The New and Improved Virtual Black Market?

A competitor to Silk Road, the black market online drug market. Alantis has launched the below youtube advertisement. Along with the launch of the youtube production, Atlantis says:

The darkweb is now easier to access than ever before and gives you access to a totally different world where you can buy and sell drugs online through a totally anonymous marketplace, just download a new browser and you're ready to access a world of legal and illegal drugs online.

Atlantis says payments can be made in bitcoins and litecoins.




Andy Greenberg at Forbes writes:

Black Market Reloaded’s pseudonymous administrator, who uses the name Backopy, has made a point of keeping an especially low profile compared to his competitors. “I don’t see myself as a big leader or a personality to be praised,” he wrote in one post on Black Market Reloaded’s forums. “I see my role here as the guy in the machine room, simply making the ship float and move forward, a lonely machine worker, that’s all.”

The Silk Road’s founder, on the other hand, has taken on a much more colorful identity within the community he’s created. In Silk Road’s forums, he goes by the name Dread Pirate Roberts, and frequently posts long political manifestos, “State of the Road” updates, love letters to his users, and even hosts a Dread Pirate Roberts Book Club focusing on libertarian economics.

But neither has spoken to the public to the same degree as Atlantis, both in its video ad and when the site’s CEO answered Reddit users questions on a public forum earlier this month. When one Redditor asked whether that publicity would attract a crackdown from law enforcement, Atlantis’ CEO responded that “We want to bring attention to the site and bring our vendors more buyers. Law enforcement is going to be aware of us (and probably already is) regardless of the way we choose to put our product out there.” When another Redditor asked how the Atlantis admin was able to freely use Reddit without being arrested, the CEO responded merely with the words “anonymity technology” and a link to Tor’s website as well as the Wikipedia entry for virtual private networks.

But whether the anonymity protections of sites like the Silk Road, Atlantis, or Black Market Reloaded can stand up to the surveillance powers of the Drug Enforcement Agency and other federal investigators remains an open question. One early attempt at an online drug marketplace known as the Farmer’s Market was shut down and had its eight staffers indicted last year.