life) and provides a list of results showing the name of the seller, price of the product, a brief description and the exact URL. As the creator of Grams told WIRED magazine in an anonymous interview: ‘I noticed on the forums and Reddit, people were constantly asking “who had the best product X and was reliable and not a scam?” I wanted to make it easy for people to find things they wanted on the darknet and figure out who was a trustworthy vendor.’2

I had read a lot about darknet drug sites but I was still gobsmacked at just how much they look like conventional e-retailers such as Amazon. They would appear reassuringly familiar to any online shopper. There’s even the usual amount of competition and cornucopia of choice. It’s just that the listings, row after row, are for cocaine, blotter (LSD), ecstasy, opioids, dimethyltryptamine (DMT), heroin, hash, cannabis and almost any other drug a user could possibly want. With just a few clicks, buyers can browse a mind-boggling selection, pay for the drugs in the traceless digital currency bitcoin (unattached to any central bank) and have them delivered unknowingly by the postman.

In October 2013, the darknet achieved notoriety when an illicit drug site called Silk Road was shut down by the FBI. The site owner and administrator, twenty-nine-year-old Ross William Ulbricht, aka Dread Pirate Roberts (DPR), was arrested at a public library in San Francisco. Convicted of money laundering, computer hacking and conspiracy to traffic narcotics, he has since been sentenced to life in prison. Appropriately, Ulbricht took his fictional namesake, Dread Pirate Roberts, from a character in the book and film The Princess Bride. In the story, Roberts is not one man but one of many who pass on the name, reputation and pirate business from one person to the next. At the time of the site’s closure, the FBI estimated that Silk Road had 13,000 drug listings and had processed approximately $1.2-billion-worth of sales.3 DPR was believed to be making an estimated $20,000 a day in the 6–12 per cent commission the site charged on every transaction.4

Ulbricht was a university-educated guy who grew up in Austin, Texas. A self-proclaimed idealist, he believed drug use was a personal choice. He was essentially a twenty-first-century digital libertarian. In Silk Road’s code of conduct it stated, ‘We refuse to sell or list anything the purpose of which is to harm or defraud another person.’ DPR also wrote, ‘Treat others as you wish to be treated.’ Ulbricht wanted to create a trusted trading ground where people could buy and sell drugs free from violence and the reach of government laws. Critically, DPR was not just revered–vendors and buyers on Silk Road trusted him. But once he was arrested, their belief was shaken in the safety of the whole system. It wasn’t enough, however, to bring it crashing down. And other sites sprang up to replace Silk Road.

How are visitors persuaded to trust these sites? Shared control, for one thing. When a buyer places an order, the bitcoin goes into an escrow account and is only released to the vendor once the order has been confirmed as received. (It’s a similar escrow system to the one used on Alibaba.) The buyer, seller and the site’s administrators control the account; two out of the three must sign off on the deal before the bitcoin can be moved. It’s designed to make it far more difficult for vendors and buyers to scam one another. On the whole, it works, although, like most systems, there are pitfalls and bad apples. For example, unscrupulous administrators can shut down a marketplace and make off at any time with all of their users’ bitcoins escrowed in the site. And some do. It’s known as an exit scam.

In March 2015 the popular Silk Road descendant Evolution mysteriously disappeared overnight. It had nothing to do with a government bust; just simple greed. The site’s administrators, Verto and Kimble, emptied the market’s bitcoin coffers and ran off with an estimated $12 million.5 A few days after the incident, a user named NSWGreat, who had previously self-described herself as an Evolution ‘public relations’ staffer, put a post on Reddit’s darknet markets forum.

‘I am so sorry, but Verto and Kimble have f—ked us all. I have over $20,000 in escrow myself from sales,’ NSWGreat wrote. ‘I’m sorry for everyone’s losses, I’m gutted and speechless. I feel so betrayed.’6

Soon after Evolution shut down, lesser-known markets like Abraxas, Amazon Dark, Blackbank and Middle Earth also subsequently disappeared for unknown reasons, but it’s assumed they were also exit scams. The utopian ideals of the darknet–‘us against the government and over-regulation’–seemed to have had their heyday. And, of course, vendors and buyers who have been ripped off have little recourse, beyond warning each other. They can hardly go to the ombudsman and complain their LSD didn’t turn up and demand their bitcoins back. How much damage did that do to trust in the darknet?

