The Farmer's Market

~ the last words ~

In 2006 i was at university in ankara on a ttnet line that had recently stopped being a modem. The Farmer's Market was already open by then, and the thing worth keeping about it is not what it sold but how it got paid. Its customers bought drugs with paypal.

It started as Adamflowers. The man behind it was a dutchman named Marc Peter Willems, and by most accounts the site was already trading in 2006. The catalog was lsd and mescaline, with marijuana listings the indictment described as high end. Orders went in over hushmail, which sold itself as encrypted webmail and was the default recommendation of that period for anybody who wanted mail nobody else could read.

In 2010 the whole thing moved onto tor as a hidden service. That solved the question of where the server lived and left every other question untouched. Payment still arrived as paypal transfers and western union pickups. Customers who wanted something more exotic could pay in pecunix or e-gold, and the ones who wanted nothing digital at all sent cash in an envelope. Intermediaries the prosecutors called cash drops routed some of it through panama and budapest.

i came to this one long after it was over, reading court documents rather than remembering anything. What holds my attention is the accounting. A market can hide its address perfectly and still be fully legible from the money side, and this is the earliest large case where somebody proved it out loud.

~ the record ~

~ the paper trail ~

Hushmail was the load-bearing assumption. The indictment quotes a message telling a buyer it was a safe method that would not produce mail for law enforcement, which was already a known-false claim by then. In 2007 hushmail had turned decrypted messages over to american investigators in an unrelated steroid case, and it was reported widely at the time. The market kept recommending it anyway.

The numbers the dea eventually put on paper are small next to what came later and large for a mail-order operation. Roughly 1.04 million dollars moved through between january 2007 and october 2009. In 2011 the owners cleared 261,000 dollars through paypal alone. Undercover agents bought lsd twice in 2009, twenty five hits in march and five hundred in september. Both purchases went through without incident.

~ what really happened ~

The investigation ran two years under the name Operation Adam Bomb and pulled in police from three other countries alongside the dea. In april 2012 the indictment was unsealed and fifteen people were taken in, eight of them named as operators. Willems was arrested at his home in the netherlands. A co-defendant who held american citizenship was picked up in colombia.

Willems pleaded guilty in september 2014 and got ten years that december. By the end of that year seven of the eight indicted had pleaded, and the eighth had died before trial. The site itself never reopened under any name.

~ what replaced it ~

Silk Road launched in 2011, while this case was still an open investigation, and did the same job with bitcoin instead of paypal. The lesson the next generation took from The Farmer's Market was narrow and correct: the network layer was never the weak part.

It is the first market of this kind to be prosecuted, and it is the only one in the cluster that predates the currency the rest of them depended on. Six years of orders held together by an encrypted mail service and a wire transfer, in a category that now reads as though it started in 2011.

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