Aggressive online marketing by sellers also boosts awareness of, and accessibility to, drugs in areas where exposure to them is limited offline or among consumers who may not have encountered these substances through traditional channels. Archetyp launched in May 2020 and quickly grew to become one of the most popular dark web markets with an estimated total transaction volume of €250 million (A$446 million). It had more than 600,000 users worldwide and 17,000 listings consisting mainly of illicit drugs including MDMA, cocaine and methamphetamine. The generalizability is specific to Hydra and may not apply to other darknet markets or regions.
It offers counterfeit documents, financial fraud tools, hacking and malware services. It has an active forum and community along with an extensive user vetting process. “Satisfied customer, will be back,” writes one user on the product page of a meth dealer with the handle shardyshardface.
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LegitScript investigative analysts explored this issue earlier this year when we conducted in-depth research on dark web opioid sales on behalf of the Center for Safe Internet Pharmacies (CSIP). Our investigation culminated in the report The State of Opioid Sales on the Dark Web. Similarly, some cryptomarket drugs—MDMA powder and cocaine—were far less likely to contain adulterants. But others—amphetamine and LSD—were found to be more likely to be adulterated than samples acquired in-person. Using the lab data about each sample’s composition, the research team investigated whether drugs from the dark web were more likely to contain the substance advertised and less likely to contain contaminants, compared to those bought offline.
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Operating on the dark web, these platforms allow sellers to evade regulations, posing serious risks to buyers. The World Wide Web is made up of the surface web, the deep web, and the dark web. The surface web (also called the clear web and the open web) is what most of us navigate when we check social media, shop online, or read the news. Websites on the surface web are publicly accessible and indexed by search engines such as Google and Bing, permitting internet users to search for them.
Previously, he worked at the New York Times and volunteered as a first responder for refugees arriving on the shores of Lesvos. The FBI is considered the primary agency responsible for policing the dark web. Spotlight on America has requested a sit-down interview with them to learn more about efforts to fight horrific crimes like child sex trafficking. It targeted opioid sales on the dark net and led to five arrests in California. Henderson says their investigations are often joint efforts with multiple agencies, both domestically and internationally.
Dark Web Websites
The list of the offered on-the-market drug data was gathered from the “darknet market” Hydra, along with the volume delivered and region of the offer. The data were collected using advanced web scraping techniques to extract specific information on drug types, quantities, and corresponding regions. These platforms, operating within the Onion Router (TOR) network (a network that allows anonymous browsing), are anonymous and transient; therefore, specific market names are omitted. We aimed to use the dark web data and officially published indicators to identify the most vulnerable regions of Russia and the correlations between the pairs of variables to measure how illicit drug trade can affect population well-being. AlphaBay, which was the largest dark net market before it was shut down by law enforcement agencies around the world last year, accounted for $94 million US in drug sales from September 2015 to August 2016, Tzanetakis’s paper says.
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Germany had the lowest percentage of users in the population for both stimulants and sedatives. The work reports usage rates in EU countries slightly below those seen in the USA (20% lifetime usage vs between 7 and 13% in EU). Predominantly, psychiatric drugs with potent sedative, stimulant or euphoriant effects are sold on cryptomarkets and this varies by country. With some caveats regarding the limitations of cryptomarket digital trace data taken into account, the study of trends of these products sold online over time may offer a novel and increasingly important window onto wider drug purchasing habits. Social media companies are under growing pressure to eradicate drug dealing on their platforms, says Ashly Fuller, a PhD candidate at University College London researching the sale and advertisement of illegal drugs to young people on social media.
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Note that the escrow mechanism is widely deployed in the anonymous online market because it helps to build trust and resolve disputes between sellers and buyers. When the purchase is made, the opioid trader ships the purchased item to the buyer (step 10). Once the item is received, the buyer finalizes the purchase by notifying the anonymous online marketplace to release the funds held in escrow (step 11) 8,9. After that, an opioid buyer often leaves review comments under the product listing or discusses the purchasing experience in the forum (step 12). This joint report prepared by the EMCDDA and Europol considers the latest findings from international research, fresh empirical data, and operational information and intelligence in order to illuminate how darknet markets function and how they relate to criminal behaviour.
Background research tasks included learning from past drug lords, researching legal matters, studying law enforcement agency tactics and obtaining legal representation. Patterns recommended to avoid include hiring hitmen like Dread Pirate Roberts, and sharing handles for software questions on sites like Stack Exchange. If buyers tend to complain about the quality of the drugs, if they report the seller as part of an exit scam (where he gets the money and flees). According to data from Lunar, our dark web monitoring platform, the countries most mentioned in drug trafficking posts on the dark web are the US, the UK, Germany, Russia, Netherlands, and Israel.
- Europol will continue working with our partners to make the internet safer for everyone.”
- This is of interest to the psychiatric profession since it suggests that many of the drug classes used in psychiatric practice are not being sourced from cryptomarkets in any meaningful amounts for the purposes of self-medication.
- According to the investigation, Incognito Market was an online narcotics bazaar that existed on the dark web.
- The supply of cannabis is about 10 times higher than opiates in terms of weight on the market.
- The Abacus Market links to the new dark web marketplace sections and took over much of the vacuum left by the AlphaBay takedown.
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“Drug checking is a precautionary and pragmatic response to the health risks of unpredictable drug markets, often detecting hazardous substances before they flood the local market,” she said. “These apps are a lot more convenient and easier to use than the dark web, but they lack many of the security features and review capacities of darknet markets,” she said. Most web users spend their time on the surface web which makes up only a small fraction (an estimated five percent) of the internet. The majority of the internet (an estimated 95 percent) exists within the deep web, unindexed by search engines like Google and Bing.
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Buying directly from an online dealer—as opposed to through one of the marketplaces—is generally inadvisable. There’s no escrow system when you do that and, therefore, no guarantee they’ll actually send you something. After all, you can’t exactly use Paypal or your credit card to pay for illegal drugs.
The dark web was built for anonymity and, as such, it’s often nearly impossible for buyers to know who they are transacting with or where their purchases are being sourced. Drugs may be adulterated, counterfeit, or possibly made by amateurs out of their homes using substandard equipment. These dangers exist on the surface web as well; however, without illicit marketplaces that have built-in escrow and rating systems, there may be a higher likelihood of nondelivery schemes and phishing scams from websites on the surface web.
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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.
Russia’s unique socioeconomic context, for instance, influences drug trade dynamics differently than in other countries. Our proposed research approach can fix this by implementing it in other marketplaces in other countries. The developed research method allows us to connect darknet drug sales data with official health, crime, and court information.
The European Drug Report 2018 identified the increasing use and availability of sedative drugs amongst young people as an area of particular concern, requiring further investigation, policy consideration and prevention efforts. Since 2014, 14 new benzodiazepines have been reported to the EU Early Warning System, indicating substantial efforts towards illicit drug development within this drug class (European monitoring centre for drugs & drug addiction, 2018). In the USA, benzodiazepine prescription rates continue to increase (Bachhuber, Hennessy, Cunningham, & Starrels, 2016; Lembke, Papac, & Humphreys, 2018). 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.
