Correlation matrix of Hydra marketplace indicators with official statistical variables. “To me, that’s very different than buying books or other things from people on a used market, where the risk is you don’t get that product, versus this product could potentially kill you.” Investigators in Calgary say police crackdowns haven’t been enough to suppress the growing appeal of dark web markets. “Given that the dark web is anonymous, it allows for a very easy vehicle in order for people to buy drugs,” Lalande says. Dream Market and other sites like it are likely helping fuel the deadly fentanyl crisis that has rippled across the country, says Sgt. Mike Lalande of the Calgary Police Service, who investigates cybercrime. In a recent scan of the site, Dream featured roughly 1,000 listings for drugs that ship within Canada, ranging from opium, morphine and fentanyl to ecstasy, ketamine and date-rape drugs.
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In the second stage, we collected 31 variables from official sources to compare officially collected data with darknet data about amounts and types of selling drugs in every 85 regions of Russia. The health-related data were obtained from official published sources—statistical yearbooks. Maps, diagrams, correlation matrixes, and applied observational statistical methods were used.
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Within the USA, CNS stimulants increased in popularity from an already high base over the time period studied, whilst the UK market shrunk relative to other drugs for sale in that region. This was also the case in India, though these products remained a substantial part of the Indian market activity. In other countries, these base levels and changes over the time period were either substantively or statistically insignificant (or both), with the exception of Austria which saw a large increase in sales of these CNS stimulants. The dataset is used alternatively as a longitudinal dataset to uncover trends in the data and as a whole to represent total market activity. In this latter case, feedbacks that are present in the data that occurred before the previous data collection of any one specific listing are excluded from the total feedback so that these are not double counted and artificially inflate the sales of any product. The linear regression results therefore represent the estimated percentage of sales within any one country attributable to any one drug classification (the constant) followed by an estimation of the yearly percentage point change over the study period.
- Dealers ran hundreds of paid advertisements on Meta platforms in 2024 to sell illegal opioids and what appeared to be cocaine and ecstasy pills, according to a report this year by the Tech Transparency Project, and federal prosecutors are investigating Meta over the issue.
- They also typically use a virtual private network (VPN), which creates a secure “tunnel” for sending and receiving data across shared or public networks by configuring their computing devices as if they were directly connected by a private network.
- Previously, he worked at the New York Times and volunteered as a first responder for refugees arriving on the shores of Lesvos.
- By recognizing and accounting for regional differences, policy makers can design and implement more effective strategies to combat drug use and mitigate its harms.
- One of the most significant features of digital markets is that they facilitate the introduction of drugs to new areas, which in turn affects consumption patterns.
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The same can be said of the Netherlands, with its almost non-existent sedative market. Denmark and Austria both demonstrate high and consistent levels of sales for these products, and Sweden increased from a high base (over 20% of all sales) by close to 10 percentage points per year. Although Novak et al. reported high sedative usage in Sweden, for these three countries to have such exceptionally high levels is unusual and it is likely there is some cross-border/within-Schengen trade occurring. Federal prosecutors have accused the men of operating 10 virtual storefronts on 17 different dark web marketplaces from September 2018 through February, the department said in a statement.
Darknet Market
- Archetyp Market was one of the few marketplaces allowing the sale of highly potent synthetic opioids such as fentanyl, contributing to broader health threats and overdose risks in Europe and beyond.
- “They don’t need to go to a back alley or a street corner and meet somebody they’ve never met before, which could potentially put them in harm’s way. They can sit at their computer or their smartphone, and they can purchase the drug of their choice and have it delivered to their home….
- Continued monitoring is essential to ensure drug policies remain responsive to the current situation.
- Drug trafficking in the dark web involves various methods for transferring payments for illegal drugs, both of which leverage blockchain technology to ensure anonymity for both suppliers and buyers.
- We developed Lunar to monitor the deep and dark web, including dark web marketplace sites.
