DeepDotWeb

» see deepdotweb.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the eulogy ~

deepdotweb made its money the same way a discount coupon blog makes its money. you clicked a link on its page, you signed up somewhere else, and the somewhere else paid a percentage of whatever you spent. the only unusual part of that arrangement was where the links went.

it opened in october 2013, weeks after the silk road seizure, and for the next five and a half years it was the front door to the whole category. this was not a hidden service. it lived at a regular address and turned up in ordinary search results, so you could read it at work. what it published was uptime tables and market reviews, plus guides for people who had never used pgp before.

i was not one of those people. what pulls me toward this grave is not the contraband, it is that the site was structurally a tech blog with an affiliate program, run by two men who appear to have thought of themselves as publishers. the united states government looked at exactly the same arrangement and saw a laundering operation.

tal prihar was an israeli citizen living in brazil. michael phan was an israeli citizen living in israel. neither one ever shipped a package or ran a market. they ran a website about markets and collected commission, and the total of that commission came to 8,155 bitcoin.

~ the dossier ~

~ the referral link ~

markets competed for buyers, and the way to win a buyer was to be listed first on the site everybody used to find markets. so they paid. every deepdotweb link carried a code, and when the person behind that code spent money, a share of it came back in bitcoin. one court exhibit put the scale of it plainly: at one point close to a quarter of all orders on alphabay were arriving through a deepdotweb referral.

that number is the whole case. it turns a directory into a distribution channel with a revenue interest in volume, which is the argument prosecutors built. the defense that never really got made in public is that this is also a description of most of the advertising internet, and the difference is the legality of the product rather than the mechanism.

~ how it ended ~

a federal grand jury in pittsburgh returned a one-count indictment on 24 april 2019 for conspiracy to commit money laundering. prihar was picked up in paris on 6 may and phan was detained in israel the same day. the domain went dark on 7 may under a seizure banner carrying the crests of the fbi and europol along with half a dozen national police forces.

prihar pleaded guilty in march 2021 and was sentenced on 31 january 2022 to ninety-seven months, with an order to forfeit $8,414,173. phan spent years fighting extradition from israel. no successor ever took the position deepdotweb held, partly because everybody who might have tried had just watched what running a link directory was worth as a sentence.

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