Jollier
Professional
- Messages
- 1,476
- Reaction score
- 1,471
- Points
- 113
Why Telegram has become a paradise for illegal stuff? Scam teams, stashers, sportsmen, renderers, operators, punchers, carders and others. How did Pavel Durov make Telegram, which ended up in the spotlight of the entire darknet? Why was the messenger the perfect infrastructure for Hydra and what is happening to it today. Is Telegram anonymous?
What do you know about the changes inside Telegram in recent years? Most likely, you will remember the addition of increasingly schizo sticker packs from individual authors, the introduction of a premium subscription, stars of gratitude to authors of publications and other nonsense that is being pushed to the surface. But all this is just the tip of the iceberg. Those who are connected with the shadow sphere will not let you lie. Telegram has long taken a course on cleaning up criminal elements within the platform, and this began long before Durov's arrest in Paris. Telegram was once a real stronghold of anonymity for lovers of everything prohibited.
Drug shops, scam teams, sellers of illegal videos and other dealers felt safe, but times have changed. Now, not only obvious crime is under attack, but also channels that publish neutral content. Hacking, money-making schemes, shadow markets. Some admins are even afraid to use the word "darknet" in their posts, so that their channel does not get demolished.
Today, we will figure out how Telegram came to such a metamorphosis. I am glad to see you in my cozy basement. Sorry, in the shelter. We pass, we look, but we do not touch anything.
To understand why Telegram was initially a paradise for illegal business, I want to approach from afar. Many authors of articles that have criticized the messenger and even the authorities of different countries of the world miss one important point that concerns Pavel Durov. He is a libertarian. This is a political ideology that implies that the state should minimally interfere in the lives of citizens, and, ideally, its role should be reduced to a minimum. That is, the existence of a free market, freedom of development of society, the rule of law and the deepest individualism are necessary.
Within the framework of libertarianism, freedom is something like a god in religion. Not that the secret services should not look into correspondence. Within the framework of this ideology, even thinking about such a thing is shameful, because each person is an individual with their own rights. This allows us to understand a little more precisely why Telegram has exactly this image, why the messenger positions itself as private, and why for quite a long time there was no strict moderation within it.
All this fits perfectly into the concept of libertarianism. A free market and an equally free society imply that criminal movements, as natural vices of people, should also exist. Thus, Pavel Durov did not create a copy of WhatsApp, but a platform with a fundamentally different approach to building communications between people. This bore fruit. In particularly censored regions, like Iran, the messenger gained incredible popularity, local influencers were able to launch private news blogs and begin to publish honest materials about those things that are simply not accepted to talk about on the Internet or on TV.
Anonymity allowed many resources to exist, although this approach is susceptible to criticism, after all, any media can be bought and used for propaganda purposes. By the way, Telegram still does not moderate it. But let's go back to the past. 2017, the dawn of the messenger's popularity. At that time, a number of dealers were obsessed with marketplaces and little attention was paid to sales of illegal substances in Telegram, scam shops and individual sellers, often at the regional level, were trading.
In those years, the first channels dedicated to substances, their use and related issues began to appear. Demolitions of frankly illegal resources that advertised drug stores were simply absent. For example, I still remember that the then monopolist in the field of automatic sales, Hydra, had its own Telegram channel, which had tens of thousands of subscribers, articles about use, and at the same time it lasted more than six months. Well, and for the smart guys who are already climbing into the comments to write that this is an advertisement for a drug marketplace, I remind you that Hydra has long been closed.
So, in fact, there was no moderation, even if a giant drug market allowed itself to launch a personal resource, where it posted information about drugs, methods of use and all this along with its advertising. Moreover, the demolition of the Hydra channel was one of the first in principle. Until that moment, local administrators of not entirely legal resources had not encountered such mechanics from Telegram in real life. It was a surprise, all other resources lived happily ever after, Shops traded, channels advertised their bots, as well as the work of a courier from various recruiters and the shops themselves.
In those years, the so-called pav-channel market was just beginning to form. Each Telegram segment has its own chat exchanges, in which admins of resources with the same topic hang out, in order to buy and sell advertising from each other more easily. Something like this exists in every segment, but it appeared quite early in the drug sphere, because there were obvious reasons for that.
There are not so many resources, and the admins from legal resources did not really want to sell publications to those who directly advertise drug shops. And therefore, a small group of admins, no more than a hundred people, including content makers and designers, united quite quickly. The first signs of demolitions came in 2019. At that point, Hydra had grown to such a scale that news publications even began to come out about its existence, such as from the large publication Lenta, according to Hydra itself later.
