The Omar Little Of the Dark Web
My conversation with a hacker who robs online drug markets
Back in 2019 I received an email from an anonymous source.
“I have been hacking and extorting Research Chemical companies for almost 3 years now,” he wrote.
I raised my eyebrows.
“Fuck these guys,” he went on. “I see myself as a modern age Omar Little.”
Was this guy serious? I wondered to myself. It wasn’t immediately obvious. His email address was clearly a burner.
“Research chemicals” is a euphemism for novel psychoactive substances (NPS), which are obscure recreational drugs — opioids or psychedelics or benzos or cannabinoids or whatever — with complicated names like 25i-nbome and AMB-FUBINACA.
Omar Little, of course, is the beloved Wire character who robbed drug dealers. This guy claimed to be doing that, except in cyberspace.
Now, this was shortly after the publication of Fentanyl, Inc., and I was getting all sorts of crazy emails. One guy saw me on Tucker Carlson and threatened to kill me.
But this guy seemed legit. He mentioned a bunch of research chemical companies by name, that he said he’d stolen from. I looked them up, and they were real. These companies were based out of China and the Netherlands. Some operated on the dark web, some on the clear web. They sold NPS and accepted cryptocurrency.
“Basically I hack them, take as many payments from the customers as I can, and finally extort both customers/companies.”
The more we chatted, the less he sounded like a kook. In fact, he sounded like he knew what he was talking about.
“The security of most [research chemical company sites] is quite bad so it's almost no work compared to bug bounty hunting which I also do.”
I was intrigued by this guy’s email. Robbing drug dealers on the internet sounded incredibly badass. I wanted to tell his story — preserving his anonymity, of course — and he considered it.
Sure, he was no Robin Hood. He said he was a formerly-addicted user who originally started doing this to get out of debt.
And I’m not someone who thinks all dark web distributors are necessarily bad. Some have Amazon-style ratings systems, and sell much purer drugs than, say, street dealers.*
*Always test your drugs, kids.
But there was something romantic about his claim to prey on the worst of these web lords. He reserved special venom for companies that sold opioids, fentanyl precursors, and cathinones, the latter a synthetic stimulant derived from the khat plant. Perhaps he disliked cathinones because they were often mislabeled and sold as ecstasy? I’m not sure.
Anyway, over the following months we continued chatting over email, and…