Dr James Martin is a renowned expert on cryptomarkets. He’s a professor at Macquarie University and author of Drugs on the Dark Net. I interviewed Martin from his flat in Melbourne just after he had come back from, appropriately, Amsterdam. He is particularly fascinated by how cryptomarkets use technology to allow people to communicate and engage in new forms of self-governance outside state and traditional regulatory control.

‘What interests me is the way technology could be used to transform an illicit drugs trade that has been debased and corrupted by four decades of the global War on Drugs,’ he says.7 ‘The fact is, you have got thousands of people–drug users and drug retailers–who have been stereotyped as “untrustworthy”, who don’t have a reputation for being the most reliable people. So how do they create highly functioning markets that are non-violent and self-regulate based on trust?’

Martin thinks law enforcement agencies and the police have been surprised by the darknet. ‘[They’ve seen] how criminals are creating peaceful communities selling dangerous products; communities that work really well the vast majority of the time.’

Yet haven’t the exit scams now damaged that trust in the darknet? ‘There isn’t a trust crisis but people are definitely more sceptical,’ he says. ‘Scams undermined the faith in the whole system. It wasn’t the “big bad Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA)” that was destroying the markets; it was people from the inside. That really chipped away the idealism and shook people’s faith in the darknet community.’

Martin likens it to research one of his colleagues carried out looking at desertion within armies and how it affected the remaining troops. The study found that if fellow soldiers were killed by the enemy, they were seen to be doing their job and it stiffened the resolve of those left. If they fled voluntarily, however, it undermined faith in what they were all fighting for, faith in the whole system. ‘That,’ says Martin, ‘is what we saw with the exit scams.’

Even so, the scams didn’t deliver a mortal blow. ‘Vendors and customers have just moved past them and repopulated other sites,’ Martin says. It’s like a game of whack-a-mole: as soon as one site closes down, another pops up.

Despite the Silk Road bust and others since, the drug business on the darknet, like other forms of e-commerce, is thriving. According to the 2016 Global Drug Survey, approximately 22 per cent of UK drug users have sourced and bought their drugs online.8 Globally, almost one in ten participants reported having bought drugs off the darknet. Significantly, 5 per cent of respondents stated that they had not bought drugs before purchasing them through darknet markets.9 The darknet makes drug-buying easier but also seem less risky to some people.

An in-depth study by the European think tank Rand found that the number of transactions on illegal drug sites has tripled since 2013.10 The United Kingdom is the largest online drug market outside the United States, with darknet sellers doing close to 21,000 drug deals a month. British vendors took home on average around £5,200 per month. But the most successful darknet dealers were making upwards of £200,000.11

The truly fascinating thing, however, about drug marketplaces is not how many there are or how much dealers make but just how well they work. While we should rightfully fear that these sites could lead to higher levels of drug use, it’s hard not to be impressed by their apparent quality control and efficiency. People, ordinary people, transact with each other globally, at high speed and in great volume. The darknet can teach us a lesson or two about trust.

In street dealing, selling is often restricted to customers a dealer already knows. New customers tend to be introduced to dealers only by a broker, a trusted intermediary. ‘My mate is not a cop, you can sell her drugs and she won’t dob you in,’ is how a broker might vouch for someone. Trust is crucial in conventional drug-dealing but it’s small-scale, interpersonal trust, meaning the trust lies directly between a few people.

In contrast, the darknet is an open network. Choice isn’t limited by whom you know or where a dealer lives. ‘Cryptomarkets represent a kind of super broker. They are able to facilitate contact between many, many more vendors and customers than any individual possibly could,’ says Martin. ‘But the trust in this instance is represented in quantitative metrics, such as reviews and ratings that substitute for the personal trust that has been historically critical for the drug trade. And that is transformative.’

Trust used to be a very personal thing: you went on the recommendations of your friends or friends of friends. By finding ways to extend that circle of trust exponentially, technology is expanding markets and possibilities. In the case of the darknet, it is creating trust between the unlikeliest of characters, despite a heavy cloak of anonymity.

The darknet is peopled by hundreds of thousands of drug users and vendors who would commonly be stereotyped as untrustworthy, the worst of the worst, yet here they are creating highly efficient markets. Effectively, they are creating trust in a zero-trust environment. Nobody meets in person. There are obviously no legal regulations governing the exchanges. It looks like a place where buyers could get ripped off. Theoretically, it would be easy for dealers to send lower quality drugs or not deliver the goods at all. Yet this rarely happens on the darknet and, overall, you’re more likely to find buyers singing hymns of praise about the quality of the drugs and reliability of the service.

