Is there a slave market in DarkNet?

This summer, all tabloids told the story of the model of Chloe Eyling, abducted by the semi-virtual group "Black Death", which planned to sell the girl in the market of slaves in darknet. Reddit users conduct a collective investigation, look for inconsistencies in the history of the criminal syndicate, and yet come to the conclusion that behind it are ordinary Polish swindlers, and their story is more like the film "Big Jackpot" or "After Reading Burned." The correspondent of samizdat "Batenka, yes, you are a transformer" went in search of the market of slaves in the domestic segment of darknet, found there is not what he was looking for, and comes to the conclusion that criminals still have enough of the usual Internet and work in the old-fashioned way offline.

July 11, 2017, the twenty-year-old model Chloe Eyling went to a routine photo shooting on the outskirts of Milan. She was greeted by the brothers Lukash and Michael Erba, who presented themselves as organizers and customers of the shooting. But instead of a photo session, the girl was pumped with ketamine, stuck in a suitcase and taken to a village near Turin.

Watch the model was Lukash. In the meagerly furnished room of the rented cottage there was one double bed. Of clothes on the stolen model - an orange swimsuit and socks. Lukash was sitting next to Chloe on the bed. He casually told about the work on the group "Black Death", about how he earned $ 15,000,000 and about his favorite method of murder - poisoning with poison.

They slept together, but there was no harassment: sexual violence allegedly forbids the regulations of the syndicate. When the captive lost her shoe, the Pole, having adopted the model, carefully brought her out for a walk with the new couple, but did not let her relax: ostensibly around the agents of "Death" and one wrong step would lead to the execution.

Lukash told the captive that the girl had to be sold into sexual slavery at an auction in a darknet, but the sale of women with children (Chloe's two-month-old son) is against the rules. So he tried to push the offer with a ransom to her agent and her three rich friends. They begged 300,000 dollars from them.

Another day before the shooting, the brothers sent letters with information about the abduction to English tabloids. In them, they reported that the model was stolen by the Russian mafia. Then they sent letters with photographs of the related model to the English press (kidnapped and kidnappers from London). The publication was both embargoed by police officers.

With the ransom it did not burn out. Desperate, on July 17, Lukasz took the girl to the British embassy, ​​taking from her a promise that she would pay him $ 50,000 in bitcoins (otherwise "Black Death" would appear). Lukash for some reason surrendered to the local cops right on the doorstep. His brother was caught in England in August.

After the arrest of the kidnappers and the release of the model, the story was replicated by the media. It turned out that with the grouping back in 2015, the Motherboard correspondent collided. He went to the link posted on Reddit, and got on the syndicate's website. On sale: trunks, custom-made murders, passports and sex slaves. The correspondent tried to get in touch, but he was told: "A good attempt, Europol."

"IF THEY ARE AND THERE ARE, THAT YOU WILL NOT BE SUFFERED THAT ONLY. ANYBODY IS OPEN THESE THINGS NOT PALET »

The main twist of the story is that the "Black Death" is, most likely, a hoax. The Italian police, for example, almost immediately caught Lukas in myth-making. He told them that he was forced to go against the law by leukemia: money for treatment was given by Romanians from Birmingham for organizing the abduction. Allegedly they promised $ 500,000, but this is more than the repurchase amount.

The stolen model later recalled: "Lukash was not interested in listening. It seemed to me that he was trying to surprise me or feed up his ego. " However, he still quite badly scared her stories about the murders. The police still had questions about both the kidnapper and the kidnapped.

A little later the situation was tried to clarify the "pirate and sysadmin" Chris Monteiro, who made his own investigation of the darknet syndicate. In short: "Death" was actively advertised on the boards of the dark Internet (they are almost the same as conventional boards like Dvač) and Reddit, which is hardly a common practice among real syndicates. And still found Motherboard photos of slaves on the group's website turned out to be frames from the mediocre BDSM-porn.

Lukash tried to sell his services from 2015, but most likely, unsuccessfully. Shortly after the arrest of the second Erb, information appeared that the "Black Death" had already conducted auctions with underage British virgins, but their veracity still had to be proved (or refuted) by Europol.

And they also had a really terrible branding. So the OPG could only be called the scriptwriter Bi-movi.

Despite all the doubts in the history of the Erba brothers, trafficking in people in the dark Internet is likely to exist. This text would not be complete if I did not pretend to be a detective from the noir detective and did not go in search of slavish auctions in the Russian-language darknet. First of all, I began to shake my contacts from the world of cybercrime. As it turned out, petty scammers do not cut a slave very much: "If they are, then you just will not get on them. I saw nothing. Nobody likes to open such things. " Just remembered the "Black Death" and links to Reddit. The rest said something similar.