It was paid for. The shadow platform gained so much strength that none of its competitors or analogues on the entire planet could. The project even launched its own ICO with a fundraiser to open the Eternos project, a marketplace that will use completely new technologies, including extensive use of artificial intelligence, and will operate around the world. Dividends were offered to those who invested. In addition to Hydra, Zhirok and local stores were gaining money, surpassing each other's records one after another.
100 thousand transactions, 200, 300, 400. Many shops have passed these milestones. The huge consumer traffic fit into the pocket of one Hydra by 90%. These were the most prosperous times for sellers of illegal substances, which is why a number of them began to climb into Telegram in order to scale up. Yes, the platform itself, like all current ones, offered promotion methods, but the main and almost the only one was an auction for a couple of dozen places. When you have thousands of stores under your wing, everyone clearly cannot fit there, so the choice fell on the messenger.
It seems to be protected, popular, and besides, there is also a community about substances with a target audience there. In addition, over several years, a small exchange has grown to a decent size and had a total audience of more than 100 thousand people. This led to quite noticeable PR campaigns of drug stores. Lines under posts mentioning dealers, paid stories with native advertising of individual shops, recruitment for delivery positions and much more were bought. The income of Telegram channel admins began to be completely transferred to drug money, and on some channels, shop ads began to appear almost daily, providing fabulous income for administrators.
Well, how fabulous. It's just that a channel with 15 thousand subscribers could afford to sell ads to shops for 20-30 thousand rubles per post. If he does this on half the days of the month, and this is quite possible, he will raise 300 thousand in the worst case. In no other area, without deceiving anyone, can you earn so much on meager Telegram channels.
True, not everything went smoothly. It was in 2019 that the first noticeable demolitions began. They were quite chaotic and strange, often not related to the volume of shadow advertising that was released, which is why there was no sensitive moderation or adequate logic here. But these were the first warning signs. 2020, lockdown, an explosion in the popularity of Hydra and Telegram. Against the backdrop of the pandemic, a lot of people rushed not to the TV to watch the news, but to the messenger. A concept such as doomscrolling appeared, a painful immersion in the news feed.
Sitting in tension and despair, people read publications that were scary for them and were concerned about what was happening in the world. Telegram suddenly became the most convenient and at the same time universal platform for consuming content and especially news. People then basically discovered such a phenomenon as doomscrolling. Before 2020, I personally had never encountered such slang. But what I did encounter were bad exchangers. Anyone can stumble upon a bad exchanger and lose their money, there is such a risk, so you need to choose wisely.
There are many exchangers, but I use audio6.Best, a consistently good rate in all directions, everything is always in stock, they exchange crypto for fiat and vice versa, in addition to transferring to a card, you can exchange it for cash, which is issued in different parts of the world, for me as a person who likes to travel, this is very convenient, and let's also imagine a situation where you have dirty crypto, of course, you did nothing bad, but suddenly someone else transferred it to you.
What scoundrels. In order not to have any problems, it would not hurt to clean it. And here you can do it in a way that no one will look at your AML. No one will block funds, as many other exchangers do. In general, the link is in the description, go for it. So, let me remind you, 2020, lockdown. Meanwhile, sales have exploded on the Darknet. Everyone predicted that restrictions on free movement around cities would kill the Darknet.
Carriers would stop carrying weight because of checkpoints at the entrances to major cities, couriers would not be able to throw due to quarantine and a ban on leaving home without a compelling need, and users would not film, because the first patrol, and they would immediately be under inspection. But how wrong was everyone then? After the start of the pandemic, the craving for substances increased many times over. If earlier a number of consumers bought substances for themselves for the weekend, then suddenly they had a whole bunch of days off. Because of this, the demand for substances simply exploded, couriers were swamped with work, but this was only the beginning. The berries and flowers were ahead.
Many people went on unpaid leave. A number of companies, like the same coffee shops and restaurants, began to close, and many people who had mortgages, car loans or other types of debt suddenly found themselves without money. Some of them, among the users, could also have acquired a drug addiction during the quarantine. And since there was no hint of any credit holidays and a number of people literally became impoverished due to lack of work, a second boom occurred in the Darknet. Employees flowed into the sphere like a horn of plenty.