An extensive report published in February 2016 by the European Monitoring Centre for Drugs and Drug Addiction (EMCDDA) revealed that drugs available through darknet markets tend to be of a higher purity than those available on the streets.12 Similarly, a study by Energy Control, a Spanish think tank, also confirmed a quality premium in darknet drugs. Volunteers were asked to send random samples of drugs they had bought from online sites and offline dealers for testing. More than half of the darknet cocaine samples contained nothing but cocaine, compared with just 14 per cent of those bought on the Spanish streets. Even the FBI testified in the Silk Road hearings that, of more than a hundred purchases of drugs they made online before the closing of the site, all showed ‘high purity levels’.

It seems dealers are more honest online. And that tells us something about how people create trust in this criminal ecosystem, with the help–or supervision–technology can provide. Given the nature of its wares, the darknet may seem like an alien and subterranean world–and some of it undoubtedly is–but at its core, it’s about people connecting with other people. It’s just another incarnation of the new kind of trust-building that technology has facilitated. The same dynamics, the same principles in building digital human relationships, apply. In that sense, it’s almost comically conventional.

Turns out, drug dealers care about their online brand and reputation and customer satisfaction as much as Airbnb hosts or eBay sellers. A typical vendor’s page will be littered with information, including: how many transactions they have completed; when the vendor registered; when the vendor last logged in; and their all-important pseudonym. It will also feature a short description about why a user should buy drugs from them, refund policy information, postage options and ‘stealth’ methods (measures used to conceal drugs in the post). Even if you’re not in the market for what they’re selling, it’s hard not to be impressed; vendors put in real effort to demonstrate their trustworthiness.

Traditionally, the words ‘drug dealer’ bring to mind some thuggish or shady lowlife, a badly educated tough swaggering around in a leather jacket or lurking threateningly on a street corner. Someone you don’t want to mess with. True or not, that persona of a heartless intimidator doesn’t work on cryptomarkets. There, vendors need to project a cleaner image. Some even display specific logos and taglines and their brand message is loud and clear: ‘We care about you’ or ‘Your satisfaction is our priority’.13

Indeed, marketing strategies used on the darknet look remarkably like standard ones. There are bulk discounts, loyalty programmes, two-for-one specials, free extras for loyal customers and even refund guarantees for dissatisfied punters. It’s common to see marketing techniques such as ‘Limited Stock’ or ‘Offer ends Friday’ to help boost sales. While reviewing these deals, I had to remind myself I was looking at an illegal drugs marketplace, not shopping for shoes on Zappos.

Some vendors, eager to build brand, label their drugs as ‘fair trade’ or ‘organic’ to appeal to ‘ethical’ interests. ‘Conflict-free’ sources of supply are also available for the benevolent drug taker. ‘This is the best opium you will try, by purchasing this you are supporting local farmers in the hills of Guatemala and you are not financing violent drug cartels,’ promised a seller on Evolution (before it was shut down).14

New vendors will offer free samples and price-match guarantees to establish their reputation. Promotional campaigns are rife on 20 April, also known as Pot Day, the darknet’s equivalent of Black Friday. (The date of Pot Day comes from the North American slang term for smoking cannabis which is 4/20.) ‘It’s not anonymity, Bitcoins or encryption that ensure the future success of darknet markets,’ writes Jamie Bartlett, author of The Dark Net. ‘The real secret of Silk Road is great customer service.’15

After a buyer receives their drugs, they are prompted to leave a star rating out of five. Nicolas Christin, an associate research professor at Carnegie Mellon University, analysed ratings from 184,804 pieces of feedback that were left on Silk Road over the course of an eight-month period. On the site, 97.8 per cent of reviews were positive, scoring a four or five. In contrast, only 1.4 per cent were negative, rating one or two on the same scale.16 Just how much can people trust those good reviews?

Some observers suspect the darknet suffers from review inflation. Similar studies have been conducted on conventional marketplace rating systems and found that feedback is also overwhelmingly positive. For instance, on eBay less than 2 per cent of all feedback left is negative or neutral. One explanation is that dissatisfied customers are substantially less likely to give feedback.17 It means the most important information, the negative reputation data, is not being captured.

