Instagram has a drug problem

Selfies, photos of exotic holidays, posts by Chiara Ferragni, fashion brands and lots of drugs. Find the intruder on Instagram, where you can buy marijuana, MDMA, cocaine, Xanax and more within five minutes; ordering from pusher who do nothing to hide and who are traceable using simple hashtags like # weed4sale (the name of the drug you are looking for, on the other hand, will hardly lead to any results, because filtered by the algorithm).

Of the 50 drug dealers identified on Instagram from the DrugAbuse website , 34% did not even hide their own face (bad idea); many showed the amount of cash cash earned in the last period (a way to show, in the absence of evaluation, the health of their business) and, more generally, nobody was worried about the risks related to the management of an illegal activity on one of the most popular platforms in the world.

The sale of marijuana (and not only) through social networks is nothing new. In most cases, however, you need a phone number - obtained from trusted contacts - to write to pushers on instant messaging platforms (the most popular is, of course, Telegram). In this case, instead, all you have to do is search on Instagram.

How is it possible that these sellers are not all arrested within a day? Some of them, in contempt of every minimum form of caution, insert in the profile the telephone number or the email address. Others, more cautious, rely on Kik: a platform similar to Telegram, encrypted (although not at maximum security levels) and above all it requires no phone number to be used, but a simple username.

In this way, it is more complex for the police to trace the identity of those who use Instagram to sell drugs (assuming that we rely on proxies or VPNs to hide their IP address). But how is marijuana or MDMA delivered? Not in person, of course; which would expose to several risks and above all limit the sale to the people who live in the surroundings.

The drug, on the other hand, is being sent, as the DrugAbuse reporter discovered who, after installing Kik, contacted some pusher pretending to have just moved to a new city to justify the need to find a new supplier (to appreciate the skilled use of jargon language).

The shipments, therefore, are made through the classic couriers or directly by mail, after having requested what one wants to buy, what quantity and after having sent the money using Bitcoin or other tools that guarantee anonymity (you will soon be able to pay directly on Kik, which is developing its own cryptocurrency).

The gain is all about the pusher. The risks, however, fall mainly on the shoulders of those who buy. Nobody obviously puts the sender on the package; the recipient's name and address, however, are inevitably on display. With the result that the police, if they intercept the expedition, usually let it pass and then arrest those who receive the package the moment it gets their hands on it.

Instagram is trying to limit an unwelcome phenomenon; but with the spread of increasingly secure and easy to use encrypted platforms - and using Instagram as a showcase only - the battle against the pusher risks turning into the classic "crush the mole".