According to Europol’s 2025 Serious and Organised Crime Threat Assessment report, nearly all forms of serious and organized crime now have a digital footprint. Criminals are leveraging the online domain to increase efficiency and maintain anonymity, and darknet markets are generating US$5–7.5 million in daily revenue. The data collection and analysis steps are presented on the flowchart in Figure 1 and explained below. These 32 complete Hydra marketplace downloads were performed 2-3 times monthly. Thus, we could estimate the dynamics of market scene changes during a relatively extended period. All these conditions theoretically support the anonymity and safety of the business.
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In this way, we collected 7100 promotion posts and 6408 review posts from forum posts in total. Our modification of the semantic comparison model will generate comparable word embeddings for opioid jargon words in legitimate documents (ie, benign corpora embedding) and in underground corpora (ie, underground corpora embedding). Specifically, our modification used a series of opioid keywords collected to generate their benign corpora embeddings and then searched for words whose underground corpora embeddings were close to the opioid keywords’ benign corpora embeddings. We output the top 100 proper nouns in the underground corpora in our implementation, whose embeddings showed the closest cosine distance to the known opioid keywords.
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This demonstrates a limitation of the digital trace methodology – although it appears that there is a lot of market activity in these products, with just over 10,000 sales recorded in the data, once this is split into subgroups at a country level interpretation becomes more challenging. This is true even if they only represent a small part of the cryptomarket trade in comparison to other products (see Soska & Christin, 2015). Products such as antidepressants, antiepileptics, antipsychotics and dementia drugs are rarely listed and even more rarely bought from these markets.
These publications are primarily based on data gathered through passive observation. Some researchers offer cryptocurrency transaction monitoring, with a tiny portion offering data documented from the initial request for a drug purchase through the final qualitative examination of all received samples from 3 vendors on the “dream market” darknet marketplace 3. Some authors attempted to analyze a single substance using “Big data” techniques 4.
Considering the COVID-19 restrictions, the illicit nature of the studied substances, and their effects on people’s health and well-being, we discovered all the proposed questions in this research. First, we learned how many drugs, in grams per 100,000 population, were found on the “shelves” of the Hydra dark market on a subnational level. In 2019, on an average day, the total quantity of drugs available for purchase on the darknet, in batches of 5 g or less, amounted to 124 kg. It was a period of COVID-19 restrictions, so we have data on the decreasing amounts of drugs distributed monthly in Russia during COVID-19 restrictions. A strong and significant correlation between the quantities of heroin for sale and lethal overdoses or fatal poisoning was established. Some researchers who study the dark web have found the quality of drugs available on these hidden websites is superior to that of drugs sold on the street.
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A screenshot of Dream Market, below, shows drugs on offer, including crystal meth, cocaine, hash and MDMA. Liam knows what he’s doing is dangerous, but he is addicted to drugs and hides his dependency from family and many of his friends. He’s so worried that people will discover his double life that he risks overdosing alone. Synthetic cannabinoids, marketed as “legal highs” or “spice,” bind more aggressively to cannabinoid receptors than natural cannabis, leading to unpredictable effects. A 2021 review in Toxicology Reports found that synthetic cannabinoids were linked to severe reactions, including acute psychosis, seizures, and cardiovascular complications.
Dream boasts almost the same number of listings for other products, including items that purport to be designer clothes, counterfeit money and stolen online banking information. With roughly 100,000 listings, Dream Market is believed to be the world’s largest market on the dark web and the biggest dark net shopping centre for drugs. A little more than half of the listings are for substances that are illicit, unregulated or diverted from legitimate sources. The country was at one point home to among the highest number of dealers globally in one dark web market, called AlphaBay, which was ultimately shuttered by police. They’re shopping for drugs on the so-called dark net, accessible not through traditional search engines but by way of special browsers and software that conceal IP addresses and make users harder to trace. Biological samples such as human-derived tissues and blood products are also sold through illicit channels, posing risks of disease transmission and improper handling.
In total, 3045 individual merchants were selling 6721 unique items and 58,563 unique listings where specific amounts of products were sold in a particular region of Russia. At the same time, the study’s findings represent a specific time frame and may not capture evolving trends in drug use and market dynamics. Usually, it takes a few weeks for buyers to transfer to alternative or new sites.