Social pressure encourages us to leave high scores in public forums. If you have experienced an Uber driver saying at the end of a trip, ‘You give me five stars, I’ll give you five stars,’ that’s tit for tat or grade inflation in action. I know I’m reluctant to give a driver a rating lower than four stars even if I have sat white-knuckled during the ride as he whizzed through lights and cut corners. Perhaps that is why Jason Dalton was a 4.7. Drivers get kicked off the Uber platform if their rating dips below 4.3 and I don’t want to be responsible for them losing, in some instances, their livelihood. Maybe they are just having a bad day. That, and the driver knows where I live. In other words, reviews spring from a complex web of fear and hope. Whether we are using our real name or a pseudonym, we fear retaliation and also hope our niceties will be reciprocated.

It would be easy to conclude, then, that the ratings we rely on to make assessments are often not an accurate reflection of the experience. But they can still make us more accountable to one another. For instance, I sometimes drop towels on the bathroom floor when I am staying in a hotel. But I would never do this as a guest staying in someone’s home on Airbnb. Why? Because I know the host will rate me, and that rating is likely to have an impact on my booking requests being accepted by other Airbnb hosts in the future. It illustrates how online trust mechanisms will have on impact on our real-world behaviours in ways we can’t yet even imagine.

While ratings might be exaggerated, or even fabricated, some sites are taking steps to reduce the problem of positive bias. For instance, in 2014 Airbnb introduced a double-blind process where guest and host reviews would only be revealed after both are submitted, or after a fourteen-day waiting period, whichever came first. The result was a 7 per cent increase in review rates and a 2 per cent increase in negative reviews. ‘These may not sound like big numbers but the results are compounding over time,’ says Judd Antin, director of research at Airbnb. ‘It was a simple tweak that has improved the travel experiences of millions of people since.’18 Like any game, it’s about figuring out the rules that put downward pressure on an unwanted behaviour until it doesn’t exist any more.

There is, however, another way to look at the 97.8 per cent of positive reviews on darknet sites. Perhaps they are an accurate reflection of a market functioning remarkably well most of the time, with content customers. Even if review systems are not perfect, and bias is inevitable, it seems that they still do their job as an accountability mechanism of social control. Put simply, they make people behave better.

A question I have often asked myself is whether limiting people to a score or star rating is really that helpful. Many marketplaces are now asking people to rate against a particular trait that is more relevant to trust in a specific context. For instance, on BlaBlaCar, people are rated from one to five on their driving skills. On Airbnb, hosts are rated from one to five on their cleanliness, accuracy, value, communication, arrival and location.19 On Uber, when riders give a low or high rating, you must specify the reason for doing so, such as cleanliness, driving, customer service or directions. On drug marketplaces, how clean a dealer is and how well they drive is irrelevant. What would be the trust measures there?

Turns out, the three key traits of trustworthiness–competence, reliability and honesty–also apply to drug vendors. To highlight reliability, many reviews point out the speed of response and delivery. For example, ‘I ordered 11.30 a.m. yesterday and my package was in my mailbox in literally twenty-five hours. I’ll definitely be back for more in the future,’ commented a buyer on Silk Road 2.0. Other reviews focus on the product quality: ‘Amazing weed. Fast shipping. Packaging very secure. Took me a bit long to get in the double-seal vacuum seal but well worth it. Would highly recommend.’ One of the ways skills and knowledge are reviewed is how good a vendor’s ‘stealth’ is, that is, how cleverly they disguise their product so that it doesn’t get detected. ‘Stealth was so good it almost fooled me,’ wrote a satisfied buyer on an MDMA listing on the AlphaBay market. Established vendors are very good at making it look (and smell) like any old regular package. Excessive tape or postage, reused boxes, presence of odour, crappy handwritten addresses, use of a common receiver alias such as ‘John Smith’ and even spelling errors are bad stealth.

There is a clear incentive for vendors consistently to provide the product and service they promise: the dealers with the best reviews rise to the top. No feedback, either negative or positive, can be deleted, so there is a permanent record of how someone has behaved. Just like the Maghribi traders and Alibaba sellers discovered, past behaviour is used to predict future behaviour. ‘The future can therefore cast a shadow back upon the present,’ Robert Axelrod wrote in The Evolution of Cooperation.20 Or to put it another way, vendors have a vested interest in keeping their noses clean right from the word go.

