Drug dealers using Instagram and Tinder to find young customers
Drug dealers using Instagram and Tinder to find young customers
Now you can swipe right for #mephedrone as dealers branch out to social media sites popular with young people
The process is simple. On Instagram, using the social platform convention of hashtagging, a potential customer trawls through the app looking for phrases like #weed4sale or the names of the drugs themselves (#mdma, #mephedrone etc). The customer then contacts the owner of the account and the deal moves along through direct messages. In the case of Tinder, potential customers can swipe through profiles until they find a dealer and match with them.
Buyers can either meet face-to-face or pay online and have their purchases posted to them. While online payments such as bitcoin and pre-paid gift cards such as Vanilla Visa are encrypted, more traceable measures such as unattributed bank transfers and PayPal are also used.
Online dealers mostly sell their drugs as “research” even though pills are put in bottles or blister packs and powders in capsules.“Despite packaging them specifically for human consumption, vendors attempt plausible deniability when it comes to what they sell,” says Moe, a former user who bought legal and illegal drugs online from the age of 16.
There are few firm statistics about who’s buying drugs over social media but interviews I did suggests young people are a market. Despite the risks – which include getting scammed, getting caught and having no guarantee about strength or composition of drugs – Moe says the internet is popular among teens who have no personal connections to drug dealers and users. In particular, he says, research chemicals that are legal for medical or clinical trial purposes are being bought online by teenagers who don’t otherwise have access to illegal drugs.
Not everyone who buys drugs online is doing it to get high. I have spoken to young people in the LGBTQ community who buy hormones for gender transitioning online because it bypasses restrictions and bureaucracy in the NHS.
“The system doesn’t guarantee what trans people need, and illegal underground behavior becomes the way to get it, which in turn sustains systemic problems,” explains sociologist Bilal Zenab Ahmed
http://www.theguardian.com/sustainable-business/2016/apr/07/drug-dealers-instagram-tinder-young-customers
Buyers can either meet face-to-face or pay online and have their purchases posted to them. While online payments such as bitcoin and pre-paid gift cards such as Vanilla Visa are encrypted, more traceable measures such as unattributed bank transfers and PayPal are also used.
Online dealers mostly sell their drugs as “research” even though pills are put in bottles or blister packs and powders in capsules.“Despite packaging them specifically for human consumption, vendors attempt plausible deniability when it comes to what they sell,” says Moe, a former user who bought legal and illegal drugs online from the age of 16.
There are few firm statistics about who’s buying drugs over social media but interviews I did suggests young people are a market. Despite the risks – which include getting scammed, getting caught and having no guarantee about strength or composition of drugs – Moe says the internet is popular among teens who have no personal connections to drug dealers and users. In particular, he says, research chemicals that are legal for medical or clinical trial purposes are being bought online by teenagers who don’t otherwise have access to illegal drugs.
Not everyone who buys drugs online is doing it to get high. I have spoken to young people in the LGBTQ community who buy hormones for gender transitioning online because it bypasses restrictions and bureaucracy in the NHS.
“The system doesn’t guarantee what trans people need, and illegal underground behavior becomes the way to get it, which in turn sustains systemic problems,” explains sociologist Bilal Zenab Ahmed
http://www.theguardian.com/sustainable-business/2016/apr/07/drug-dealers-instagram-tinder-young-customers
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