Some to pay off debts, and some to quench their thirst for substances. During the pandemic, the Darknet, contrary to all expectations, has grown significantly. This became a powerful impetus for the development of drug trafficking in Russia, and the influx of money into the drug sphere is always associated with the desire of dealers to reinvest these receipts. Someone makes a drug lab for themselves and stops buying goods from manufacturers, starting to synthesize them. Someone increases salaries in order to attract even more people, improves the service and, of course, buys advertising.
And where do sellers get it? Almost only in Telegram, so the shadow segment of the messenger grew along with Hydra. Marketing became more and more aggressive and less and less noticeable. In 2020, every experienced administrator lost a channel at least once. Because of this, by the way, among the then and current administrators of shadow channels, the practice of helping each other with advertising after the resource was demolished became widespread. If a public was demolished, colleagues would find a date for free and post an advertising post to re-gather an active audience in a couple of weeks.
But then this was just starting to appear. Significant changes occurred in 2022. For many, this is due to the beginning of the war, and there is another point here. After the start of hostilities, Doomscrolling returned again. In Russia, Telegram has become so popular that it is easy to see with the naked eye how the channels' reach has grown before and after February 24. Naturally, when the audience of the legal segment of Telegram channels increases, the illegal one also grows, admins sometimes find those who are ready to advertise their illegal resource for a higher price and attract a fresh audience.
But this is not as important as the death of Hydra at the hands of the Germans. After the collapse of Monopolist, the real Wild West began. Many administrators began to scam and panic that their business was gone and the Darknet died along with the platform, some of the dealers left the sphere altogether, but only the most imperceptive participants of the shadow sphere did so, because what happened next surprised literally everyone.
Of course, we are talking about the beginning of a full-scale war for the Darknet throne, who will become the new monopolist. In the first six months, a whole bunch of different platforms appeared, some were made on the knees and on the principle of just releasing them as quickly as possible, some had been working since time immemorial and had a crooked, lopsided site, and someone had a shop before, and he decided to start playing big, making an entire marketplace with the money he had.
The effect worked, which the Americans felt on themselves at the time of the liquidation of the Medellin cartel led by Pablo Escobar.
Where there used to be one player, a whole multitude appeared. Pure chaos. But if cartels love weapons and corruption in a competitive war, then in the Darknet everything is very different. No one knows anyone personally, so there is no one to shoot. What to do? In general, of course, deanon is possible, but with the leaders of drug marketplaces it is all quite difficult, but if there are ill-wishers or you want to know how easy it is to break through you, then test the bot for breaking through.
Considering that with the eye of God, now the problems are very relevant, especially since the base there is impressive. The link will be in the description. So, it is logical that there are several options, either hacker attacks, or information attacks, plus fair competition and product development. Hacking did not bring much success, Ex-administrators and techies, the deceased hydra, demolished one marketplace that dared to declare that it was the heir to the three-headed site. For this lie, the site was put down by Dudos Attack and lasted only a few weeks.
Later, the sites attacked each other, hacked and stole domains, sometimes even hijacked balances, which is why one of the rather large sites closed due to too large debts to its users. Dudos, of course, was also used en masse, especially on days of high sales, like the same New Year, but often such interventions in the work of competitors were needed not for their final destruction, but for obtaining a specific benefit.
If Marketplace A is unavailable, the client will go to B, C or D, there is no point in investing millions in this expensive direction, if in fact the traffic is distributed randomly and it is not a fact that it will go to the initiator of the attack. In this case, this method ceases to be effective, which is why even in 2024 it was not used very abundantly and only in relation to one site. By the way, these dudos are often blamed on the team that previously worked on Hydra, apparently, the huge experience of counteracting competitors, developed back in the days of RAMP, is reflected. Then the three-headed site literally ate the competitor, taking its entire audience.
But hacking has not had any major successes in recent years. After all, modern platforms are not as leaky as they were in the middle of the last decade. With the information part, everything is different. In 2022, Darknet Marketplace bought up as much advertising in Telegram and at such exorbitant prices as they bought up shops combined over the previous few years. They bought both simple posts with advertising and orders for competitors, and the marketplaces themselves created entire PR agencies and their own channel networks, keeping a huge bunch of administrators on salary, just so that they advertised only their site.
For example. If earlier a pin for a store cost 50 thousand per month in a channel for 10 thousand subscribers, then the platforms were given exactly the same thing for 200 thousand or more. After Hydra left, a number of admins not only promoted their channels, but also bought cars and apartments. There are many more channels themselves, even with the same audience and the same people.