Reputation is trust’s closest sibling; the overall opinion of what people think of you. It’s the opinion others have formed based on past experiences and built up over days, months, sometimes years. In that sense, reputation, good or bad, is a measure of trustworthiness. It helps customers choose between different options and, with luck, make better choices. It encourages sellers to be trustworthy, in order to build that reputation, and it weeds out those who aren’t. It isn’t quite that simple, however. Price is also a factor in the value of reputation, and reputation can influence price.

Consider this scenario: two vendors are both offering Purple Haze cannabis on exactly the same shipping and refund terms. One vendor, let’s call him BlazeKing, has only three reviews, with an average score of 4, and is offering the cannabis for $12.50/gram. The other vendor, CandyMan2, has fifty-two reviews, with an average score of 4.9, and is offering the same Purple Haze but for a slightly higher price at $12.95/gram. Who to go with? Obviously, the majority of customers would choose CandyMan2. The reviews reduce uncertainty for the buyer.

CandyMan2’s higher reputation comes with a price to the customer, though not a huge one. The value of the reduced risk is $0.45/gram. In this sense, online reputation is functioning as a risk premium.21

Now let’s say the choice is between BlazeKing, still with three reviews and cannabis for sale at $12.50/gram, and another vendor, FlyingDynamite, also with fifty-two reviews and an average score of 4.9, but selling the same drugs for $16.50/gram. Now the risk premium for a vendor with a higher reputation is $4/gram. Is the vendor’s reputation worth the significant difference in price? For some, it may be; for others, not. Even reputation, while valuable, has a price ceiling. There is only so much more a customer is willing to pay for goods or services based on a seller’s high reputation.

Still, I was intrigued how influential a vendor’s reputation really is on cryptomarkets. So I tracked down a buyer, let’s call him Alex. He describes himself as a ‘casual drug taker’ who likes to smoke a lot of weed and occasionally take ecstasy at the weekend. Towards the end of 2014, Alex switched from buying drugs from a dealer who lived relatively close by, to buying through cryptomarkets. What made him switch? His answer confirms everything we’ve just explored. ‘Rather than buying drugs from a friend of a friend of a guy I met in a bar, I can buy drugs after reading dozens of reviews of their service,’ he explains. ‘I feel confident I am getting exactly what I am paying for.’ It echoes what drug surveys indicate: 60–65 per cent of respondents say that the existence of ratings is the motivation for using darknet marketplaces.22

And that brings us back to the matter of feedback and reputation systems on the darknet. Those systems make both sides more accountable but they are not infallible. Ratings are gamed in a similar way to other sites such as Amazon, Yelp and TripAdvisor. A common trick is a practice known as padding feedback. Vendors essentially purchase their own drugs from a series of fake buyer accounts they have created. The glowing reviews look legitimate when they have in fact been created by the vendor. It’s the online equivalent of stuffing the ballot box. Politicians do it. Advertisers do it. TripAdvisor is bedevilled by it. And drug dealers do it.

An industry of darknet ‘marketing’ services has sprung up, peopled by fibbers and promoters who are willing to create rave reviews and posts to help boost a vendor’s reputation. ‘Hi, my name is Mr420 and we started out and still are a small group of college public relations majors,’ wrote a darknet PR vendor. ‘We would be interested in keeping your product, thread or listing at the top of the forums.’ Fake reviewers on Amazon will get free books, and hotels will often offer discounts for a positive review on TripAdvisor. The likes of Mr420 will pad feedback in exchange for free drug samples. Vendors regard it simply as brand management, doing something to make themselves look better.

It’s the same practice Amazon took a suit against in a landmark reputation case. On 16 October 2015, in Washington, DC, the company sued 1,114 individuals for selling positive five-star reviews to Amazon sellers and Kindle authors.23 All the defendants in the case were advertising their services on Fiverr, an online marketplace where freelancers offer to do minor tasks for a flat rate of $5.

It might be hard to see how Amazon could suffer a loss of revenue from dodgy reviews; products with high-star ratings sell more, right? But Amazon was smart enough to know it needed to crack down on fake reviews because they undermine the foundations of trust in online marketplaces. If reviewers and their reviews can’t be trusted, the whole system falls.

But where is the line? Say I send this book to a hundred friends and colleagues, and ask them to leave a nice review on Amazon to help boost sales. Is that gaming the system or just common-sense marketing? As the adage goes, fake it until you make it.

