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A comment on 179 Arrested in Global Dark Web Takedown. Parent comment

Re:179 Arrested in Global Dark Web Takedown by dx034 on Friday September 25, 2020 @04:16AM (#24587733)
The question is how many dealers there really are. If you look at the volumes of some of the arrested dealers, it seems like few people dominate these platforms. Arresting them is enough to disrupt the market for a bit. Sure, new ones will come but in the end, it could very well be that most sellers on these platforms will get arrested.

People are stupid and many won't be deterred by this. But I'm not sure if it's profitable in the long run to be a seller on these platforms.

For the buyer, on the other hand, it's much better. They don't face the risks they do when buying on the street and police doesn't really care unless they buy enough to be distributors themselves.

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Re:179 Arrested in Global Dark Web Takedown by pas on Friday September 25, 2020 @10:57AM (#24590482)
It seems the supply of people willing to risk a long-term incarceration for short-term gains is basically endless. And the ratio of those who then get greedy, and/or don't want to silently exit is also seems to be high.

That said, there are probably many-many thousands of people who are ex-dealers. And we'll probably never know about the ex-online-dealers, who had sufficiently good OpSec. (So maybe in 10 years we'll hear about some people who heard about those who did it for a few years and then silently quit.)

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