If only the platforms would buy and pay more and more money. New admins, new channels were bred, and here the messenger could not stand it anymore. Since 2022, blocking has become a habitual rhythm for administrators of illegal resources. In an attempt to find a new audience, they increasingly began to buy advertising in the legal segment. This led to the fact that new users who condemned substances actively reported resources, and the channels themselves began to be deleted in batches every six months, 10 resources at a time or more.
At the same time, full-fledged cleanings of all kinds of chats began. Scam teams, refunders, carders, punchers, abusers, drug chats and even communities of channel administrators were demolished - absolutely everything that had at least some hint of not very legal operations. Sometimes these were straight white channels where they simply published interesting information, as, in fact, on this YouTube channel. In general, it reached the point of absurdity, and this was not caused by the Messenger abruptly abandoning the principles of freedom.
The issue here is completely different. Even at that time, Telegram did not have very good relations with most of the world's intelligence agencies. Security officials do not really like it when they submit official requests to obtain correspondence materials, and in response they receive an ignored message. Messenger managed to be blocked in Russia, and also remains illegal in many countries to this day. And in order not to attract even more unnecessary attention, the platform's administration made a logical decision - to start moderating content so that Telegram does not become the second Darknet, although in fact it has become.
With just a phone, even without a Tor browser, in one application, with contacts, you could buy a gun, order sports shoes, check a person's place of residence and simultaneously buy a bomber jacket on his number, while simultaneously buying yourself a dose of prohibited substances in a neighboring bot, paying for it all with crypto. It is difficult to find any illegal product that could not be purchased through Telegram. Even now, this is partly true, although the product range has noticeably decreased due to the beginning of moderation of the messenger's content. After the arrest of Pavel Durov in Paris on August 24, 2024, everything got even worse.
Now IWF, the International Internet Watch Foundation, has been connected to moderation. It works in the field of Telegram moderation on an outsourced basis, and the messenger itself has taken up the removal of illegal content much more closely, actively using analysis of correspondence and publications on channels. Of course, without direct human supervision, but with the help of neural networks, after all, anonymity and privacy must be understood.
By the way, the choice of Telegram as a refuge for many people from the shadow sphere is not chosen for security reasons. The main reason why criminal elements sit in the messenger is not its anonymity. For example, often all work chats and groups where business matters are discussed have long been transferred to Jabber or Element on the Matrix protocol. There is real security there, and Telegram is used simply because it has the most clients. Surprise, but no, the messenger is not anonymous at all.
Not at all. What is an anonymous messenger? This is when the database with servers can be replaced with a private one, the product itself has an open source code that will allow anyone with the necessary skills to independently check the absence of trackers and tracking mechanisms, as well as complete transparency. Telegram does not even come close to any of this. In Pavel Durov's product, the open source code is only for the client. While the server part is inaccessible and cannot be checked.
It is impossible to choose any other servers, not from Telegram itself, and such functionality is not provided and is not planned. This means that all correspondence can be decrypted by the administration and, for example, they can be transferred to law enforcement agencies and turn an anonymous and secure product into a thoroughfare for special services. The only reason why people believe in Telegram is because without a court decision and without strong evidence, the administration does not transfer any data about its users.
That is why Pavel Durov is having problems now and that is why he has creditworthiness. The messenger's policy may have changed, but the people at the helm are still trying to adhere to the principles. Although, of course, I should make a reservation, but secure correspondence within the messenger should really be secure, since users store information about the correspondence on their devices, and not on Telegram servers. In this case, neither the employees working on the messenger nor anyone else can have access to such messages.
Of course, having looked into the matter, it is difficult to say that Durov hates the Darknet. Until now, Messenger has clearly shown concern for the freedom of expression of its users. For example, I have subscribed to one channel that has existed for as long as I have been using Messenger, and this resource is still alive. Articles are published on illegal topics, but there is no advertising for Scam Team, drug shops, or other shadowy figures. It has existed for years and has never been taken down, because it does not have a factor of criminal activity in the opinion of the Telegram administration, there is simply no PR for illegal goods and services.
It's just that most channels are run specifically for the purpose of earning black money. Just like chats with drug users exist to recruit people, which is why they are blocked. If a random person decides to register a channel and start telling the truth about the shadow business, sharing the features of the effects of psychoactive substances on the brain and talking about processing, his channel would not really be taken down. Well, at least before. Now it's a matter of luck.