‘The weird thing is that even though there is a certain amount of gaming, there is an acceptance that it will take place and it’s okay,’ James Martin says. ‘New vendors will tell you that to break into the market they have to generate false reviews themselves. If you have no feedback in your vendor profile, you are not an attractive proposition. So fake reviews get the ball rolling for new entrants.’ It’s simply the way markets function; a feedback system will never be perfect.

Gaming the feedback system is also used by rival vendors who want to gain market share. In the case of drug sales, how do dealers compete with one another when violence and turf wars are no longer an option? They engage in online wars. One tactic is sock puppetry (or ‘socking’), where a rival hides behind an online identity in order to tarnish the reputation of a competitor. It’s a common behaviour, even esteemed professors do it; quite badly, in some cases.

Take Professor Orlando Figes, a critically acclaimed and prize-winning author, who has written eight books. In 2010, he was caught posting damaging critiques of his rivals’ books on Amazon.24 Under the aliases ‘orlando-birkbeck’ and ‘Historian’ (drug dealers could teach him a thing or two about selecting a better pseudonym), he called his competitors’ works ‘dense’, ‘pretentious’ and ‘the sort of book that makes you wonder why it was ever published’. Stupidly, he used the same pseudonyms to praise his own work in illustrious detail: ‘Beautifully written… leaves the reader awed, humbled yet uplifted… a gift to us all,’ Historian wrote.

When the scandal went public, the professor initially, and somewhat ungallantly, blamed all the reviews on his wife, the barrister Stephanie Palmer. It did not help the situation.25 Figes ended up paying damages to rival historians Dr Rachel Polonsky and Robert Service, whose work he had slated. In an apology statement he issued to the media, Figes said, ‘Some of the reviews were small-minded and ungenerous, but they were not intended to harm.’26 The same purposeful sniping happens on the darknet. Vendors pretend to be unsatisfied buyers and leave bad reviews.

But gaming can only go so far. Indeed, machine learning systems are already being developed to identify and weed out deceptive reviews. A team of researchers at Cornell University has developed software that can detect review spam. In a test on 800 reviews of Chicago hotels on TripAdvisor, the program was able to pick out the deceptive reviews with almost 90 per cent accuracy.27 In contrast, Cornell’s human subjects only managed to pick the fakes about 50 per cent of the time.

It turns out people are beautifully predictable when writing fictional reviews, using similar syntax, language, grammar, punctuation, too many long words and even similar spelling mistakes. The Cornell researchers found that deceivers use more verbs and long words than truth tellers, while the genuine reviewers used more nouns and punctuation.

No doubt these types of review filter will become increasingly sophisticated and commonplace, so we will be better able to trust a review is legit. But there is another simple solution when it comes to countering deceptive reviews: word of mouth. An upstanding community may not be something we associate with the drug trade but darknet markets have a strong sense of community with clear norms, rules and cultures. Users frequently chat to each other on discussion forums such as the DarkNetMarkets on Reddit, publicly calling out dodgy vendors. ‘I was looking at this vendor a few hours ago and they had zero feedback. Now they have a bunch,’ wrote one user. Customers who continually ask for refunds, claiming that their goods did not show up, are also likely to be shamed.

There are also websites such as DarkNet Market Avengers (dnmavengeradt4vo.onion), that use trained chemists to do random testing of darknet drugs. Users send samples of their drugs to Energy Control, a drug-testing lab funded by community donations. It tests the products and sends the results back to the user. For instance, if LSD is found to be ‘under-dosed’ or heroin is found to contain something dangerous like Carfentanil (an extremely potent synthetic opioid which can be life-threatening), the results are posted on the DNM Avengers site, including details of the specific vendor who sold the product.

The result is that fraudsters on both sides of the market are relatively quickly outed and driven out. As James Martin beautifully puts it, ‘The darknet is really not dark. Thousands of people hold torches to shine the light on how other people behave. You no longer have to rely on one person but the collective judgements of the entire darknet community.’

Within the next five years, darknet sites could be to street drug dealers what Amazon is to local booksellers or Airbnb is to hotels, even if they do raise different and serious ethical questions. On the one hand, cryptomarkets mean that drugs will be more easily available to more people, which cannot be a good thing. On the other, they reduce the length of the supply chain and some of the risks and criminal behaviour associated with conventional drug-dealing.

Either way, the systems work because customers become enfranchised in them. Technology empowers customers to hold vendors to account and, ultimately, it is only trustworthy vendors who will survive. E-commerce is e-commerce and, even on the darknet, reputation is everything.