Its affordability and reliability have earned it a loyal customer base. The platform’s activity has increased significantly over the past year, indicating its growing influence and market share in the underground economy. Much like the surface web, the dark web is made up of friend-to-friend and peer-to-peer networks, along with larger popular networks like Tor, Freenet and Riffle.
Online Drug Markets Are Entering A ‘Golden Age’
Recently, a group of investigators with the Senate Subcommittee on Investigations Googled “buy fentanyl online” on the open internet, then homed in on the six sites that were most responsive to their requests. An investigator on the committee, who was not authorized to speak publicly about the findings, said these represent a tiny fraction of the hundreds of fentanyl-selling sites on the web. A Canadian market established in 2021, WTN offers over 9,000 products, including narcotics, fake goods, and digital services. It operates in both French and English and has built a reputation for ease-of-use. Known for its publicity stunt releasing millions of stolen card details for free, BidenCash specializes in credit card fraud and identity theft. Barratt envisions a future where harm reduction strategies are tailored to the source of the drug.
Getting To Know Darknet Markets
(Some people also seek fentanyl and there are vendors who openly sell it.) Still, my sources agree, unwanted fentanyl is found in lower levels in drugs bought online compared with street drugs. After one too many experiences with this joke of a drug, I decided to look for a new source. I’ve heard from friends and drug-user forums alike that dark-web drugs tend to be of better quality, and that buying in this way reduces some risks. Buying drugs online and through social media or on the dark web can be extremely dangerous with fatal consequences.
Top Posts
He wanted to be able to buy high-quality psychedelics from a trusted, reliable source and the dark web seemed like the best place to do so. They bought some, and days later it arrived in a small, clear, plastic bag complete with a thank-you card — a sign of how easy it is to buy drugs on the so-called darknet. COMPLEX participates in various affiliate marketing programs, which means COMPLEX gets paid commissions on purchases made through our links to retailer sites. Our editorial content is not influenced by any commissions we receive.
How To Access The Dark Web Safely
Owing to the anonymity of the underground marketplaces and forums, there exists no ground truth to link users with their IDs. The results provide insight into opioid trading in the anonymous markets and forums and may prove an effective mitigation data point for illuminating the opioid supply chain. Once someone has access, they can use its dark web markets to anonymously purchase without prescription any drug they want from online dealers or illegal online pharmacies.
- Its content is intentionally hidden and requires special browsers to access.
- It is used by many for buying or selling items that are prohibited on the regular internet, like fake IDs, illegal drugs, and stolen data.
- “Are there any trustworthy markets left?” one user wrote, complaining that they used the dark web markets as a source for anti-seizure drug Lyrica and now had no good source.
- There is a tendency for informational matrices to degrade quickly.
- It features over 40,000 listings including narcotics, counterfeit items, hacking tools, and stolen data.
Criminal Hacking Services
Buying dozens of kilograms at a time, some of Chris’ buyers onsold drugs to local consumers both on the dark web and via street deals. The sellers preferred Bitcoin, the investigators said, but they also accepted Western Union transfers, PayPal, and prepaid credit cards. They wanted to ship the packages through the international arm of the US Postal Service, rather than a private carrier like FedEx or UPS. They told the investigators that there was less of a chance the package would end up detained — we’ll get back to that in a moment. It is against the law to buy, possess, supply, import or unlawfully produce illegal drugs or psychoactive substances.
Buying Illegal Drugs Online Or Through An App
Even with the increase in law enforcement pressure, the dark web market still achieved a revenue of $2 billion in 2024. Therefore, as long as this dark part of the internet exists, these marketplaces will flourish and emerge. New and potentially more vulnerable population segments can be reached by exploitative drug dealers as they begin to sell on social platforms and the number of drug consumers in the US and around the world grows. CLEVELAND – A federal grand jury has charged Behrouz Parsarad, an Iranian national, for his role as the creator and operator of Nemesis Market, a dark web marketplace designed to enable users to buy and sell illegal drugs and other illicit goods. The market also sold criminal cyber-services such as obtaining stolen financial information, fraudulent identification documents, counterfeit currencies, and computer malware. In addition to Empire Market’s more than 18,000 drug listings, another site called Nightmare Market now lists 28,000 drug products, along with the dark web’s usual assortment of stolen credit card numbers, counterfeits, and hacking tools.
