Darknet market
[1][2] They function primarily as black markets, selling or brokering transactions involving drugs, cyber-arms,[3] weapons, counterfeit currency, stolen credit card details,[4] forged documents, unlicensed pharmaceuticals,[5] steroids,[6] and other illicit goods as well as the sale of legal products.
[8] Following on from the model developed by Silk Road, contemporary markets are characterized by their use of darknet anonymized access (typically Tor), Bitcoin or Monero payment with escrow services, and eBay-like vendor feedback systems.
[9] Though e-commerce on the dark web started around 2006, illicit goods were among the first items to be transacted using the internet, when in the early 1970s students at Stanford University and Massachusetts Institute of Technology used the ARPANET to coordinate the purchase of cannabis.
[10] By the end of the 1980s, newsgroups like alt.drugs would become online centres of drug discussion and information; however, any related deals were arranged entirely off-site directly between individuals.
[17][18] The first marketplace to use both Tor and Bitcoin escrow was Silk Road, founded by Ross Ulbricht under pseudonym "Dread Pirate Roberts" in February 2011.
[19] This in turn led to political pressure from Senator Chuck Schumer on the US DEA and Department of Justice to shut it down,[23] which they finally did in October 2013 after a lengthy investigation.
[24] Silk Road's use of all of Tor, Bitcoin escrow and feedback systems would set the standard for new darknet markets for the coming years.
Atlantis, the first site to accept Litecoin as well as Bitcoin, closed in September 2013, just prior to the Silk Road raid, leaving users just one week to withdraw any coins.
[29][30] In October 2013, Project Black Flag closed and stole their users' bitcoins in the panic shortly after Silk Road's shut down.
In March 2015, the Evolution marketplace performed an "exit scam", stealing escrowed bitcoins worth $12 million, half of the ecosystem's listing market share at that time.
However Black Bank, which as of April 2015[update] captured 5% of the darknet market's listings, announced on May 18, 2015, its closure for "maintenance"[48] before disappearing in a similar scam.
[49] Following these events commentators suggested that further market decentralization could be required, such as the service OpenBazaar, in order to protect buyers and vendors from this risk in the future as well as more widespread support from "multi-sig" cryptocurrency payments.
[56][57] At the end of August, the leading marketplace Agora announced its imminent temporary closure after reporting suspicious activity on their server, suspecting some kind of deanonymization bug in Tor.
[59] From then on, through to 2016 there was a period of extended stability for the markets, until in April when the large Nucleus marketplace collapsed for unknown reasons, taking escrowed coins with it.
[62] Later that month, the long-lived Outlaw market closed down citing a major bitcoin cryptocurrency wallet theft; however, speculation remained that it was an exit scam.
On March 21, 2018, Reddit administrators shut down the popular subreddit /r/DarkNetMarkets citing new changes to their content policy that forbids the sale of "Drugs, including alcohol and tobacco, or any controlled substances".
[84] Dark web news and review sites such as the former[72] DeepDotWeb,[77][85] and All Things Vice provide exclusive interviews and commentary into the dynamic markets.
[89] Transactions typically use Bitcoin[1] for payment, sometimes combined with tumblers[90] for added anonymity and PGP to secure communications between buyers and vendors from being stored on the site itself.
Buyers may "finalize early" (FE), releasing funds from escrow to the vendor prior to receiving their goods in order to expedite a transaction, but leave themselves vulnerable to fraud if they choose to do so.
[116] Markets such as the original Silk Road would refuse to list anything where the "purpose is to harm or defraud, such as stolen credit cards, assassinations, and weapons of mass destruction".
[22] Later markets such as Evolution ban "child pornography, services related to murder/assassination/terrorism, prostitution, Ponzi schemes, and lotteries", but allow the wholesaling of credit card data.
Patterns recommended to avoid include hiring hitmen like Dread Pirate Roberts, and sharing handles for software questions on sites like Stack Exchange.
Law enforcement and intelligence agencies have expanded investigations of dark web markets,[124][125] A large number of services pretend to be a legitimate vendor shop, or marketplace of some kind in order to defraud people.
[133] According to 2014 studies by Martin[134][132] Aldridge & Décary-Hétu[135] and a January 2015 report from the Global Drug Policy Observatory, many harm reduction trends have been spotted.
Some users report the online element having a moderating effect on their consumption due to the increased lead time ordering from the sites compared to street dealing.
Europol reported in December 2014, "We have lately seen a large amount of physical crime move online, at least the 'marketing' and delivery part of the business ... [Buyers can] get the illegal commodity delivered risk-free to a place of their choice by the mailman or a courier, or maybe by drone in the future, and can pay with virtual currency and in full anonymity, without the police being able to identify either the buyer or the seller.
[140] In August 2015 it was announced that Interpol now offers a dedicated Dark Web training program featuring technical information on Tor and cybersecurity and simulated darknet market takedowns.
A study based on a combination of listing scrapes and feedback to estimate sales volume by researchers at Carnegie Mellon University captured some of the best data.
Robot, the protagonist, Elliot, is supposed to be repairing a Tor hidden site which turns out to be a darknet market called "Midland City" styled after the Silk Road for the sale of guns, sex trafficked women, rocket launchers, drugs and hitmen for hire.
In Grand Theft Auto Online, players who purchase warehouses and garages for illicit cargo and stolen cars can buy/steal and sell them through trade on the "SecuroServ" syndicate website.
