A REFORMED dealer who has twice been jailed for importing drugs into Jersey has today told how crime groups have ditched ‘traditional’ smuggling methods and are now targeting tech-savvy teenagers using social media and the postal system.

Nick Whitcombe – a pioneer of the early online-dealing movement who once boasted he could deliver any drug to Jersey within two days of the order – has warned that parents have no idea what their children are doing on the internet, and how easy it is for them to buy drugs.

‘Ten years ago if you were 16 and wanted to buy drugs you could go online but you probably weren’t going to find them,’ he said.

‘So you would have to find somebody on the street who looks a bit dodgy, or find someone who knows someone dodgy. You are asking your dodgy mate Dave to speak to his dodgy mate Paul who is going to speak to his dodgy uncle who’s got a mate who might sell a little bit of drugs.

‘Whereas now, if you are 16 and curious, you just go on Snapchat or Instagram and you have got a channel straight away and they’ll deliver it to your house free of charge.’ Mr Whitcombe, now aged 32, was first jailed in 2015 for being part of a gang which ran a mail-order drugs business fulfilling bespoke orders through the postal system.

One of the gang members was based in Jersey, while Mr Whitcombe remained in his native Merseyside, dispatching packages which were custom-made to the Island-based member’s orders.

The pair and a third member were later arrested and Mr Whitcombe was jailed for six years.

Last year, he was locked up again – this time for three years – for a historical smuggling plot dating back to 2018, during which he again sent drugs to Jersey through the postal system.

The one-time importer, who removed himself from the drug-dealing world later in 2018 and has since become a successful businessman running three gyms on Merseyside, said the methods used by UK-based gangs to ship drugs to Jersey have changed enormously over the last decade.

The trade was at first boosted by the so-called dark web – a part of the internet only accessible by using special software which allows people to remain anonymous and where drugs, guns and fake currency are often bought and sold.

Just a few years later, the rise of social media brought the illicit trade into the mainstream internet.

‘We started in 2013 and this was the early realms of the dark web,’ said Mr Whitcombe, who was released from his second sentence earlier this year.

‘We adopted the tactics of [the now shutdown dark-web black market site] Silk Road in terms of packaging, in terms of our methods and in terms of the do’s and don’ts.

‘At the time online wasn’t huge – that came about 18 months after we started doing what we were doing, at which point I was in La Moye. 

‘I went away just before the internet boom and by the time I came out it was almost exclusively on the internet.’

As reported yesterday, teenagers are increasingly using a network of social-media channels and online messaging apps to order drugs into the Island.

Links to group chats on messaging apps such as Snapchat and Telegram where a dealer is selling drugs are temporarily shared on social-media platforms, including Instagram, or obscure web forums.

The link is forwarded around groups of friends – and then deleted to avoid detention, but not before the teens have been taken into the chat and have had the chance to order drugs.

‘The social-media boom of 2014 was the catalyst,’ said Mr Whitcombe.

‘Then came the wave of the encrypted messaging apps – Wickr, Telegram, Signal – which was a big one for the industry.

‘Unlike a conventional drug dealer where you have a phone number and you ditch that number every couple of weeks, you would instead have a user name on Wickr or Telegram and it would enable you to get more longevity out of that particular contacts book.’

And while dealers were building their contacts, teenagers, he says, were becoming increasingly emboldened by the use of Virtual Private Networks, where a secure and private connection is created using encryption.

‘If you asked someone ten years ago what a VPN was no one would have known what you were talking about.

‘You talk to 16-year-old kids now and they’ll say that’s what they put on before they go online and have a little snoop to see what they can get.

‘So the boom in social media, and the boom in messaging apps, some of which enable their messages to disappear, and the ease of getting VPNs have all worked together to create this situation.

‘If you want to deal drugs you can go online now and remain anonymous without a significant degree of effort. That never used to be the case.

‘The ability to remain anonymous has made people bolder, especially younger kids, and Snapchat has contributed a lot to this with its disappearing messages and the assumption that when the messages disappear they are gone for good.’

