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Cops Chase Drugs on the Internet |
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Written by Jim Krane
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Tuesday, 21 December 1999 |
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Page 2 of 5
ONE SOLDIERS BATTLE
Erickson has built a career of infiltrating chat rooms on America Online and arresting those who offer him drugs.
His first bust brought him to the outskirts of Beaumont, Texas, where a pair of ecstasy distributors hoped to sell 1,000 tablets of the chemical drug to a person they believed was a New Orleans rave promoter.
They kept telling me how much profit I could make with their ecstasy, said Erickson. They sent me a sample to try out. We sent it to the lab. The test was positive.
Erickson said he arranged the buy-and-bust with a passel of doubtful cops who grumbled that the drug sellers would be as ethereal as the Internet itself. To their surprise, Ericksons online connection came through delivering a thousand tablets of the drug at the meeting place and relinquishing 3,500 more during a home search.
They were definitely a major criminal enterprise that was trying to conduct business on the Internet, said Erickson. I couldn't believe their ignorance actually talking to someone online about that amount of drugs.
As the cops jacked their arms into handcuffs, Erickson said one suspect told the other, I told you we shouldn't have done this on the Internet.
HOW IT IS DONE
Police who monitor cyberspace say drug sales can be arranged in chat rooms on the Internet and America Online. All users need is a credit card at Web sites selling semi-controlled substances, such as the chemical rave drug GHB, or Gamma hydroxybutyrate, which has yet to be listed as an illegal narcotic in many states.
Erickson said drug buyers create user profiles on Web pages outlining their drug use and music preferences. Once the chatting begins, conversations soon turn to drugs--whos buying and who's selling, said Erickson.
Its like having a normal conversation at a bar, said Erickson. Your relationship will bond online, until you actually meet in person. There's a great deal of trust online. Most drug dealers are very outgoing, and they like to promote their trade. It doesn't take long to find out who those people are.
Some are quite young. Erickson said the majority of the sellers he meets range from 18 to 26 years old, but run as young as 14, and are predominately middle-class whites.
In Erickson's experience, users and sellers negotiate the sales online, then meet in person to exchange cash for drugs.
In other cases, dealers send drugs by mail or private courier, said Peter Hampton, director of the Web Police, an online volunteer group dedicated to supplying computer-crime intelligence to law enforcers.
They actually mail it directly to you, said Hampton.
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