Telegram clearly has its own ideas about the legality of content, which is why it is the shadow advertising that is a red flag, and not the criminal focus of the resource itself. Therefore, Telegram channels on this topic are now a rarity.
Stay away from crime, and I'm leaving, leaving beautifully.
What do you know about the changes inside Telegram in recent years? Most likely, you will remember the addition of increasingly schizo sticker packs from individual authors, the introduction of a premium subscription, stars of gratitude to authors of publications and other nonsense that is being pushed to the surface. But all this is just the tip of the iceberg. Those who are connected with the shadow sphere will not let you lie. Telegram has long taken a course on cleaning up criminal elements within the platform, and this began long before Durov's arrest in Paris. Telegram was once a real stronghold of anonymity for lovers of everything prohibited.
Drug shops, scam teams, sellers of illegal videos and other dealers felt safe, but times have changed. Now, not only obvious crime is under attack, but also channels that publish neutral content. Hacking, money-making schemes, shadow markets. Some admins are even afraid to use the word "darknet" in their posts, so that their channel does not get demolished.
Today, we will figure out how Telegram came to such a metamorphosis. I am glad to see you in my cozy basement. Sorry, in the shelter. We pass, we look, but we do not touch anything.
To understand why Telegram was initially a paradise for illegal business, I want to approach from afar. Many authors of articles that have criticized the messenger and even the authorities of different countries of the world miss one important point that concerns Pavel Durov. He is a libertarian. This is a political ideology that implies that the state should minimally interfere in the lives of citizens, and, ideally, its role should be reduced to a minimum. That is, the existence of a free market, freedom of development of society, the rule of law and the deepest individualism are necessary.
Within the framework of libertarianism, freedom is something like a god in religion. Not that the secret services should not look into correspondence. Within the framework of this ideology, even thinking about such a thing is shameful, because each person is an individual with their own rights. This allows us to understand a little more precisely why Telegram has exactly this image, why the messenger positions itself as private, and why for quite a long time there was no strict moderation within it.
All this fits perfectly into the concept of libertarianism. A free market and an equally free society imply that criminal movements, as natural vices of people, should also exist. Thus, Pavel Durov did not create a copy of WhatsApp, but a platform with a fundamentally different approach to building communications between people. This bore fruit. In particularly censored regions, like Iran, the messenger gained incredible popularity, local influencers were able to launch private news blogs and begin to publish honest materials about those things that are simply not accepted to talk about on the Internet or on TV.
Anonymity allowed many resources to exist, although this approach is susceptible to criticism, after all, any media can be bought and used for propaganda purposes. By the way, Telegram still does not moderate it. But let's go back to the past. 2017, the dawn of the messenger's popularity. At that time, a number of dealers were obsessed with marketplaces and little attention was paid to sales of illegal substances in Telegram, scam shops and individual sellers, often at the regional level, were trading.
In those years, the first channels dedicated to substances, their use and related issues began to appear. Demolitions of frankly illegal resources that advertised drug stores were simply absent. For example, I still remember that the then monopolist in the field of automatic sales, Hydra, had its own Telegram channel, which had tens of thousands of subscribers, articles about use, and at the same time it lasted more than six months. Well, and for the smart guys who are already climbing into the comments to write that this is an advertisement for a drug marketplace, I remind you that Hydra has long been closed.
So, in fact, there was no moderation, even if a giant drug market allowed itself to launch a personal resource, where it posted information about drugs, methods of use and all this along with its advertising. Moreover, the demolition of the Hydra channel was one of the first in principle. Until that moment, local administrators of not entirely legal resources had not encountered such mechanics from Telegram in real life. It was a surprise, all other resources lived happily ever after, Shops traded, channels advertised their bots, as well as the work of a courier from various recruiters and the shops themselves.
In those years, the so-called pav-channel market was just beginning to form. Each Telegram segment has its own chat exchanges, in which admins of resources with the same topic hang out, in order to buy and sell advertising from each other more easily. Something like this exists in every segment, but it appeared quite early in the drug sphere, because there were obvious reasons for that.
There are not so many resources, and the admins from legal resources did not really want to sell publications to those who directly advertise drug shops. And therefore, a small group of admins, no more than a hundred people, including content makers and designers, united quite quickly. The first signs of demolitions came in 2019. At that point, Hydra had grown to such a scale that news publications even began to come out about its existence, such as from the large publication Lenta, according to Hydra itself later.
