The ubiquity of the internet has transformed black markets, with shadowy street transactions now taking place in sophisticated digital marketplaces. 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.
Market Activity
The rise of counterfeit pharmaceuticals on dark web marketplaces is a major public health threat. These drugs often contain incorrect dosages, harmful adulterants, or entirely different substances than advertised. A 2020 study in JAMA Network Open found that nearly 40% of medications from unregulated online sources contained subtherapeutic levels of active ingredients or dangerous contaminants, increasing the risk of treatment failure and adverse reactions. Counterfeiters exploit the anonymity of these platforms to distribute falsified medications that mimic legitimate prescriptions, deceiving consumers seeking lower-cost alternatives or unavailable treatments. Drug trafficking is one of the most widespread activities on the dark web, with drugs being the most commonly available product across illegal marketplaces. This illicit trade takes place on various platforms, including “drug markets,” chat applications, and forums on the dark web.
Products And Services
More surprisingly, the UK represents 31% of the hypnotics & anxiolytics market, despite having a much smaller population than the USA. This pattern is not repeated in the CNS stimulants grouping, where the UK-based sales take just 16% of the market, compared to just under 60% being from the USA. 11% of all opioid dependency products are sold from within Germany, in contrast to the pattern seen in other two groupings where German sales are relatively small components of the market.
The Birth And Rise Of The Silk Road
This operation was aided by non-operational supporting participation from the Financial Crimes Enforcement Network (FinCEN) and U.S. Local, state, and other federal agencies also contributed to Operation SpecTor investigations through task force participation and regional partnerships. Established in 2019, Russian Market is a well-known and highly regarded data store on the dark web, specializing in the sale of PII and various forms of stolen data.
Trade is booming despite disruptions from law enforcement and particularly “exit scams”, in which market admins abruptly close down sites and take all available funds. The operation resulted in the seizure of 50.8 million euros ($53.4 million) — in cash and virtual currencies, nearly 1,900 pounds of drugs and 117 firearms in a series of raids in several countries. Investigators received leads from local police departments investigating overdose deaths, including that of a 19-year-old man in Colorado who loved learning languages and building his own computers, according to FBI Deputy Director Paul Abbate. Beyond drugs, there are now ever-growing examples of generative AI being used for sexual deepfakes across schools and even of public figures, including the recent case of NRL presenter Tiffany Salmond. In fact, it is routine for individuals participating in these dark web communities, par for the course of engaging in the markets. The durability of these markets tells us that if policing responses keep following the same playbook, they will keep getting the same results.
Data Availability
A 2016 LegitScript report prepared for CSIP showed that, without exception, drugs sold through test buys from the surface web were shipped from the country of origin using public (government-run) postal services. In 2016, the DEA made purchases from four vendors on a major dark web marketplace called Dream Market and received verified controlled substances from each, all of which were shipped through United States Priority Mail, according to a criminal complaint filed by the DEA in August 2017. New and potentially more vulnerable population segments can be reached by exploitative drug dealers as they begin to sell on social platforms and the number of drug consumers in the US and around the world grows. The US Drug Enforcement Administration has warned that because dealers are “no longer confined to street corners and the dark web,” social media users’ posts and inboxes can be peppered by dealers seeking to purvey these addictive and, when misused, harmful drugs. “Social media extends the reach of the Sinaloa and Jalisco cartels directly into drug users’ phones, with potentially fatal consequences,” the DEA said in its 2024 national drug threat assessment report, bemoaning that dealers are more difficult to apprehend online than the streets.
What People Are Saying
Nowadays, they have relocated online, especially to the more clandestine areas of the “darknet.” In 2022, there were 133 publications returned when the phrase “darknet AND drugs” was used in the search in MEDLINE. 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.