"Girls, children, five, thirteen and eighteen or twenty-eight. South America, USA, Canada, Europe. Documentation. They are kept in order and clean, under qualitative [psychoactive substances]. White, Asian, Negroes. Without deformities, girls without excess weight ", - wrote the user smilingknight on the forum-black market Rutor. Usually there sit carders, barygs and their cooks. The topic appeared in February this year, a survey is bolted to it. The author tried to understand whether there is a demand for slaves at the forum.

There are six pages of discussions in the topic. Someone asks about logistics (you can not make a bookmark), someone condemns. Usually, transactions on the site are conducted with the help of intermediary guarantors, so that questions about whether they are going to legitimize the practice on the forum are addressed to the administrators. Admins are silent: the Rutor slaves are a novelty. The rest write that the theme is like a fake. Moreover, even despite the obvious interest of users, smilingknight disappeared from the forum after an incomplete month after publication, and no specific lots appeared.

And in another theme he created, smilingknight tried to find out the exact location of the streamer games in Dota 2, "who in one of the games with me, when I poked Rubik into the support, called me a regular and said: check the family." Apparently, to fill the muzzle, or for threats. As a reward, the lowest-level game item was offered (they are written that they usually stand in the area of ​​a pair of American cents). In short, the mother of the slaver "Knight" is not like. Just in case, I tried to get in touch with him, but without success.

The last chance is for darknet searchers who will not exactly show me the closed sites for their own, but could lead to some clues.

One of these hooks was the announcement of the sale of a minor slave from Germany, laid out on one of the boards of darknet. I got in correspondence by mail. Answered exclusively in broken English, without guarantees, delivery details or even photos of the girl. If I wanted to acquire a slave, then obviously not this guy.

In the reports, specialized NGOs and the same Europol speak of the slave trade in the network. In late July, the special services conducted a large-scale special operation: during a week, operatives checked almost one hundred twenty-five thousand people, six thousand cars and four thousand locations like brothels, massage parlors and the like. In a press release, the organization wrote that "the network environment used to advertise sexual exploitation was given special attention."

To combat the slave trade on the network, the department of the US Department of Defense called "Office of Advanced Research Projects" developed a special complex search engine Memex. The program scans the Internet (both normal and deep) and simulates human behavior: it checks each working button on sites, explores the pop-up interface elements and so on. The robot must find even what the search engines of the dark network can not. The slave trade and sexual slavery are the main objectives of the program.

And scientists from New York University and the University of California at Berkeley and San Diego have recently developed a comprehensive method for analyzing slave networks with the help of a blockbuster: they analyze payment cards from the blockbuster and advertise on the Internet, and artificial intelligence recognizes where prostitution is advertised, and where sex -Movement with the involvement of minors.

Yes, advertising on the Internet. Against it, and directed the network presence and Europol, and, to a lesser extent, Memex.

Previously, the main focus of such advertising on the American Internet was Backpage.com - the site of electronic ads, such as "Avito"; in January 2017 adult ads on the site feds were covered. But before the victory is still far away. On Avito, by the way, announcements about the escort (even veiled) are moderated, and the dating section was closed.

The contribution of brothels to the world market of the slave trade is much higher than the notorious slave auctions in darknet, but they cause less trembling among the inhabitants than the semi-virtual virtual slave market.

The fact is that Darknet managed to draw a huge number of myths in the eyes of a broad user. Drug buying has become, of course, easier, but the rest of the criminals deep Internet is not that necessary. For years, criminals did without a darknet and, in fact, do so until now. In Google, for example, you can easily find sites selling MDMA and spice, some suggest bookmarking the selected metro station in Moscow. It is only necessary to enable VPN. Buy a barrel, fake passport and child porn is also easy (the latter in the ordinary Internet is even easier). Probably, because of this mysterious touch of darknet, the story of Chloe's model and meshed in the media.

Internet investigator Chris Monteiro, who combed darknet in search of references to the "Black Death", found a topic on the Polish conspiracy forum, where users are hawking about how Ross Ulbrich ordered a murder from "Death." Ross, he's the Scary pirate Roberts - the creator of the historic black market Silk Road. In fact, Ulbrich ordered five people from the Canadian Hell's Angels. And one more from the agent of the Office for Combating Drugs. All six times he was thrown. Spent more than a million dollars.

Whether the Poles managed to sell Erba someone in slavery, we, perhaps, will never know. As well as whether there was a "Black Death" in principle. But you can find some moral in this story. For example, that the Internet can feed the slavery industry without Tor. Or the fact that cryptocapitalism has not yet come, and it is not so easy to buy a slave or to roll it into a polyethylene of a competitor (especially without guarantors).