It was paid for. The shadow platform gained so much strength that none of its competitors or analogues on the entire planet could. The project even launched its own ICO with a fundraiser to open the Eternos project, a marketplace that will use completely new technologies, including extensive use of artificial intelligence, and will operate around the world. Dividends were offered to those who invested. In addition to Hydra, Zhirok and local stores were gaining money, surpassing each other's records one after another.
100 thousand transactions, 200, 300, 400. Many shops have passed these milestones. The huge consumer traffic fit into the pocket of one Hydra by 90%. These were the most prosperous times for sellers of illegal substances, which is why a number of them began to climb into Telegram in order to scale up. Yes, the platform itself, like all current ones, offered promotion methods, but the main and almost the only one was an auction for a couple of dozen places. When you have thousands of stores under your wing, everyone clearly cannot fit there, so the choice fell on the messenger.
It seems to be protected, popular, and besides, there is also a community about substances with a target audience there. In addition, over several years, a small exchange has grown to a decent size and had a total audience of more than 100 thousand people. This led to quite noticeable PR campaigns of drug stores. Lines under posts mentioning dealers, paid stories with native advertising of individual shops, recruitment for delivery positions and much more were bought. The income of Telegram channel admins began to be completely transferred to drug money, and on some channels, shop ads began to appear almost daily, providing fabulous income for administrators.
Well, how fabulous. It's just that a channel with 15 thousand subscribers could afford to sell ads to shops for 20-30 thousand rubles per post. If he does this on half the days of the month, and this is quite possible, he will raise 300 thousand in the worst case. In no other area, without deceiving anyone, can you earn so much on meager Telegram channels.
True, not everything went smoothly. It was in 2019 that the first noticeable demolitions began. They were quite chaotic and strange, often not related to the volume of shadow advertising that was released, which is why there was no sensitive moderation or adequate logic here. But these were the first warning signs. 2020, lockdown, an explosion in the popularity of Hydra and Telegram. Against the backdrop of the pandemic, a lot of people rushed not to the TV to watch the news, but to the messenger. A concept such as doomscrolling appeared, a painful immersion in the news feed.
Sitting in tension and despair, people read publications that were scary for them and were concerned about what was happening in the world. Telegram suddenly became the most convenient and at the same time universal platform for consuming content and especially news. People then basically discovered such a phenomenon as doomscrolling. Before 2020, I personally had never encountered such slang. But what I did encounter were bad exchangers. Anyone can stumble upon a bad exchanger and lose their money, there is such a risk, so you need to choose wisely.
There are many exchangers, but I use audio6.Best, a consistently good rate in all directions, everything is always in stock, they exchange crypto for fiat and vice versa, in addition to transferring to a card, you can exchange it for cash, which is issued in different parts of the world, for me as a person who likes to travel, this is very convenient, and let's also imagine a situation where you have dirty crypto, of course, you did nothing bad, but suddenly someone else transferred it to you.
What scoundrels. In order not to have any problems, it would not hurt to clean it. And here you can do it in a way that no one will look at your AML. No one will block funds, as many other exchangers do. In general, the link is in the description, go for it. So, let me remind you, 2020, lockdown. Meanwhile, sales have exploded on the Darknet. Everyone predicted that restrictions on free movement around cities would kill the Darknet.
Carriers would stop carrying weight because of checkpoints at the entrances to major cities, couriers would not be able to throw due to quarantine and a ban on leaving home without a compelling need, and users would not film, because the first patrol, and they would immediately be under inspection. But how wrong was everyone then? After the start of the pandemic, the craving for substances increased many times over. If earlier a number of consumers bought substances for themselves for the weekend, then suddenly they had a whole bunch of days off. Because of this, the demand for substances simply exploded, couriers were swamped with work, but this was only the beginning. The berries and flowers were ahead.
Many people went on unpaid leave. A number of companies, like the same coffee shops and restaurants, began to close, and many people who had mortgages, car loans or other types of debt suddenly found themselves without money. Some of them, among the users, could also have acquired a drug addiction during the quarantine. And since there was no hint of any credit holidays and a number of people literally became impoverished due to lack of work, a second boom occurred in the Darknet. Employees flowed into the sphere like a horn of plenty.
Some to pay off debts, and some to quench their thirst for substances. During the pandemic, the Darknet, contrary to all expectations, has grown significantly. This became a powerful impetus for the development of drug trafficking in Russia, and the influx of money into the drug sphere is always associated with the desire of dealers to reinvest these receipts. Someone makes a drug lab for themselves and stops buying goods from manufacturers, starting to synthesize them. Someone increases salaries in order to attract even more people, improves the service and, of course, buys advertising.