Addressing this challenge requires deep domain knowledge and expertise, which is constantly evolving. Another limitation is pointed out in the paper that multiple online suppliers might belong to the same vendor. This problem might be addressed by studying the product overlapping patterns over time to merge suppliers, which might reveal more interesting hierarchical clustering patterns.
“Mushrooms and marijuana used to be hard to get and now they’re being marketed to me in beautiful packaging on Instagram,” says one 34-year-old in Austin, Texas, whom WIRED spoke to. Initial studies into drug sales on social media began to be published in 2012. Over the next decade, piecemeal studies began to reveal a notable portion of drug sales were being mediated by social platforms. In 2021, it was estimated some 20 percent of drug purchases in Ireland were being arranged through social media. In the US in 2018 and Spain in 2019, a tenth of young people who used drugs appear to have connected with dealers through the internet, with the large majority doing so through social media, according to one small study. There are a lot of misconceptions about the dark web online and in popular media.
However, there’s been no formal evaluation of online and street drug sales that can attest to the relative purity and safety of what’s sold in either place—and illegal drugs always come with a safety risk, regardless of where they are bought from. And the fragmentation of illicit markets, particularly in drug sales, signals a shift toward decentralization — with criminal enterprises moving away from traditional darknet marketplaces toward more agile and resilient platforms. This shift presents both new challenges and opportunities for disruption. According to the indictment, Parsarad, 36, of Tehran, Iran, launched Nemesis Market in or around March 2021. Nemesis Market operated on the dark web, a network that uses The Onion Router (TOR) to encrypt traffic and hide users’ Internet Protocol (IP) address.
First things first, always use strong and different passwords for each account you open. But these efforts of law enforcement don’t go in vain; hackers and criminals lose trust if a website or marketplace goes down. According to a recent trend, the dark marketplaces faced a decline in revenue. Chainanalysis, a blockchain analysis firm, conducted research that shows that the revenue decreased from $3.1 billion (2021) to $2 billion (2024). As mentioned earlier, launching a cyberattack doesn’t require any hacking skills.
Post Navigation
In addition, we set parameters such as sleeping time to limit the speed of crawling. Overdoses from opioids, a class of drugs that includes both prescription pain relievers and illegal narcotics, account for more deaths in the United States than traffic deaths or suicides. Overdose deaths involving heroin began increasing in 2000 with a dramatic change in pace, and as of 2014, 61% of drug overdoses involved some type of opioid, inclusive of heroin 1. Deaths involving fentanyl nearly doubled from the previous year’s rate in 2014, 2015, and 2016 2. To reduce opioid-related mortality, there is a pressing need to understand the supply and demand for the product; however, no prior research that provides a greater understanding of the international opioid supply chain has been conducted.
- Genesis Market and BidenCash, two top dark web marketplaces, were also shut down in 2023 and 2025, respectively.
- The report recommends that all international packages start to include what they call “advanced electronic data”—special information on bar codes that could help flag drug-bearing packages for postal workers.
- For everyone else, dark-web marketplaces are a pretty reasonable idea.
- There’s also a privacy angle—some users live in countries with censorship or surveillance, and the dark web gives them a space to communicate or access information more freely.
The drug trade, both real and digital, is not only recession-proof but liable to bloom in times of economic growth. We now have decades of evidence showing how drug markets will keep on going, whatever the economic or political weather. And while many governments have floundered and faltered, the online drug trade has come out fighting.
Various cryptocurrencies such as Bitcoin and Monero can be used to make purchases. The Abacus Market links to the new dark web marketplace sections and took over much of the vacuum left by the AlphaBay takedown. These sites cater to cybercriminals seeking valuable data, such as credit card numbers, login credentials, and personal information.
This way, you can catch any leaks and stop them before they cause bigger problems. You can even find things such as BIN checkers and PayPal cookie converters. Another reason the Russian Market is so popular is that it’s pretty inexpensive compared to other dark web marketplaces. While this market started in Canada in 2021, WeTheNorth now sells to both Canadian and international users. It’s a market for fake documents, hacking software, and financial fraud services. WeTheNorth has a strong community vibe, with an active forum where users interact and share updates.
