Archive / The text pages
The operator wrote terms and conditions
Four text pages survive alongside the catalogue: two FAQs, a shipping policy and a performance dashboard. Together they are a more revealing document than anything said in court, because the operator wrote them for customers rather than for a judge.
1. The FAQ, in two languages
?page_id=43 (Deutsch) · ?page_id=997 (English)
The two FAQs are not translations of each other. The German one is blunter and assumes a domestic customer. The English one opens by pointing readers outside Europe to the onion shop, because the clearnet site would not ship to them.
Both begin the same way: with a numbered list of the only three circumstances in which the shop will reply to you. Your order was paid for and then cancelled. Your order has sat in processing for more than eight days. Your order was marked completed more than nine days ago and has not arrived. That is the entire support policy.
EVERY OTHER REQUEST WILL BE IGNORED! NO EXCEPTIONS!
ORDER, PAY, RECEIVE. THERE IS NO REASON TO COMMUNICATE. INFORM YOURSELF SOMEWHERE ELSE AND BE PATIENT
F.A.Q. (English), captured 4 December 2014
The German version carries an edge the English one loses in translation. On the nine-day rule it becomes almost petulant: it does not matter if it always arrived the next day before, and it does not matter if you have better things to do than wait around. After NINE days you may ask. The capitalisation is original.
Elsewhere the register is pure e-commerce. Shipping is a flat six euros. Dispatch is quoted at nought to seventy-two hours. Customers are told they will not be given a tracking number, but assured that tracking exists. There is a line about express delivery not being offered under any circumstances, with a justification - that Deutsche Post delivers 99% of parcels next day anyway - that any retailer would recognise as the standard defence against a service nobody wants to run.
And then, in the middle of it, the tell:
Very occasionally it takes a few days longer than planned - after all, we’re not Amazon.
F.A.Q. (English), captured 4 December 2014
Four months later the Leipzig prosecutors would describe the operation to reporters as an “Amazon for drugs”. The shop got there first, and used it as an excuse for slow dispatch.
2. The shipping policy
?page_id=4557 - “International Shipping Info”
This is the page that makes the scale concrete. It is a delivery-estimate table of the kind every online retailer publishes, and it lists twenty-odd destinations with expected transit times. Germany, one to two days. Austria, Switzerland, the Netherlands, Belgium, France, Italy, Spain, Denmark, Poland, the Czech Republic, all two to four. The United Kingdom and Ireland, two to six.
Beyond Europe it becomes a different document. The United States, Canada, Russia and Brazil are quoted at five to fifteen days, shipped “at your own risk”. Africa gets seven days and upward. And then Australia, which gets the only joke on the page:
Australia - 2-5 weeks, maybe never (Your post service sucks. We had no problems SO FAR!)
International Shipping Info, captured 4 December 2014
The page also published success rates. One hundred per cent within Germany, qualified as “according to our own knowledge with thousands of shipments 2014”; around ninety-five per cent worldwide, with the exception of countries with hard customs. That parenthesis - thousands of shipments, stated casually in a policy page in 2014 - is the operation admitting its own volume more plainly than any witness did at trial.
The remaining half of the page is administrative housekeeping about address formatting, including a genuinely stern instruction not to use Cyrillic characters because the label printer only handles Latin ones, with a link to the relevant Wikipedia article on Unicode blocks. It is the single most mundane paragraph in the entire archive, and it was written to make sure that packets of cocaine reached the correct letterboxes.
3. The public records dashboard
?page_id=38329 - “PUBLIC RECORDS / INFO”
This is the extraordinary one, and as far as this archive can establish it has never been written about. The shop published its own operational metrics. Weekly, for eight months, the average number of days between an order being paid for and the parcel going out - broken out separately for the clearnet shop and the onion shop.
It is a service level dashboard, voluntarily maintained, on a website selling controlled substances. And because the shop kept it up honestly, it records its own decline.
The shape is unmistakable. Through spring and summer this is a genuinely tight operation: mostly one to three days, with a best week of 1.01 days at the start of September. Then, from the end of September, it comes apart. Three days. Five. Six point eight. Six point nine. Eight point six nine in the last week of October, more than eight times his best. The onion shop degrades in lockstep, which tells you the bottleneck was not the website but the person behind both of them.
The page acknowledged it, in the flat tone of a status update:
Question: Why were orders processed so slowly in October and November?
Answer: Because we had some delays and also made necessary security improvements. December should be much better.
PUBLIC RECORDS / INFO, captured 4 December 2014
Then the reporting stopped, on the reasonable-sounding grounds that publishing before 99% of orders had completed “would be cheating”, and replaced the figures with forecasts - four to seven days, then three to five, then two to four - a recovery projected but never evidenced. Eleven weeks after the last forecast, the police were in the bedroom in Gohlis.
4. The scoreboard
The same page carried the shop's standing on the darknet markets, and it doubles as a fossil of that entire era:
| Marketplace | As the shop reported it | Status by December 2014 |
|---|---|---|
| Agora | 2500+ deals (4.993/5.000) | Operating |
| Evolution | 750+ deals (100%) | Operating; exit-scammed March 2015 |
| Silk Road 2.0 | (5/5) - struck through | Seized November 2014 |
| Pandora | (5/5) - struck through | Gone |
The dead markets were struck out rather than deleted, the way a shop crosses items off a chalkboard. A bracketed aside explained that effort had stopped going into the darknet markets altogether: the buyers there wanted conversation the shop was not willing to provide, the volume was poor next to its own sites, and the markets “come and go as they please”. Within four months Evolution would exit-scam with its users’ money, proving the point in a way nobody there got to enjoy.
5. The announcements, and the promise
The top of the page carried dated announcements. Three survive, all from November 2014.
One is a product roadmap: cheap 70mg pills, more pharmaceuticals, and heroin, listed as coming soon. Heroin never appears in the December catalogue, so either it did not materialise or it was never listed publicly.
One is a declaration that all activity on every forum had ceased, having tired of arguing with “silly customers or trolls”, and asked its customers to fight those battles for it instead. It was signed #SHINY-ARMY. The shop had built a fanbase and was deploying it as unpaid moderation.
And one, dated 16 November 2014, is this:
from now on your shipping address gets automatically encrypted upon checkout - your unencrypted shipping address never touches our database!
PUBLIC RECORDS / INFO, 16 November 2014
That is the sentence this archive exists to place next to the other ones. Everything else on these pages is charming in the way competence is always slightly charming - the delivery estimates, the metrics, the joke about Australian customs. This is the line that tells you what it actually cost, and it cost other people far more than it cost the person who wrote it.