Black Market

Juan Benjamin surveyed the warehouse from his office up the stairs in the center of the room, and chuckled.

The Sunday Midnight rush was the best. Products illegally obtained loaded in from around the city and landed right here for underground trading. Each items was tagged and put up on a website for everyone to bid on for just an hour, but the turnover rate was so great that most of the time the accumulated backup was put into sales as well. Before you know it, the things you bought were already packed and ready to ship.

Unlike retail sales, Juan got a cut of 30% for every successful transaction into his pocket just by running this business. Very simple but profitable.

However, not everyone could just walk in and put their goods on the rack, because the operation has to stay underground and anonymous in case of police raiding. You need a middleman, an agent, a contact from the inside. That middle man, an automated program moderated together by thousands of hackers and private detectives, worked better than the police department in your background check.

Every week, a new website would be put into use and it would maintain exactly an hour of work before going down. The team of hackers behind it would defend any attempts to shutdown the site. It was an dead drop, untraceable, variable, constantly changing location.

Even the warehouse was picked by the very last day before the sales went live. Trucks full of goods would cross the state border and unload thousands of stolen goods into the empty space until it filled up completely.

The massive trucks ran along the road together was not something never seen, it wasn’t easy to detect whether they were real or not.

The police had been on the tail of this activities for weeks, but thanks to the anonymity of the website and warehouse location, and the weekend traffic rush, little progress was made. The investigation was a state wide cooperation between the agencies, but because they could not organize a large raiding party since the location was not announced beforehand, the cooperation was meaningless except the intelligence. They knew there would be guarding party with heavy firearm, and a warehouse full of bulky trucks, the operation of such scale could not be easily cracked, let alone capturing the mastermind behind this.

One of sensible solution was to monitor all the warehouse that was large enough for this kind of operation, which in the case of the whole US soil, were hundreds fitting the description on paper. But even if they did find the warehouse in action, the response time and manpower was still a headache.

Another solution they came up was to send undercover agents into the field and penetrate the organization from the bottom. Supposedly their would get in touch with some of the ‘associates’ they knew, thief, hacker, grifter, and assign them to made contact with the middle man. Once they get into the game, they could possibly gain more information before the party started again undisturbed.

But how could they trust them. Thief? Hacker? Grifter?