Although the number of multisellers suffers a severe drop (Fig. 4a) and the multiseller network drastically shrinks (Fig. 6), the net income of multisellers remains persistently the largest among sellers throughout the whole period of observation, as shown in Fig. This suggests that the multiseller activity is sensitive to external shocks but also that it yields higher profits. Throughout the whole period of observation, the dominant category of buyers is market-U2U buyers followed by market-only buyers, representing on average 52% and 42% of all buyers, respectively. The U2U-only category is comparatively small, representing only 6% of all buyers on average. The number of market-U2U and market-only buyers also drops as a consequence of operation Bayonet.
Individually, they are able to yield significant high incomes compared to other types of sellers. With the advent of several markets at the beginning of 2014, the number of multisellers rapidly grows, representing more than 20% of all sellers until the beginning of 2016 (see Supplementary Information Section S3). During 2016 and 2017, AphaBay becomes the dominant market (see Fig. 3), polarizing sellers around its own ecosystem, such that the fraction of multisellers decreases to 10% of all sellers until its closure. Then, after operation Bayonet, the number of sellers in all categories and multisellers significantly drops, as shown in Fig.
Data Availability
As input parameter, we considered the full network, transactions from/to DWMs and U2U transactions between users (see Section S4). Plotted lines indicate the median value while bands represent the 95% confidence interval. Negative and positive numbers indicate the days prior and after the closure, respectively. Only the 33 DWMs that closed during our time period are considered in the analysis. (a) Schematic representation of an ego network surrounding a dark web marketplace (“DWM”, in red).
After the shutdown of Silk Road, in the last quarter of 2013, the ecosystem evolves to a structure where several markets coexist. This structural change is reflected in the median net income of sellers and buyers, as shown in Fig. While the curves for the seller and buyer median net income were negatively correlated before Silk Road’s shutdown, after that moment they became positively correlated. Specifically, sellers show a trend of increase and buyers a trend of decrease in their median net income before the shutdown.
Effect On Purchases And Drug Diffusion
This form of parallel import frequently occurs when the price of an item is significantly higher in one country than another. The percentages of overall sales recorded in the dataset are presented for the top three categories and for the most common product within those categories only. Overall market share and within country proportion and change, September 2013 to July 2016. Springer Nature remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations.
Multiseller Network
Existing research studying the workings of cryptomarkets and aimed at assisting law enforcement in identifying key players, often uses methods such as topic modelling or sentiment analysis7,8,9,10,11,12. These methods rely on (combinations of) commonly used words and sentence structures in the forum message contents. However, the rise of the use of message encryption in criminal communication, calls for the development of methods not reliant on knowledge of message content. In this work, we aim to develop a method to identify key players based on the temporal structure of their communication network alone; thus, ignoring message content entirely. Despite consistent results, this study has limitations that may be addressed in future work. First, while the dataset is preprocessed with state-of-the-art methods, there is no ground truth for validation, and this uncertainty propagates to our findings.
Market Activity
Law enforcement aims to disrupt criminal activity conducted through these markets by targeting key players vital to the market’s existence and success. We particularly focus on detecting successful vendors responsible for the majority of illegal trade. Our methodology aims to uncover whether the task of key player identification should center around plainly measuring user and forum activity, or that it requires leveraging specific patterns of user communication.
Market Operations
After all, the ranking induced by the centralities and activity indicators is more useful to law enforcement practitioners than the actual values. 1, indicate the potential of all network measures and activity indicators to distinguish vendors from non-vendors. To predict vendor success, we must determine if it is possible to distinguish between vendors and non-vendors, as well as between various levels of success.
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These themes offer insights not only into the cat-and-mouse game played by law enforcement and cybercriminals but the increasing deficiencies of law enforcement entities despite their actions in this sphere. Given the increasing sophistication of cybercriminals and the inexhaustible need for illicit and controlled substances, law enforcement might opt to curtail the growth and influence of cryptomarkets instead of shutting them down entirely. The “within country share and change” columns of the table present the within country longitudinal analysis of the market activity restricted to within each country as modelled through the smoothed regression technique outlined above.
