Pedant Alert!
That would be Starlord's Strontium Dog
A 30-year old man from Aberdovey has been sentenced to two years in prison, thanks to his dark web drug dealing. Cei William Owens, 30, from Ceunant, Aberdovey, was nabbed by the coppers last year as part of an international investigation which targeted the bigger players in the dark net drug-dealing world. Owens, who used …
I was also curious about the police reference to "organised crime". There doesn't seem to be any evidence that this chap was part of some sort of group
Using terms like "the dark web" and "organised crime" do make it sound a lot more interesting than it is....... and perhaps make us all feel how well the police and government are doing to protect us all from such terrors.
Strontium Dogs was an excellent series though, that and ABC Warriors are crying out for TV series. Luke Kirby got toned down and became Harry Potter (though apparently that was convergent evolution)
I wonder if there's a Strontium Dogs collection on the Kindle like there is for lots of Dredd.
Oh and Nikolai Dante, I loved that too. I should really resub to 2000AD
I know it's a Farcebook link, but scroll down the page for the trailer.
It was produced by the team behind "Judge Minty" and it's going to premiere at the 40 Years of Thrill-Power Festival on Feb 11th.
P.S.
Big chunks of the Cursed Earth scenes in "Judge Minty" were shot in Llanberis.
There's several problems with the dark web and the dealing of dodgey merchandise:
1. Physical delivery leaves traces all over the place.
2. BitCoin can be reasonably anonymous but your customers aren't necessarily the brightest people out there.
3. The numb-nut customer caught out with one parcel is the weak link for a dealer who has made 444 transactions.
4. and more besides
As an example for (1) - inadvertent police discovery of a parcel or a client with a delivery will likely yield a postmark. For sparsely populated areas of the country this can likely be narrowed down quite quickly to a post office. Given a username and a sales platform - the collared client will be singing for their freedom - it most likely didn't take long to narrow down a search area and patterns of behaviour (POs used on certain days/times of day etc).
Dealing on the dark web for goods that don't require physical delivery such as CC numbers I would guess is a lot harder to nail down.
There is an advantage of it being used for dealing drugs - as dealers get caught flaws are likely discovered in the operation of TOR et al. This leads to solutions and workflows with better security for the end user. Although some may not like that these advances benefit criminals they also help protect dissidents and whistle-blowers. I'd rather there was a large target to go after that gave transparency to such flaws rather than people just disappearing and having them relatively unknown.