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Now, goods are hidden in publicly accessible places like parks and the location is given to the customer on purchase. The customer then goes to the location and picks up the goods. This means that delivery becomes asynchronous for the merchant, he can hide a lot of product in different locations for future, not yet known, purchases. For the client the time to delivery is significantly shorter than waiting for a letter or parcel shipped by traditional means - he has the product in his hands in a matter of hours instead of days. Furthermore this method does not require for the customer to give any personally identifiable information to the merchant, which in turn doesn’t have to safeguard it anymore. Less data means less risk for everyone.
The use of dead drops also significantly reduces the risk of the merchant to be discovered by tracking within the postal system. He does not have to visit any easily to surveil post office or letter box, instead the whole public space becomes his hiding territory.
...
To prevent theft by the distribution layer, the sales layer randomly tests dead drops by tasking different members of the distribution layer with picking up product from a dead drop and hiding it somewhere else, after verification of the contents. Usually each unit of product is tagged with a piece of paper containing a unique secret word which is used to prove to the sales layer that a dead drop was found.
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It's worth reading the entire article for more detail, the business model is quite clever.
Your customers are limited to your immediate geographic area and those who are willing to search for their purchases. The use of cryptocurrency to make purchases is a pretty big barrier for most people and reducing your customer base even further seems like it would make the whole operation uneconomical.
Paradoxically, the purchases should be inconspicuous yet easy to find. The mention of using Bluetooth and WiFi to help guide your customers would help, but at some point you have people out in public (presumably they’re in public because private locations provide even more obstacles) looking for hidden objects. That in itself is pretty conspicuous, even with the greater public knowledge of things like geocaching and Pokémon go (your customers also risk being engaged by those people). Additionally, placing and maintaining your drop locations is conspicuous. All it takes is one person seeing you leaving an object for the bomb squad to get called in.
The idea that a seller could place multiple orders ahead of time and then activate them as required seems odd as well. Your customers are going to have to be okay with buying drugs that could be degraded from being exposed to environmental conditions if the drops are outside (placing them inside of buildings exposes both you and your customers to more scrutiny). Likewise, leaving them for extended periods of time makes it more likely for them to be discovered. You’re also limited by what you’ve previously placed. If a customer wants multiple items, they’ll have to go to multiple drop locations.
There’s also the time and expense of setting up all these drop locations. You don’t want them concentrated because that makes it more likely that your customers will be noticed, but spreading them out will reduce your profit.
Shipping through the mail obviously poses it’s own problems, but it also has a lot of advantages. Mail generally can’t be opened without a warrant, sending and receiving mail is pretty inconspicuous and it gives the buyer more plausible deniability.
The article reads more of a “maybe this is how it could be done” than a “this is how it’s actually being done”.
- How is collection of the product verified. In other words, a customer can say they went to the drop location and nothing was there. The seller has no way of knowing if the customer was lying or if the product was "intercepted" by chance or federal officials
- How can people making the drop be confident that authorities making controlled buys won't be able to trace them via CCTV (if there is a camera recording in that area, their identity can be determined) I suspect the normalization of face masks has helped make this somewhat easier to evade, but in normal times, the government could go to 100 drop zones used by the same seller, compile a list of all the people who have been seen near those zones in the last 6 months with facial recognition, then dig into people who have been seen in more than one of those zones. I assume these are obscure enough locations that random people won't find the drops, so a person appearing in more than one is enough to flag them as likely to be involved. But in the event these are just really good hiding places in more public locations, someone being near 3 or more of these locations is still enough to suggest involvement.
- Most of the risk still seems to be the buyer's burden; if a government official impersonates the seller, they can just wait for the person to show up to collect their package, and they'd be caught "red-handed" so to speak. I suppose the person can claim ignorance, but I don't know how good of a defense this would be.
- Sellers would be taking massive risks with bulk orders being found by the wrong party (I assume bulk orders are most of their profits). Additionally, they wouldn't really have the ability to tailor the amount to the customer for complicated orders
1) The article mentions the drop locations need to be places where another person stumbling upon them will be super unlikely, and which also haven't been used before (not regular, recurring locations as I assumed).
3) There is still likely a fair bit of risk to the buyer, but the writer seems to believe they can plead innocence
4) Addressed in the same as 1, and with drop locations being new every time, making more involved drops may not be as much of an issue
(2) still begs the question, people making lots of drops seem to have a lot of risk; if many controlled buys are taking place, officials can crossreference the lists of people who have been near that location. Once they identify people who make the drops they can then watch the people who are seen in many of the locations, subpoena location information from Google, etc. until they catch them in the act of making a drop or gather enough evidence to indite them. These people could then face very serious charges of conspiracy. It's not unlikely that these people could then be turned informant. Get enough surveillance on, or cooperation of the people making the drops and you can then use the same techniques to suss out the sales layer. Rinse and repeat.
I suppose this might differ worldwide, but I’m guessing most countries have post boxes?
Wapo did an article on it some time ago: https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2018/10/16/postal-se...
In Germany, apartments have mailboxes accessible without entering the building. Mailboxes have last names on them, we don't send mail to apartment numbers.
If you need a secure dropbox you go to a random building with some vacancies, look for an unused mailbox, change the lock (many have them on the outside as well) and put a random name on it.
However, buying or selling weapons is no joke here.
You can buy an amount of weed here (for personal) use that would absolutely get you convicted with "intent to supply" in the UK.
My weed smoking friends were worried they wouldn't be able to pick up when they came to visit. It was not a problem.
When USPS does randomly seize a package (such as a fake ID caught at customs) the end result is nothing happens to the receiver other than the package not arriving.
I suspect the cost for local enforcement or for the post office of preventing weed being sent via mail is just too high to be considered.