“A New Breed of Drug Dealer Has Turned Buying Drugs into a Treasure Hunt: Most Russian Drug Dealers Don’t Hand off Drugs Anymore—They Stash Them in Geotagged Hiding Spots Ready for Pickup by Online Buyers”, 2020-03-27 (; backlinks):
[Description of the 2020 state of the Russian darknet market (DNM) online drug buying scene: the original Silk Road 1 model of a Tor hidden service transacting using Bitcoin with commissions+moderation & shipping drugs in the mail has been superseded by the RAMP/Hydra business model of charging vendors ‘rent’ and delivering drugs using dead drops/geocaching.
A seller now recruits a large number of “treasuremen” or “droppers”, who receive large shipments of drugs and physically hide smaller amounts in various locations, sending GPS coordinates to the buyer.
RAMP and Hydra went to war, with RAMP getting hacked, doxxed, bankrupted by the fall of BTC-e; Hydra now monopolizes the Russian drug market, and the switch to dropping has changed the dynamics considerably: droppers are now the most frequent arrests in connection with DNMs (often college students doing it as a part-time job), and new niches have arisen, like “seekers” (drug addicts who hunt for drops, particular when droppers are lazy and reuse good spots or let themselves be spotted or leave tracks in the snow).
Is Hydra the wave of the future for Western DNMs as well? Probably not. While the dropping model is effective in Russian urban environments, it has not yet made any inroads—Western drug buyers appear to prefer the convenience of mail delivery, and the market (either buyers or sellers) may be too small or too spread out to make drops & crews of droppers viable.]