Saskatoon man arrested for dark web drug trafficking investigation

A man has been arrested by the Saskatoon Police Service (SPS) cybercrime unit in connection to an ongoing investigation into drug trafficking on the darknet.

At around 10 a.m. on Tuesday, March 31, members of the cybercrime, digital forensics and patrol units executed a search warrant at a home on the 10 block of Bateman Crescent and arrested a 30-year-old man.

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Police say the man was believed to be trafficking illicit drugs on several darknet markets. Officers seized Xanax and MDMA, approximately 130 terabytes of data storage and assorted computer components, in addition to assorted digital currencies including 0.447 Bitcoin, 0.007895 Ether and 0.0989 Binance Coin.

The man was charged with trafficking controlled substances and possessing the proceeds of crime over $5,000.

What is the darknet?

The darknet — also referred to as the deep web — may sound spooky, but it is just the internet.

What sets it apart from the internet most people are familiar with is the type of web browser you use, called Tor, and the kinds of pages you can access with it — special websites with addresses that end in “.onion” and only live on the Tor network.

Tor, also known as the onion browser, works just like Chrome or Firefox but it masks both who you are and where you’re connecting from, according to the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF).

It’s a volunteer-run service that has helped democratic activists circumvent state censorship, but it’s also become a widely used platform for trafficking illicit goods.

“Unlike traditional websites, which have a public IP address, a .onion address is hidden, unique, and provides end-to-end encryption,” the EFF says.

This makes it useful for both activists and criminals.

The term darknet came into popularity in the late 2000s when one of these “.onion” sites, an underground drug market known as the Silk Road, caught the public eye. It’s founder was a San Francisco man who went by the alias of the Dread Pirate Roberts.

Roberts — real name Ross Ulbricht — was arrested in 2013. However, the model he established, with buyer and seller connecting online to exchange drugs for cryptocurrency, has persisted.