And where do sellers get it? Almost only in Telegram, so the shadow segment of the messenger grew along with Hydra. Marketing became more and more aggressive and less and less noticeable. In 2020, every experienced administrator lost a channel at least once. Because of this, by the way, among the then and current administrators of shadow channels, the practice of helping each other with advertising after the resource was demolished became widespread. If a public was demolished, colleagues would find a date for free and post an advertising post to re-gather an active audience in a couple of weeks.
But then this was just starting to appear. Significant changes occurred in 2022. For many, this is due to the beginning of the war, and there is another point here. After the start of hostilities, Doomscrolling returned again. In Russia, Telegram has become so popular that it is easy to see with the naked eye how the channels' reach has grown before and after February 24. Naturally, when the audience of the legal segment of Telegram channels increases, the illegal one also grows, admins sometimes find those who are ready to advertise their illegal resource for a higher price and attract a fresh audience.
But this is not as important as the death of Hydra at the hands of the Germans. After the collapse of Monopolist, the real Wild West began. Many administrators began to scam and panic that their business was gone and the Darknet died along with the platform, some of the dealers left the sphere altogether, but only the most imperceptive participants of the shadow sphere did so, because what happened next surprised literally everyone.
Of course, we are talking about the beginning of a full-scale war for the Darknet throne, who will become the new monopolist. In the first six months, a whole bunch of different platforms appeared, some were made on the knees and on the principle of just releasing them as quickly as possible, some had been working since time immemorial and had a crooked, lopsided site, and someone had a shop before, and he decided to start playing big, making an entire marketplace with the money he had.
The effect worked, which the Americans felt on themselves at the time of the liquidation of the Medellin cartel led by Pablo Escobar.
Where there used to be one player, a whole multitude appeared. Pure chaos. But if cartels love weapons and corruption in a competitive war, then in the Darknet everything is very different. No one knows anyone personally, so there is no one to shoot. What to do? In general, of course, deanon is possible, but with the leaders of drug marketplaces it is all quite difficult, but if there are ill-wishers or you want to know how easy it is to break through you, then test the bot for breaking through.
Considering that with the eye of God, now the problems are very relevant, especially since the base there is impressive. The link will be in the description. So, it is logical that there are several options, either hacker attacks, or information attacks, plus fair competition and product development. Hacking did not bring much success, Ex-administrators and techies, the deceased hydra, demolished one marketplace that dared to declare that it was the heir to the three-headed site. For this lie, the site was put down by Dudos Attack and lasted only a few weeks.
Later, the sites attacked each other, hacked and stole domains, sometimes even hijacked balances, which is why one of the rather large sites closed due to too large debts to its users. Dudos, of course, was also used en masse, especially on days of high sales, like the same New Year, but often such interventions in the work of competitors were needed not for their final destruction, but for obtaining a specific benefit.
If Marketplace A is unavailable, the client will go to B, C or D, there is no point in investing millions in this expensive direction, if in fact the traffic is distributed randomly and it is not a fact that it will go to the initiator of the attack. In this case, this method ceases to be effective, which is why even in 2024 it was not used very abundantly and only in relation to one site. By the way, these dudos are often blamed on the team that previously worked on Hydra, apparently, the huge experience of counteracting competitors, developed back in the days of RAMP, is reflected. Then the three-headed site literally ate the competitor, taking its entire audience.
But hacking has not had any major successes in recent years. After all, modern platforms are not as leaky as they were in the middle of the last decade. With the information part, everything is different. In 2022, Darknet Marketplace bought up as much advertising in Telegram and at such exorbitant prices as they bought up shops combined over the previous few years. They bought both simple posts with advertising and orders for competitors, and the marketplaces themselves created entire PR agencies and their own channel networks, keeping a huge bunch of administrators on salary, just so that they advertised only their site.
For example. If earlier a pin for a store cost 50 thousand per month in a channel for 10 thousand subscribers, then the platforms were given exactly the same thing for 200 thousand or more. After Hydra left, a number of admins not only promoted their channels, but also bought cars and apartments. There are many more channels themselves, even with the same audience and the same people.
If only the platforms would buy and pay more and more money. New admins, new channels were bred, and here the messenger could not stand it anymore. Since 2022, blocking has become a habitual rhythm for administrators of illegal resources. In an attempt to find a new audience, they increasingly began to buy advertising in the legal segment. This led to the fact that new users who condemned substances actively reported resources, and the channels themselves began to be deleted in batches every six months, 10 resources at a time or more.
