We believe that the findings and pattern analyses presented here, which place concentration on the supply side, might suggest a new direction to focus and will serve as a useful complement to current research conducted within the domain of addiction medicine. Despite their ubiquity, online drug markets have distinct geographical hubs, shaped by regional roles in the global trade. Most dark web drug shipments originate from the US and Northern and Western Europe, as well as Russia. Russia also recorded the highest proportion (85.7%) of drug users purchasing on the darknet in 2022, and a drug trafficking average of 5.75 in the 2023 Global Organized Crime Index. Among the various illicit digital markets, the drug trade is one of the most prominent. In 2024, darknet marketplaces generated over US$1.7 billion in cryptocurrency-enabled drug transactions, marking year-on-year growth of over 20%.
Russian Language Darknet Marketplaces Continue To Drive Overall Volume Of Illicit Drug Sales
After the Biker DLC, players can now purchase buildings for illegal drugs and counterfeit products manufacture, and distribute them through a darknet website called “The Open Road” where law enforcement cannot be notified of the player’s trade. In an extraordinary twist, Lin had previously worked for Taiwan’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs, where he trained law enforcement officials on the very blockchain analytics techniques used to take down platforms like his own. The results of that investigation were published in a report called Technical analysis of the Genesis Market. Van Well explained that his organization doesn’t typically share so much detailed technical information around investigations, but it felt imperative to provide these details to law enforcement and tech companies around the world to help them fight future cybercrimes. Though Genesis Market domains and servers were seized and antivirus programs have been updated, cybercriminals have already rebuilt illicit services like these. Cybercrime enablement represents flows from ransomware, stolen funds, malware, or fraud shops to darknet markets.
Beyond The ‘Silk Road’: Assessing Illicit Drug Marketplaces On The Public Web
So when someone like a private buyer or criminal group can’t pass the background checks or get the right permits, they usually turn to the dark web to sidestep the rules and get armed without drawing attention. The UNODC (United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime) maintains that almost all firearms are originally manufactured through legal means. Naaaah surely not.” Plus if I’m honest, my inner reprobate buzzes from it.
- In North America and Western Europe, purchased products are delivered by post, whereas Russian-speaking DNMs dominant in Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union distribute their products through dead-drops in public places.
- Why are these markets still seen as enticing places to sell drugs, despite the risks?
- A 2020 study found that almost 57% of sites on the Tor network hosted some form of illegal content.
- And despite being in psychiatric treatment, Marie didn’t feel as if she were improving.
- As these transactions are more insular and anonymous than in-person trade, it is more difficult to track user behaviour.
- Our experiment evaluated MALLET on our annotated anonymous marketplace and forum data set (Table 3) using 3 classification algorithms in the document classification tool (package cc.mallet.classify class in MALLET’s JavaDoc API Application Programming Interface).
Finally, in the model refining stage, the model is trained for other 2 iterations using the same objective function. We manually investigated the results by randomly sampling 10% of data records during each iteration and adding false positive samples into the unlabeled set. The review detection model yielded a mean precision of 81.5% and an average recall of 80.1%, whereas for the promotion detection model, it yielded a mean precision of 88.1% and an average recall of 85.1% (Table 4).
Treasury International Capital (TIC) System
Interviews with merchants and consumers are a crucial part of understanding the mechanisms of the Internet market 5-8. Our research collected product listings and forum posts from 10 anonymous online market places and 6 forums. Our study determined the underground marketplace and forum list based on darknet site search engines and previous research works 20.
Shifting Fraudster Tactics
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. “Over the years some markets … developed a robust catalog of illicit services like money laundering, fiat offramping, and products that enable cyber-criminal activities like ransomware and malware attacks. One such sophisticated darknet market, Hydra, offered all that and more,” Chainalysis explained. To buy his fentanyl, the man uses “darknet” sites, which are unlisted on search engines, rely on a special private browser for access, and don’t tie his username to his identity.
Gaining Remote Access
The darknet protected political dissent around the world but also facilitates criminal e-commerce. The United States government set up the Tor system to enable secure Internet use in intelligence operations. Other Tor users include pro-democracy activists, libertarians, corporate whistleblowers, computer hackersnotably, the Anonymous collectivecyber spies of foreign governments, and traffickers in drugs, weapons, false documents, and stolen data. Operating like a black-market version of eBay, Silk Road processed $1.2 billion in sales to more than one million customers before being shut down by the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) in 2013. Silk Road 2.0 appeared within weeks, competing against other darknet sites such as Evolution Marketplace, Agora, and Nucleus.