Snapchat has told the JEP that it takes a ‘zero-tolerance’ approach to ‘dealers abusing our platform to advertise and sell dangerous drugs’, and that it is ‘committed to doing everything we can to shut them down, support law enforcement, and help educate Snapchatters about the dangers of illicit drugs.’ Instagram has told the JEP that it too works hard to remove illegal content online – often before it has been reported – and that it offers help and advice to those addicted to drugs.

As in any business environment, the rise in one product or service can often lead to the demise of the other.

And the ‘little-but-often’ system of postal deliveries – which began to increase with the advent of social media and boomed during lockdown when the once-favoured ‘ method of large shipments via car ferry travel was no longer an option – now dominates the market.

‘Traditional routes are dead,’ said Mr Whitcombe.

‘I am Joe Bloggs and I have ten kilos of drugs with a wholesale value of £350,000. Am I going to take the risk of putting all that into one car with one person and send him on a ferry to go through a very stringent security process in an island that is renowned for its security?

‘Or am I going to split that into multiple lots and send it through the post in packages that go with thousands and thousands and thousands of other parcels and packages?

‘There is no middle man. I don’t have to pay the dealer in Jersey. And if I get caught it is just linked to an anonymous return address. So why would you take the traditional old-school route?

‘We were one of the early adopters of the postal route. I talked at the time to some of the old heads and they thought we were crazy to do it through the post. They would say “what if it gets lost” or “what if you get caught”?

‘But the Jersey authorities are renowned for how on the ball they are. People in the criminal world know this.

‘Honestly, if you send it through the ferry there is a 50/50 chance you’ll get caught.

‘People just don’t do it anymore. Seeing someone send a car load of drugs on the ferry to Jersey now is the equivalent of seeing someone riding down the street on a horse and cart. It’s like, “ah, people still do that. That’s cute”.’

Although he heaps praise on the authorities for their ability to take out major drugs shipments before they hit the streets, Mr Whitcombe says targeting the supply lines is only half of the job.

Jersey, he says, will always be a huge draw for drugs gangs – demand is constant, profit margins are massive because drugs can be sold for four times the price they would fetch in the UK, and there are no organised crime groups fighting for territory.

In his words, Liverpool is the ‘Wild West’ riddled with gun crime as gangs fight over drug-dealing zones.

But any gang eyeing Jersey knows that they would not be ‘entering a battlefield’, just ‘a ripe market that is there for the picking’, he says.

And so, he stresses, education is the key.

‘I really can’t emphasise this enough. There absolutely needs to be a focus on education.

‘You can tackle the supply all you like, but it is like a Hydra – you chop off a head and more will grow back.

‘Arresting a dealer is like putting a sticking plaster on a gun shot wound and leaving the bullet in there.

‘Unless you tackle demand – by educating people enough to stop them wanting to do drugs – you will never stop the problem.

‘And parents need to educate themselves too, so they know what to look out for and can speak to their children about it.’

Jersey has, he says, got kids with little to do and money to spend – in many cases, more money than the average teenager in the UK.

But the consequences of gaining a criminal record at a young age in a small Island, where word gets around easily and reputations are difficult, even impossible, to shake off, can be huge.

It’s something Mr Whitcombe has seen first hand during his two spells in La Moye. The wings, he says, are full of the same faces – people who fell into crime, often drugs, at an early age, and never escaped.

‘It’s so easy for people to get caught in a loop. They end up in a cycle of taking drugs and committing crime. Sadly, there are often only two end results – you are going to spend the rest of your life in and out of La Moye or you end up dead.’

TOMORROW: ‘We are watching you and you will be caught,’ warn Jersey authorities 

‘ There absolutely needs to be a focus on education. You can tackle the supply all you like, but it is like a Hydra – you chop off a head and more will grow back. Unless you tackle demand... you will never stop the problem

Nick Whitcombe 

‘‘ I am Joe Bloggs and I have ten kilos of drugs with a wholesale value of £350,000. Am I going to take the risk of putting all that into one car with one person and send him on a ferry to go through a very stringent security process in an island that is renowned for its security?

Nick Whitcombe