The rise and challenge of dark net drug markets

Drug and Alcohol Review, 2015

Proceedings of the 5th Annual ACM Web Science Conference, 2013

Over the last decade, the nature of cybercrime has transformed from naive vandalism to profit-driven, leading to the emergence of a global underground economy. A noticeable trend which has surfaced in this economy is the repeated use of forums to operate online stolen data markets. Using interaction data from three prominent carding forums: Shadowcrew, Cardersmarket and Darkmarket, this study sets out to understand why forums are repeatedly chosen to operate online stolen data markets despite numerous successful infiltrations by law enforcement in the past. Drawing on theories from criminology, social psychology, economics and network science, this study has identified four fundamental socioeconomic mechanisms offered by carding forums: (1) formal control and coordination; (2) social networking; (3) identity uncertainty mitigation; (4) quality uncertainty mitigation. Together, they give rise to a sophisticated underground market regulatory system that facilitates underground trading over the Internet and thus drives the expansion of the underground economy.

Paper presented at the Annual Convention of the Belgian Association for Political Science (VPW) and the Dutch Political Science Association (NKWP) 13 and 14 June 2019, Antwerp (Belgium), 2019

In public debates, the dark net is usually demonized as a trafficking platform and occasionally praised as a free haven for whistleblowers and dissidents from authoritarian regimes. The highly normative debate, however, obfuscates that the dark net is a space in which property rights are effectively enforced without and often against the will of state authorities. In our paper, we take this observation as a starting point. We show that drug transactions within the dark net are regulated by a combination of several distinguishable, yet interacting modes of governance. Market mechanisms play an important role to motivate participants to engage in dark net drug trafficking. The functionality of markets, however, is sustained by hierarchical steering modes, including subjectively legitimate monopolies of (virtual) violence and fee collection for the forum hosts and administrators. Both the authority of hierarchical steering and the uncertainties of market transactions are counterbalanced by network governance, which allows for the mutual exchange of information about the behavior of the actors involved. At the same time, the interplay between markets, hierarchies, and networks is facilitated by community governance, which helps to maintain a common identity and shared beliefs among all participants. In our paper, we illustrate the interplay of the different governance modes by an ethnographic "thick description" which is based on our observations and online chats with forum providers, administrators, and users of dark net drug platforms.

Drugs: Education, Prevention, and Policy, 2012

Governments have traditionally censored drug-related information, both in traditional media and, in recent years, in online media. We explore Internet content regulation from a drug-policy perspective by describing the likely impacts of censoring drug websites and the parallel growth in hidden Internet services. Australia proposes a compulsory Internet filtering regime that would block websites that ‘depict, express or otherwise deal with matters of… drug misuse or addiction’ and/or ‘promote, incite or instruct in matters of crime’. In this article, we present findings from a mixed-methods study of online drug discussion. Our research found that websites dealing with drugs, that would likely be blocked by the filter, in fact contributed positively to harm reduction. Such sites helped people access more comprehensive and relevant information than was available elsewhere. Blocking these websites would likely drive drug discussion underground at a time when corporate-controlled ‘walled gardens’ (e.g. Facebook) and proprietary operating systems on mobile devices may also limit open drug discussion. At the same time, hidden Internet services, such as Silk Road, have emerged that are not affected by Internet filtering. The inability for any government to regulate Tor websites and the crypto-currency Bitcoin poses a unique challenge to drug prohibition policies.

AoIR Selected Papers of Internet Research – 2024, 2025

2011

Abstract It has been claimed that people discuss their own illicit drug use online because anonymity allows them to avoid the legal and social risks of identifying themselves as drug users. Discourses around the risks, strategies and management of online drug discussion were produced by interviewing 26'party drug'users who reported participating in internet forums where drugs were discussed.

Proceedings of the 54th Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences, HICSS 2021, Grand Hyatt Kauai, Hawaii, USA, 4-8 January 2021, Maui, Hawaii, 2021

In recent years, there have increasingly been conflicting calls for more government surveillance online and, paradoxically, increased protection of the privacy and anonymity of individuals. Many corporations and groups globally have come under fire for sharing data with law enforcement agencies as well as for refusing to cooperate with said agencies, in order to protect their customers. In this study, we focus on Dark Web drug trading sites as an exemplary case of problematic areas of information protection, and ask what practices should be followed when gathering data from the Dark Web. Using lessons from an ongoing research project, we outline best practices for protecting the safety of the people under study on these sites without compromising the quality of research data gathering.

2016

A cryptomarket is an online marketplace platform bringing together multiple vendors and listing mostly illegal and illicit goods and services for sale. Cryptomarkets have the same look and feel as surface web, or ‘clearweb’, marketplaces such as eBay and Amazon, and they allow their customers to search and compare products and vendors. What differentiates these markets from established clearweb marketplaces, however, is that they offer anonymity. Cryptomarkets employ a range of strategies to hide the identities of their participants, make transactions anonymous and conceal the physical locations of servers. These include anonymisation services, such as Tor (The Onion Router), that hide a computer’s IP address when accessing the site (see Chapter 3); decentralised and relatively untraceable cryptocurrencies, such as bitcoin and litecoin, for making payments; and encrypted communication between market participants. Like some others (e.g. Barratt, 2012; Martin, 2013) we employ the term...

Onoma, 2019

The illegal drug trade has recently found a new route: darknet cryptomarkets. On these Ebay-like marketplaces, located in an anonymous network, drug sellers and buyers from all over the world make deals without meeting each other in person. Drug vendors are known by their user names, and those names could have a huge financial significance for their owners. This study examines the characteristics of those vendor user names and contrasts them to both other types of user names as well as to real-life commercial names. The data for the study were collected from AlphaBay, the largest cryptomarket in early 2017. Many vendors share information of themselves through their user names, referring to their products, home country and whether they work alone or in a group. Names are also used to create various images of vendor's business. Some vendors try to create an image of a normal, legal business by using company and brand name vocabulary or by plagiarising famous real-life brand names. Other vendors, however, appear to even highlight their crim-inality, referring to illegal activities or well-known real-life or fictional drug criminals. Vendor names also include references to the desired effects of drugs and the high quality of products and service. One-third of names are not connected to drugs in any visible way. Overall, vendor names more closely resemble other user names, but they clearly have also been influenced by commercial names.

C an organized illegal activities grow stronger and more advanced in response to legal pressure? In October 2013, the FBI shut down Silk Road, a thriving e-commerce market for illegal drugs. After the shock, market actors adopted a new identity verification method that enabled mass-migration to other markets, and created websites for information distribution that reduced post-shock uncertainties. The outcome was a decentralized market in which actors could operate in "open secrecy" across multiple websites. With verifiable pseudonyms and securely obfuscated real-world identities, actors could publicly discuss, plan, and participate in illegal activities. Threats from police and opportunistic criminals persisted but were no longer crippling concerns as buyers and sellers could reasonably expect that their exchange partners would be available for future business; the illegal market could operate more like a legal one. Drawing on quantitative and qualitative data, the author argues that advances in information technology have expanded the opportunity structure for cooperation and creative problem-solving in the underworld, and therefore that shocks did not hinder but rather stimulate development in digital drug markets. Data, collected in 2013-2017, include nearly one million transactions from three illicit e-commerce markets, three million messages from eight discussion forums, and website traffic from two market-independent websites.