Silk Roads come and Silk Roads go. But after every law enforcement crackdown shakes the dark web, one Russian black market always seems to survive.

For more than two and a half years, the Russian Anonymous Marketplace, or RAMP, has maintained a thriving business in the Dark Web drug trade, offering one of the Internet’s widest arrays of narcotics to its Russian-speaking clientele. That’s roughly as long a tenure online as the original Silk Road achieved before it was seized in an FBI bust in October of last year. And it’s far longer than the new generation of anonymous drug markets that followed the Silk Road, including more than a dozen sites taken down last week in a massive coordinated police action. The largest of those seized sites, Silk Road 2, lasted exactly one year to the day.

RAMP, which like those sites runs on the anonymity software Tor, has outlived its western counterparts to amass more than 14,000 members. But the exact amount of uppers, downers, and psychedelics of every description it sells can't be easily measured—and not just because the site is exclusively in Russian. RAMP functions less like an eBay-style e-commerce site than a loose-knit, Craigslist-like web forum where buyers and sellers can find one another.

While RAMP does offer a Silk-Road-style escrow system to help users avoid fraud in high-value transactions, most sellers seem to seal their deals informally beyond the forum. They often communicate over the encrypted instant-messaging system known as Off-The Record messaging and pay in bitcoin or with the Russian payment service QIWI. Then drug purchases are triple-vacuum sealed and mailed, or in the case of some Muscovite buyers, delivered to a "dead drop" location where buyers are instructed to pick it up.

Users often return to RAMP to offer reviews and feedback. "In the nose, it is without foreign flavor and is not bitter in scent and it does not burn," writes one cocaine reviewer on the site. "This is the first coke that I felt right away in the moment."

Even without taking commissions on those off-site transactions, RAMP is pulling in serious revenue. The site charges 42 top dealers $300 a month for their own private forum sections. Some pay another $700 monthly for a banner ad at the top of the site, flashing images of cocaine rails and marijuana leaves. And for the privilege of selling the most profitable drugs—coke, hashish, and amphetamines—to the lucrative Moscow market, dealers are required to buy one $1,000-per-month license for each drug on that restricted "quota" list that they wish to sell.

Some of the Russian-language banner ads advertising drugs for sale at the top of RAMP's homepage. Some of the Russian-language banner ads advertising drugs for sale at the top of RAMP's homepage.

"Make your business successful with RAMP! Immediate sales!" the site's advertisement to potential dealers reads in Russian. "Sellers of quality hashish, amphetamine, and cocaine in Moscow, we’re waiting for you."

It isn't exactly clear how RAMP has managed to avoid the same fate as Silk Road and its successors. The explanation may be as straightforward as the fact it targets users in Russia, where law enforcement often turns a blind eye to online crime. Or it may be that RAMP's simpler, more decentralized system has helped protect the site from law enforcement. Less involvement in the deals between users means fewer staff members who could be exploited as informants, or who might be undercover agents.

Nicolas Christin, a Carnegie Mellon professor who has closely studied Dark Web drug markets, suggests the site's simplicity and lack of its own payment system could reduce its "attack surface"—less code means less hackable bugs for law enforcement to attack. "It’s more like traditional drug dealing with online support than a real full-fledged anonymous marketplace," says Christin, comparing RAMP to Silk Road's simpler predecessor OVDB, or the Open Vendor Database. "To some extent it’s very primitive. But to some extent it clearly works really well, because these guys are still alive and kicking."

The Dark Web is still reeling from the impact of Operation Onymous, a joint campaign by the FBI and Europol that last week seized the Tor-protected websites of the Silk Road 2, along with popular drug market competitors like Blue Sky, Cloud 9 and Hydra, and dozens of others. The security community and administrators of those sites have speculated that the takedown may have taken advantage of an unknown weakness in Tor, suggesting that perhaps distributed denial of service attacks forced traffic over relays in Tor's network that were controlled by law enforcement, allowing cops to match traffic at the hidden site with its IP address.

But that theory doesn't explain why several of the top drug sites running Tor hidden services, including RAMP and its top western competitors Agora and Evolution, were spared by Operation Onymous. Nicholas Weaver, a security researcher at Berkeley's International Computer Science Institute, speculates that __the remaining sites may have been hosted in countries beyond western law enforcement's reach. __ "I'd now bet that all surviving darknet markets are hosted in Russia, China, or similar countries that say F U to US requests," he wrote last week. "Its far easier to be a cyber-crook with a Moscow address."

Weaver's theory could explain RAMP's longevity, if it in fact hosts its servers in Russia—but that's difficult to confirm, given that Tor masks the site's IP address. And RAMP may simply not be a target for Western law enforcement, since it caters exclusively to Russian speakers.

The Ed Norton avatar of Darkside, RAMP's administrator.

Since at least September, 2012, RAMP has been run by a figure known as Darkside, who didn't respond to WIRED's request for an interview. Using an avatar of Edward Norton's character from the film Fight Club, Darkside has laid down a strict series of rules for the site's users: RAMP allows no weapons, stolen credit cards, counterfeit documents, or even legal pornography to be sold on the site. That's far more restrictive than Agora (which sells weapons) and Evolution (which sells both weapons and stolen credit cards).

Promoting "violence and nationalism," or even talking politics at all, can lead to being banned from RAMP. Darkside doesn't use any of the revolutionary rhetoric of the Dread Pirate Roberts, the Silk Road's libertarian founder. His comments seem limited to the day-to-day administration of his lucrative drug business. The only hint of character he reveals at all are a series of semi-inspirational quotes from figures like Mark Twain, Marcus Aurelius, and Bruce Lee that rotate at the top of the site.

Each of Darkside's own messages is also signed with a Russian-paraphrased quote from Albert Einstein, one that might capture the security strategy that has kept RAMP online longer than practically any other drug market on the Dark Web: "Everything must be made as simple as possible," it reads. "But not simpler."