Archive / The interview
“For hackers there is nothing to take. The bitcoins flow straight into our pockets.”
In early September 2014, after several weeks of email exchange, Motherboard Germany published a long interview with the operator of Shiny Flakes. He was still trading. He had six months left.
It talked like a startup founder
The striking thing is not what he was selling. It is the vocabulary. Asked why the shop had grown so fast, the answer came with customer analytics:
From the very beginning we analysed customer and purchasing behaviour. […] Things like: “How did you hear about us?” - that is how we learn which customers we need to cater for. Or: how much time does the user spend on the FAQ, is it written too awkwardly?
Motherboard Germany, September 2014
He was running an acquisition-source survey and measuring time-on-page to test whether his documentation was too dense. That is not a criminal enterprise borrowing the language of business; that is somebody who genuinely thought of himself as running a shop, and who treated conversion as the problem in front of him.
Motherboard’s own framing put it plainly: apart from the product range and the fact that staff wanted to remain anonymous, the operation barely differed from a conventional internet startup. Sales. A development side with contacts to Dutch pill presses. Somebody evaluating purchasing behaviour. Smart web design. Customer service. And the site carried a recommendation engine of the most familiar kind imaginable - customers who ordered this also bought.
Why cannabis was dropped
With weed the demand is far too high. The profit bears no sensible relation to the effort compared with our other lines. Sourcing it, the shipping volume, the number of orders, the support requests and so on, are a pure waste of time. We took weed out of our range after about four weeks.
Motherboard Germany, September 2014
This is a cost-to-serve argument. He is not describing risk, or morality, or supply. He is describing support ticket volume per euro of margin, and concluding that a high-demand low-value line was dragging the business down. Any operations manager would recognise the reasoning and most would agree with it.
It also happens to be checkable, and it does not quite hold. The December capture shows cannabis back on the shelf - but in a single hundred-gram unit at nine hundred euros, the most expensive item in the shop and the only one sold in bulk. He returned to the product on the one term that answered its own objection: few orders, high value, almost no support.
It said “we” until it forgot to
Throughout the interview he speaks in the first person plural. A team. A part of the team with long experience in the fraud scene. Departments. Then, asked how he handles a customer who is unhappy with a product, the plural collapses:
If someone is dissatisfied with the product, I am very direct. I tell them to look elsewhere, or they are welcome to buy other products from us that will satisfy them. All our products are top class. But with cocaine and speed especially, everyone thinks they are an expert. With those two you can never satisfy everyone. So I do not dwell on it.
Motherboard Germany, September 2014
The German courts eventually treated Shiny Flakes as essentially one young man with a courier and a shelving unit. The interview is where you can watch the corporate “we” slip, in the one answer that required a description of personal behaviour rather than the organisation’s.
Oddly modest about the whole thing
Asked whether online drug sales would revolutionise the market once bitcoin went mainstream, the operator said no, and the answer is more clear-eyed than most of the commentary written about him since:
Not at all. 99.9 per cent of the drug trade happens on the street. We, or the darknet and its marketplaces, have absolutely no influence on that. We are not even competition. Drugs are a “right now” business.
Motherboard Germany, September 2014
That modesty was then undercut by a detail presumably thought harmless: there was, the operator said, a certain town of fifty thousand people that he supplied as though he were running a local branch there, and the dealers in that town would be delighted if he dropped dead.
What the interview gave away
He would not confirm his name or any personal detail. He did confirm that the operation was based in Germany, and the shipping pages said so too. Security commentary at the time, and Forbes in its coverage of the bust, treated the combination - a clearnet shop, a named country, and a press interview - as poor operational security. It is widely described as one of the things that helped narrow the search.
It is worth being careful here. No public source shows that the interview identified him. What brought police to Leipzig, on the reporting, was an underpaid parcel and the repeated use of one packing station. The interview is better understood as evidence of the mindset that produced both: a man confident enough to publish delivery statistics, argue with reviewers, run a customer survey, and give a press interview, while operating out of his mother’s flat.
He described the security thinking of a team that studied the case files of previous prosecutions to understand how surveillance worked, and that had, the operator said, no IT department, because the fewer people involved the better. Both statements are probably true. Neither helped.
The line that aged worst
On customer data, he told the interviewer that personal information was deleted from the servers once or twice a day, leaving only anonymous statistics for service improvement. In November he went further and announced on the shop that addresses were encrypted automatically at checkout and never touched the database unencrypted.