Global Synthetic Drug Markets: The Present And Future
In furtherance of Operation RapTor and in its first action as a JCODE member agency, the Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) additionally sanctioned Iranian national Behrouz Parsarad for his role as the founder and operator of Nemesis Market following seizure of the market. Parsarad was also indicted by a federal grand jury in the Northern District of Ohio on drug trafficking charges related to the illegal business he ran on the dark web. To the best of our knowledge, a comprehensive overview of the opioid supply chain in the anonymous online marketplaces and forums, as well as a measurement study of trading activities, is still an open research challenge. This is the first study to measure and characterize opioid trading in anonymous online marketplaces and forums.
To collect the listing information of 5 anonymous online marketplaces (ie, Apollon, Avaris, Darkbay, Empire, and The Versus Project), we conducted a whole-site crawl. The crawler was implemented in Python and used the Selenium module to launch browsers and to send crawling requests 24. To avoid blocking from the marketplace, we provided as an input to the scraper a session cookie that we obtained by manually logging into the marketplace and solving a Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart (CAPTCHA). However, some sites, namely, the Empire Market, forced users to log out when the life span of the session cookie was expired.
- The RCMP say they have a national investigative strategy to combat the mail order drug trade in partnership with Canada Post, Health Canada, CBSA and other law enforcement agencies.
- Those suppliers kept using the same IDs for years to gain reputation and familiarity from buyers.
- Encryption technologies allow vendors to communicate with customers and receive payments anonymously.
- The research used appropriate sources of data and effective practices to analyze the data to secure its validity and reliability.
- THE HAGUE — Authorities in the U.S. and Europe arrested nearly 300 people, confiscated more than $53 million and seized a dark-web marketplace as part of an international crackdown on drug trafficking that officials say was the largest operation of its kind.
- The BKA also said 20 additional properties were searched, mainly targeting Archtetyp moderators and vendors.
- When considering the sedative market in other countries, caution needs to be exercised.
- 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).
- There is significant regional variability in drug usage, with the most urbanized areas like cities Saint Petersburg and Moscow experiencing higher levels of drug usage than the more rural or less populated regions.
- Sales of drugs used in the treatment of opioid dependency are also substantial in the USA.
- My sources agree that unwanted fentanyl is found in lower levels in drugs bought online compared with street drugs.
In our study, a total of 248,359 listings from 10 anonymous online marketplaces and 1,138,961 traces (ie, threads of posts) from 6 underground forums were collected. Among them, we identified 28,106 opioid product listings and 13,508 opioid-related promotional and review forum traces from 5147 unique opioid suppliers’ IDs and 2778 unique opioid buyers’ IDs. A total of 248,359 listings from 10 anonymous online marketplaces and 1,138,961 traces (ie, threads of posts) from 6 underground forums were collected. First, an opioid trader, who intends to list the selling information and find potential customers, will first access the anonymous online marketplaces and forums, using an anonymous browsing tool such as a Tor client or a web-to-Tor proxy (step 1 in Figure 1) 5,6. Anonymous online marketplaces and forums usually operate as hidden Tor services, which can only be resolved through Tor (an anonymity network). Figures 2 and 3 illustrate examples of opioid listings in The Versus Project and Alphabay.
However, there’s been no formal evaluation of online and street drug sales that can attest to the relative purity and safety of what’s sold in either place—and illegal drugs always come with a safety risk, regardless of where they are bought from. 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). Silk Road 2.0 was launched soon after the original Silk Road was seized and since that time there has been a proliferation of darknet markets.. In addition to Empire Market’s more than 18,000 drug listings, another site called Nightmare Market now lists 28,000 drug products, along with the dark web’s usual assortment of stolen credit card numbers, counterfeits, and hacking tools. A new, Reddit-style forum site called Dread, hosted on a Tor hidden service, has already replaced the seized DeepDotWeb as a community hub, where users discuss which site to use when one is taken down by police or turns out to be run by scammers.
Anonymous online marketplaces are usually platforms for sellers and buyers to conduct transactions in a virtual environment. They usually come with anonymous forums for sellers and buyers to share information, promote their products, leave feedback, and share experiences about purchases. To understand how it works, we describe an opioid transaction’s operational steps on the anonymous online marketplaces and forums.
