Plus, the far-too-common grey sort (known confusingly as “grey death,” despite often being on the weaker side) is rather hard to inject. A pale, ashy shade in powder form, it turns pitch-black when mixed with water. This opaqueness makes the flash of blood impossible to see, so you never quite know whether you’ve hit a vein. As described by IRS Criminal Investigation Chief Guy Ficco, investigators “cracked the code of so-called ‘safe spaces’” by targeting these friction points.
- Note that data for 2020 only included data from January to March; price per gram is in US $.
- As observed in our data set, the opioid suppliers in the marketplaces Evolution, Pandora, and Silk Road accepted escrow as a method of payment.
- Being able to order drugs for self-medication so easily and discreetly, Marie continued, also kept misguided friends from trying to force her to quit.
- The closure of Archetyp Market will likely trigger a temporary disruption in darknet drug supply chains, but it won’t end darknet drug trafficking altogether.
- Of course, the promise of secrecy and unfiltered access might lure you in, but those same features are what make the environment so risky.
Online Resources
Or that a multiagency US law enforcement task force devoted to stemming opioid sales on the dark web arrested more than 60 people in a major operation the month before. Even after Silk Road went down, dark web marketplaces haven’t slowed down. Stopping their growth takes serious effort from US agencies like the FBI, often working hand-in-hand with international law enforcement. Many people go to the dark web to buy things they can’t find elsewhere, but what if what you’re buying is also trying to harm you? Scammers on darknet markets claim to offer legit tools or services, but instead provide you with malicious software that can infect your device.
Power Your Insights With Data You Can Trust
SANTA ANA, California – An Orange County man and South Los Angeles man were sentenced today to federal prison for supplying fentanyl-laced pills to a drug trafficking ring that sold these drugs to more than 1,000 customers nationwide via the dark web. One of the central76 discussion forums was Reddit’s /r/DarkNetMarkets/,777879 which has been the subject of legal investigation, as well as the Tor-based discussion forum, The Hub. To better understand the potential bundling relationship of opioid suppliers across different marketplaces, we calculated the Jaccard similarity coefficient between the suppliers in different marketplaces (Figure 6).
International Law Enforcement Cooperation
To facilitate these financial transactions, Incognito Market had its own “bank,” which allowed its users to deposit cryptocurrency on the site into their own accounts. After a narcotics transaction was completed, cryptocurrency from the buyer’s account was transferred to the seller’s account, less the 5% fee that Incognito collected. The bank enabled buyers and sellers to stay anonymous from each other. Because they live on the fringes, these sites are remarkably innovative.
What Was The Archetyp Market?
It is similar to an online store, except it’s not the type you’ll find with a quick Google search. From items like drugs, fake ID cards, and hacked bank accounts to more complex offerings like human trafficking, these sites carry all the illegal activities you can think of. Discover everything about what a darknet market is, top marketplaces, security threats on them, and learn how to protect your data online. At the same time, experts are calling for more education about darknet dangers – especially for younger users who discover access to such markets through Telegram or forums. Cryptocurrency-enabled online sales of illicit drugs saw a year-on-year growth of over 19% between 2023 and 2024, nearing USD 2.4 billion. Ta communicated with Srinivasan about drug orders, obtained fentanyl-laced pills and methamphetamine from sources of supply, stored those drugs in his residence, and mailed out packages with drugs to customers who had ordered them from Srinivasan on the “redlightlabs” account.
WizardShop has solidified its status as one of the best data stores in the dark web by providing an impressive quantity of quality data as well as providing a trustworthy, easy to use interface allowing criminals easy and secure buying and selling. Established in 2022, Torzon market is one of the biggest and most diverse marketplaces on the dark web. It is considered very secure thanks to strict user validations and transparent payment and vendor review procedures. Valued at approximately $15 million, Abacus Market is one of the most lucrative platforms in the dark web ecosystem. In 2024, the platform grew significantly in popularity, partly because of its strategic acquisition of users from a number of recently shut-down marketplaces, such as AlphaBay and Incognito Market, which had recently closed their doors.
Russian Market
The platform’s endurance, scale and reputation within the criminal community place it alongside now-defunct darknet markets such as Dream Market and Silk Road, both notorious for their role in facilitating online drug trafficking. We first conducted a whole-site crawl of anonymous online marketplaces and forums to solicit data. 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. Some health professionals such as “DoctorX” provide information, advice and drug-testing services on the darknet.140 The quality of products is attributed to the competition and transparency of darknet markets139 which involve user feedback and reputation features. Our research collected product listings and forum posts from 10 anonymous online market places and 6 forums.