- OFAC’s Economic Sanctions Enforcement Guidelines provide more information regarding OFAC’s enforcement of U.S. sanctions, including the factors that OFAC generally considers when determining an appropriate response to an apparent violation.
- Authorities seized assets valued at 7.8 million euros, including cryptocurrency and luxury goods, and deployed around 300 officers across multiple countries during the operation.
- Another reason the Russian Market is so popular is that it’s pretty inexpensive compared to other dark web marketplaces.
- This paper seeks to complement current studies widening the understanding of opioid supply chains in underground marketplaces using comprehensive, large-scale, longitudinal anonymous marketplace and forum data.
- These 32 complete Hydra marketplace downloads were performed 2-3 times monthly.
Exodus Marketplace
In the aftermath of the Silk Road 2.0 arrests, other darknet sites continued to operate, apparently uncompromised by the FBI investigation. Evolution Marketplace and Agora had already overtaken Silk Road 2.0 in seller listings, offering a wider range of illegal products. In his October 2013 boast that Silk Road was unstoppable, Dread Pirate Roberts claimed police attempts to close the site would result in “a Hydra effect on a massive scale.” Replacement sites sprung up around the darknet. According to reports, scientists at CMU’s CERT Division, which worked with law enforcement as part of the US Computer Emergency Response Team (CERT), began a Tor study in February 2014 that combined a Sybil attack with a tracking confirmation attack. The Sybil attack planted a number of computers in the Tor network, and captured data for statistical analysis. The Sybil computers, acting as Tor relays, also added a marker to messages for tracking confirmation.
Nevertheless, the research was performed according to institutional requirements for ethical research practice. We have built the interactive maps and conducted the preliminary visualizations to construct the hypothesis. This provided a baseline understanding of the spread and prevalence of various drugs. The variables used in the correlation matrix in the study were related to drug use-related problems in 2019 (all variables are relative). Police also took out a vital part of the dark web’s infrastructure, the information and review site Deepdotweb.com, arresting two suspected administrators in May in France and Israel, and seizing €7.5 million (£6.7 million) in bitcoins. Additionally, threat actor ‘GermanDrugScout24’ advertised a wide array of illicit substances priced in euros.
Designed to resemble a legitimate e-commerce platform, Incognito offered a slick user experience with branding, advertising, and customer support. Upon visiting the site via the Tor browser, users were greeted by a graphic interface and prompted to log in with a unique username and password. Inside, buyers could browse thousands of drug listings, many accompanied by reviews and ratings. The platform also featured prescription drug listings falsely marketed as authentic, and some products were outright scams—counterfeit pills advertised as legitimate pharmaceuticals. Law enforcement agencies around the world — but especially in the US — have started to take a keen interest in what takes place in this strange encrypted internet and are certainly getting better at infiltrating and shutting down these sites.
He says most of the sites on the regular internet, which the Senate report focused on, are scams in which dealers will take money and fail to deliver. (The Senate investigators did not actually make any purchases.) Or, these so-called “clearnet” sites lead to arrests. By the mid-2020s, darknet websites continued as facilitators of international cybercrime. In addition to proffering illicit materials, many such sites allowed money laundering and other illegal financial services. Another evolution was the involvement of national governmental agencies and personnel in these illegal activities. Archetyp Market facilitated a reported minimum of 250 million euros (about $290 million) in drug transactions over five years, with over 600,000 users, 3,200 vendors, and 17,000 listings.
The movement to easily accessible services and the way dealers are open to communication even on an unencrypted platform suggests the bold lengths they are heading in to capitalize on the market among young people. However, the constant shutdowns of these marketplaces and the difficulty to lure big numbers to the dark web has meant that criminal enterprises have had to think differently about how they reach their markets. At the same time, the COVID-19 pandemic has helped open up new avenues for criminal activity, from the greater vulnerability of home working to restricted access to venues and the use of vaccine passports.
As for Genesis Market cybercriminals located in the Netherlands, three have already been convicted and received prison sentences considered severe for that jurisdiction. The third convicted cybercriminal — the biggest Dutch user and the number 10 user worldwide — received a four-year sentence. Though Mega Darknet Market typically serves a Russian customer base, the drug revenue shown in the chart above likely came from customers based in Europe. Mega clearly dominated the realm of wholesale drug purchases, capturing 51.9% of that segment.
“History has taught us that this ecosystem is very, very resilient,” Christin says. “It’s part of a cycle, and we’re in the chaotic part of the cycle. We’ll have to see how it recovers. But if I were a betting person I would put more money on it recovering than on it dramatically changing.” All products featured on WIRED are independently selected by our editors. However, we may receive compensation from retailers and/or from purchases of products through these links.