At the same time, full-fledged cleanings of all kinds of chats began. Scam teams, refunders, carders, punchers, abusers, drug chats and even communities of channel administrators were demolished - absolutely everything that had at least some hint of not very legal operations. Sometimes these were straight white channels where they simply published interesting information, as, in fact, on this YouTube channel. In general, it reached the point of absurdity, and this was not caused by the Messenger abruptly abandoning the principles of freedom.
The issue here is completely different. Even at that time, Telegram did not have very good relations with most of the world's intelligence agencies. Security officials do not really like it when they submit official requests to obtain correspondence materials, and in response they receive an ignored message. Messenger managed to be blocked in Russia, and also remains illegal in many countries to this day. And in order not to attract even more unnecessary attention, the platform's administration made a logical decision - to start moderating content so that Telegram does not become the second Darknet, although in fact it has become.
With just a phone, even without a Tor browser, in one application, with contacts, you could buy a gun, order sports shoes, check a person's place of residence and simultaneously buy a bomber jacket on his number, while simultaneously buying yourself a dose of prohibited substances in a neighboring bot, paying for it all with crypto. It is difficult to find any illegal product that could not be purchased through Telegram. Even now, this is partly true, although the product range has noticeably decreased due to the beginning of moderation of the messenger's content. After the arrest of Pavel Durov in Paris on August 24, 2024, everything got even worse.
Now IWF, the International Internet Watch Foundation, has been connected to moderation. It works in the field of Telegram moderation on an outsourced basis, and the messenger itself has taken up the removal of illegal content much more closely, actively using analysis of correspondence and publications on channels. Of course, without direct human supervision, but with the help of neural networks, after all, anonymity and privacy must be understood.
By the way, the choice of Telegram as a refuge for many people from the shadow sphere is not chosen for security reasons. The main reason why criminal elements sit in the messenger is not its anonymity. For example, often all work chats and groups where business matters are discussed have long been transferred to Jabber or Element on the Matrix protocol. There is real security there, and Telegram is used simply because it has the most clients. Surprise, but no, the messenger is not anonymous at all.
Not at all. What is an anonymous messenger? This is when the database with servers can be replaced with a private one, the product itself has an open source code that will allow anyone with the necessary skills to independently check the absence of trackers and tracking mechanisms, as well as complete transparency. Telegram does not even come close to any of this. In Pavel Durov's product, the open source code is only for the client. While the server part is inaccessible and cannot be checked.
It is impossible to choose any other servers, not from Telegram itself, and such functionality is not provided and is not planned. This means that all correspondence can be decrypted by the administration and, for example, they can be transferred to law enforcement agencies and turn an anonymous and secure product into a thoroughfare for special services. The only reason why people believe in Telegram is because without a court decision and without strong evidence, the administration does not transfer any data about its users.
That is why Pavel Durov is having problems now and that is why he has creditworthiness. The messenger's policy may have changed, but the people at the helm are still trying to adhere to the principles. Although, of course, I should make a reservation, but secure correspondence within the messenger should really be secure, since users store information about the correspondence on their devices, and not on Telegram servers. In this case, neither the employees working on the messenger nor anyone else can have access to such messages.
Of course, having looked into the matter, it is difficult to say that Durov hates the Darknet. Until now, Messenger has clearly shown concern for the freedom of expression of its users. For example, I have subscribed to one channel that has existed for as long as I have been using Messenger, and this resource is still alive. Articles are published on illegal topics, but there is no advertising for Scam Team, drug shops, or other shadowy figures. It has existed for years and has never been taken down, because it does not have a factor of criminal activity in the opinion of the Telegram administration, there is simply no PR for illegal goods and services.
It's just that most channels are run specifically for the purpose of earning black money. Just like chats with drug users exist to recruit people, which is why they are blocked. If a random person decides to register a channel and start telling the truth about the shadow business, sharing the features of the effects of psychoactive substances on the brain and talking about processing, his channel would not really be taken down. Well, at least before. Now it's a matter of luck.
Telegram clearly has its own ideas about the legality of content, which is why it is the shadow advertising that is a red flag, and not the criminal focus of the resource itself. Therefore, Telegram channels on this topic are now a rarity.
Stay away from crime, and I'm leaving, leaving beautifully.