Yet the digital nature of these crimes ensures new threats will emerge. Just as Incognito built on the playbook of its predecessors, future markets will learn from RapTor. But with blockchain intelligence advancing and global partnerships strengthening, law enforcement is better positioned than ever to detect, disrupt, and dismantle these operations. Incognito, like other modern darknet platforms, operated entirely on cryptocurrency—primarily Bitcoin and Monero. Buyers and sellers used wallets controlled either directly or through third-party mixers and exchanges. While Monero obscures transaction details, Bitcoin’s traceable blockchain provided law enforcement with critical leads, particularly at the point of off-ramp—when vendors converted crypto into fiat or moved assets through centralized exchanges.
- This opaqueness makes the flash of blood impossible to see, so you never quite know whether you’ve hit a vein.
- Early participants may see some profit, but that money usually comes from new victims, not actual earnings.
- This page may contain sensitive or adult content that’s not for everyone.
- In this way, we gathered 5 active underground marketplaces with opioid listings.
The Shift Toward Smaller, More Niche Markets
This further complicates monitoring efforts because now you need to search for the related Telegram channels and track activity there and on the marketplace itself. The FBI Cleveland Field Office is investigating the case with assistance from the DEA and IRS-CI in Chicago. Cybersecurity experts should pay close attention to these trends, as they often indicate emerging threats and profit-generating tactics among the cybercriminal forums. Active for a decade since 2014, it is a widely used credit card shop used to source stolen credit card information such as dumps, CVVs, Wholesale Accounts. It maintains a very strict level of user verification and integration with an official Telegram account to provide real-time updates to users. Various cryptocurrencies such as Bitcoin and Monero can be used to make purchases.
Safer Drug Supply On The Dark Web? It’s Complicated, Researchers Find
This is because the same user could have different IDs, and the same ID in different marketplaces can point to different users. Owing to the anonymity of the underground marketplaces and forums, there exists no ground truth to link users with their IDs. The earliest modern online anonymous markets, often referred to as darknet markets or cryptomarkets, appeared in early 2010, and evolved from an encrypted email service and migrated on to a Tor (The Onion Router) anonymity network to guarantee better anonymity to users. The first darknet market of notoriety was Silk Road, which opened at the end of January 2011 and was seized by the US Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) in October 2013 (DEA, 2013).
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. TRM has observed that these manufacturers have adapted their practices in response to intensified law enforcement efforts. Specifically, these manufacturers are becoming increasingly cautious about sharing cryptocurrency addresses in direct communications with buyers.
Inspector General Sites
This exposes users to risk as it is simple to copy a site’s code, host a fake version of it, circulate URLs online and steal users’ passwords to the official sites – and then steal their bitcoins. In May, German police shut down Wall Street Market, a thriving marketplace that had more than 63,000 deals and 5,400 sellers, with over 1 million users worldwide. It was a resource-heavy operation, involving hundreds of separate investigations by five EU and US agencies. A few weeks before, Dream – the longest running and largest market – was closed under mysterious circumstances. It scans darknet marketplaces and hacker forums to alert you instantly if anything shows up. This way, you can catch any leaks and stop them before they cause bigger problems.
In particular, MALLET is retrained and evaluated via 10-fold cross-validation. We also applied the MALLET topic modeling toolkit (package cc.mallet.topics MALLET’s class in JavaDoc API) on the same data set to predict the type of topic. The baseline model was applied directly to the labeled data (Table 3) and evaluated using 10-fold cross-validation.
HSI New York leads and directs all operational and administrative activities of the El Dorado Task Force (EDTF). The EDTF is the premier money laundering task force in the nation and is comprised of more than 200 law enforcement personnel representing approximately thirty-five (35) federal, state, and local law enforcement and regulatory agencies. The EDTF encompasses a standalone Cyber Division as part of an effort to stay abreast of emerging criminal threats and in keeping with current and future investigative priorities. The mission of the EDTF is to disrupt, dismantle, or render ineffective, organizations involved in the laundering of proceeds of narcotics trafficking and other financial crimes. Since its inception in 1992, the Task Force has been responsible for the seizure of approximately $600 million and more than 2100 arrests. Operation RapTor’s scale reflects a new era of international coordination.
