GOOGLE FOR DRUG BUYERS

  Vocativ spoke with the guy behind Grams, which lets you search all of the Internet's drug markets in one place. How closely does it resemble Google? He's even planning to introduce keyword bidding for ads on the drug sites

“Are you a fed?”

This is what the founder of Grams asked me over encrypted chat earlier this week. A few minutes into our conversation, I had asked him a seemingly innocuous question—what sort of music he likes. But the young entrepreneur is clearly a bit skittish about revealing his identity. I can understand why.

Grams, which launched two weeks ago on the browser Tor, scrapes data from the world’s most-popular black-market drug sites. Working around the clock for nearly a month, the young programmer built an impressive search engine that pulls together thousands of listings from Agora Market, Silkroad 2, Evolution Market, and many other top underground drug sites.

Think of Grams like Google Shopping: a way to shop for products and compare vendors—only it’s for things like meth and MDMA.

“We get about 1,000 searches [per] day,” says the young programmer. “It is moving very fast. Right now, it is my full-time job.” Earlier this week, the site even got its first couple of press mentions.

Tor is software that masks details about its users, making it impossible to track their identity, location and search history, and for that reason it has become popular as a way to access the ”darker” part of the Web. Because Tor essentially re-routes your IP through a number of different countries, there can be a considerable lag time between clicking “search” and receiving results. The user experience on the dark net, frankly, isn’t all that great, and entrepreneurial ventures like Grams are rare. 

At this point the dark net, which has about 3 million daily users, consists of little more than encrypted email and drug-buying sites, but that could change as it becomes more mainstream. Perhaps at some point, the dark net will even get access to some of the venture capital that powers the evolution of the Google web. 

The young male behind Grams, who wants to be called Gramsadmin, won’t tell me where lives or even his exact age, though he confirms that he is indeed a “he.” He says he’s a web programmer by trade, and dropped out of college a couple of years ago to build websites for a living. This is his first foray into a project that’s in a legal gray area, so he’s being extra careful about the details he offers to the public. He hasn’t even told his best friends and family.

“Sometimes when my friends are talking about their work…I just have to say I am not working on anything really interesting right now,” he says.

In October 2013, the FBI shut down the world’s most prolific underworld drug site, Silk Road. Then, they arrested its alleged founder, Ross Ulbricht, at a public library in San Francisco. According to the FBI, Silk Road handled about $1.2 billion in transactions over the three years it existed.

Despite the shutdown, the online drug trade has continued to flourish.  As you might imagine, running an underground drug website is a lucrative, if not risky, field. Ulbricht, for instance, was worth about $30 million in Bitcoin when he was arrested. In the days and weeks following the shutdown, a handful of underground entrepreneurs began creating new drug websites to replace Silk road, including many of the sites Grams scrapes from.

Now, there are over a dozen drug sites, but until Grams came along, drug-seekers were forced to search each individual site to find what they were looking for. ”I got the idea from reading the board and sub-reddit every day and seeing the same questions asked “Where can I find productx?” “Which vendor has the best productx?” “Can Vendorx be trusted and is his product good?” Gramsadmin says. “There was no way to get this kind of information easily without asking on the forums.”

What a typical drugs-for-sale post looks like

He adds, “I thought there needed to be a site where you can search the darknet for all the information people have already posted.”

When the site launched two weeks ago, the Reddit darknet community seemed to approve.

“Well done man!” wrote one commenter.

“Great project!” wrote another.

Gramsadmin says that 75% of the searches are for the most common drugs, including LSD, cannabis and steroids. Though the site only scrapes for drug information, the search queries themselves reveal the sort of material people are searching for on the dark net in general. Around 20% of the searches are people looking for a weapon, and around 5% come from people looking for porn and child porn, he says. He said he doesn’t plan to scrape data for these other topics.

Gramsadmin currently earns a small amount of money from display advertising (he won’t say exactly how much), but the founder plans to implement keyword bidding, just like Google, in the next few weeks. Tor-based advertising exists, but it’s a relatively minor feature of the dark net.

As for the Google-esque design of the site, Gramsadmin has a perfectly rational response. “It is a familiar layout for users,” he says. “This way I don’t have to explain anything.”

Gramsadmin comes across as polite and friendly, and extremely professional. He’s also a classic startup guy: He admires Steve Jobs “for his drive,” Bill Gates “for his charity,” Richard Branson “for his gift to make money at anything he does,” and Elon Musk for his “creativity and ability to help the world with everything he does.”

He also claims to only use drugs himself once or twice a year—and only the soft stuff when he does.

“I think they should be legal,” he says. “I don’t think innocent people not harming others should end up in prison.”