In an ideal world, it would be possible for law enforcement to shut down the drug trade entirely. Sadly, we don’t live in an ideal world. A century ago, Prohibition didn’t succeed in stamping out “the demon rum,” and drugs also won’t go away any time soon.
The flow of fentanyl, designer opioids, and illicit prescription pills will continue to leave a trail of victims in our communities. Yet every overdose, as sad as each death is, may give investigators a way to find the dealers and kingpins responsible. The victims’ own social media accounts may often hold the information needed to make arrests and get convictions.
Social Media Use in the Drug Trade
It’s not news that the internet is a major tool for drug trafficking. Over the past few years, though, the way in which the internet is used for drug sales has changed. The internet can be compared to an iceberg, with the regular everyday internet being the part that shows above water. The “deep” web is the largely invisible part below water, while the “dark” web is a shady sliver of the deep web that mostly hosts criminal activity.
A 2023 analysis by the UN Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC) found that sales of drugs on the “dark web” had largely switched from retail to wholesale. The reason? Small-scale drug sales had largely shifted to social media instead. This makes perfect business sense for drug rings. Accessing the dark web’s markets is purposefully difficult, requiring special skills and software — which limits sales. Social media platforms, in contrast, are stable and easy to use.
Separating the trade into wholesale markets on the dark web and retail markets on social media also meets drug dealers’ operational needs. The big players need anonymity and operational security, and the dark web provides those. Street-level vendors and other small players, on the other hand, need to be visible to potential buyers. Social media provides that visibility.
The Victim As a Source of Intelligence
Every overdose victim is a tragedy, and law enforcement alone can never prevent overdoses entirely. Yet in the age of social media drug trafficking, victims can play another role: as a key source of intel for investigators.
Investigations usually take known or suspected perpetrators as their starting point, but working from the opposite end – with the victim – has some natural advantages. Unlike suspects or “persons of interest,” the victim is unquestionably connected to the drug purchase that resulted in their death. And unlike street-corner sales, drug transactions taking place on social media leave traces that can be followed by investigators.
If investigators identify the victim’s social media accounts, and if the drug purchase was made through social media, it’s often possible to identify the seller. Then the seller’s connections, in turn, can be used to identify and map other players in the local drug scene. Pursued aggressively, this kind of intelligence-gathering may, in time, make it possible to break entire drug rings.
Powering Investigations With Spokeo for Law Enforcement
Let’s look at how the next overdose victim in your jurisdiction could fuel an investigation.
First, you’ll need to identify which social media platforms the victim used. If you’re lucky, you’ll have access to the victim’s devices and may be able to identify some of them that way. That’s not always the case, so you’ll need another option. With Spokeo for Law Enforcement, you can start with whatever information you do have: any combination of the victim’s name, known aliases, phone number, and physical or email addresses can be your starting point.
Type that information into Spokeo’s simple search interface, and our algorithms will search through billions of data points (from both open and regulated sources) for anything that’s connected to your victim. This includes known associates, past addresses, emails, phone numbers, and – most crucially, in this case – social media accounts. Even if the accounts are anonymous or have a made-up username, Spokeo can often connect them back to a real-world person. In this case, that’s your victim.
With that information in hand, you’re ready to begin digging deeper.
Establishing Connections and Following Leads
Once you know which accounts belong to your victim, you can immediately review all of their public posts. It’s now well accepted by the courts that public posts, by definition, don’t need search warrants in order to be admissible. Investigators can use those public posts to create a list of every account that interacted with the victim and screen those other contacts’ public posts as well.
Surprisingly, much of the drug-related interaction on social media does take place publicly or in open groups. Buyers and sellers dodge the platforms’ filters and moderation algorithms by using slang terms, deliberate misspellings, or even emojis to speak of drugs. If investigators find any such references in the victim’s interactions with other accounts, this provides a number of opportunities for follow-up. Here are a few potential examples:
- Searching the username of the other account, using Spokeo for Business, to learn the suspected dealer’s real name (if unknown), and/or their other personal information and social media accounts.
- Reviewing the other account’s further connections. Although many will be customers, some may be contacts within the drug-trafficking hierarchy.
- Subpoenaing records from the victim’s phone or internet provider. This gives investigators access to private posts and private messages and may include evidence that can be used to identify dealers.
- Tracing the victims’ and sellers’ connections to create a “map” of the drug trade within your jurisdiction.
Comparing the players in each overdose death is where social media activity can really pay off. Contacts who turn up in multiple dealers’ social media connections are likely to be involved in the drug trade. Often, they’ll be the local dealers’ contact to a larger drug ring that operates across jurisdictions. This, in turn, creates the possibility of information-sharing with LEAs in other jurisdictions, and potentially a major cross-jurisdiction bust that takes out a whole drug-trafficking network.
Any LEA Can Leverage Social Media Activity
The nation’s largest police forces are well-funded and well-resourced, though most – if asked – would argue that they still need more money. Law enforcement agencies in rural jurisdictions and small towns typically don’t have a large budget or IT team to purchase and implement specialized software.
This isn’t necessarily an issue. The software industry as a whole currently favors subscription-based pricing, which means a manageable monthly fee (your operating budget) rather than a big-ticket purchase (your capital budget). That’s how Spokeo for Law Enforcement works. Its subscription tiers are based on usage, so it’s scalable from the smallest rural county sheriff’s department to the largest city police force. It’s simple to install and use, even in LEAs with minimal technical expertise. Agencies that do have IT assets in-house (or under contract) can do even more with the product.
Either way, Spokeo provides a tool your force can use to turn the tragedy of an overdose death into arrests and prosecutions. To learn more about how Spokeo can work for you, or to arrange a demonstration or no-cost trial of the product, reach out to our team using the contact information on our Law Enforcement page.
Sources
UN Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC): Use of the Dark Web and Social Media for Drug Supply
British Columbia Prosecutions Service: Report On the 2011 Vancouver Stanley Cup Riot Prosecutions
Congressional Research Service: Law Enforcement and Technology: Using Social Media
Wired: Drug Dealers Have Moved on to Social Media