Finally, despite its large size, the sample only allowed us to perform non-parametric tests due to the lack of normal distribution. The re-evaluation of the indicators applied in the questionnaire, taking statistical aspects into account, could help create a database suitable for running more robust parametric tests and developing models. The findings, criminal policy recommendations, and criminological research remarks presented above are summarized in Table Table66. The datasets generated by the survey research and analyzed in this study are available from the corresponding author upon reasonable request.
The data upon which this work is based does not allow for the separating out of package sizes and the amount of active ingredient in any one sale. However given the relatively low unit price for each of these drugs, analysis of the distribution of the raw listing prices within each country can give an indication of how many doses of each product are being sold with the typical product listing (Table 3). With this caveat in mind, under the assumption of a unit price of around 2 dollars per pill, it is clear that the vast majority of listings are for more than a few doses. The median price for hypnotics & anxiolytics from the USA, for instance, at $79 implies that the most typical listing is for in excess of 20 tablets. For the two countries with the highest median priced sedatives, China and Canada, these pricing findings are strongly indicative of a business to business model similar to that identified by Aldridge and Décary-Hétu (2014).
Transactions are streamlined using Monero and Zcash, offering stronger privacy than Bitcoin. Darknet markets in 2025 offer secure and efficient platforms for drug transactions, leveraging advanced encryption and decentralized networks. These platforms prioritize anonymity, using Tor and Bitcoin to mask user identities and financial trails. Escrow systems ensure fair deals, holding funds until buyers confirm receipt, while vendor reviews highlight trustworthy sellers. Darknet markets can be risky, as there is no guarantee of product quality or seller reliability. Additionally, law enforcement often monitors darknet markets for illegal activity, which can result in arrests and prosecutions.
In particular, for current success we see clearly higher difference scores in the last months. On the contrary, for future success the final months show lower difference scores than before. This behaviour is likely due to the delay between successful vendors establishing themselves in the network and reaping the benefits in terms of sales. In other words, high betweenness centrality is expected to be more a prelude to than a consequence of vendor success. Thus, these results show the potential of betweenness centrality as an early warning signal for future vendor success.
- Until the end of 2013, when Silk Road is the dominant market (see Fig. 3), market-only sellers is the dominant category, and there are no multisellers.
- For a local machine configuration, he recommends a computer purchased for cash running Linux, using a local Tor transparent proxy.
- Alongside that, there are many self-identified dependent and addicted PWUD who find the predictability, professionalism and stability of supply a significant benefit 24.
- To this end, we report the top 25 users, their member title, and their current and future sales for September 2014 for these measures in Table 2.
- After it was shut down in July 2017 following law enforcement action in the United States, Canada, and Thailand as part of Operation Bayonet, it was relaunched in August 2021 by the self-described co-founder and security administrator DeSnake.
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- Distribution of listing prices in USD, by psychiatric drug categorisation and country of origin, active products only.
- This suggests that the multiseller activity is sensitive to external shocks but also that it yields higher profits.
- Online pharmacies (of either the ‘no prescription required’ or ‘free online consultation’ varieties) have been the main source of online procurement of prescription drugs since the early 2000s.
- The cryptomarket Evolution observed two notable changes in user and post activity.
- (b) Relative difference between the top percentile and all vendors, future success.
- The most affected are multisellers, with a drop of 78% in the median income, followed by market-U2U and market-only sellers, with a drop of 59% and 47%, respectively.
Next, we report and interpret results for the task of distinguishing vendors from non-vendors and predicting the levels of vendor success. Then, we explore to what extent the rankings induced by (network) measures can reduce the set of users for law enforcement to investigate, while still including the greatest share of successful vendors. Finally, we look at the set of top ranked users for the most promising network centrality measure and activity indicator at a specific point in time. We do so to establish how well represented key players are among these top ranked users. Examples include the sale of high-quality products with low risk for contamination (including lacing and cutting), vendor-tested products, sharing of trip reports, and online discussion of harm reduction practices.
