To understand how it works, we describe an opioid transaction’s operational steps on the anonymous online marketplaces and forums. We present a view about how such services operate and how different entities interact with each other (Figure 1). We first conducted a whole-site crawl of anonymous online marketplaces and forums to solicit data. We aimed to profile the opioid supply chain in anonymous markets and forums via a large-scale, longitudinal measurement study on anonymous market listings and posts. Toward this, we propose a series of techniques to collect data; identify opioid jargon terms used in the anonymous marketplaces and forums; and profile the opioid commodities, suppliers, and transactions. In total, we collected 248,359 listings from 10 anonymous online marketplaces and 1,138,961 traces (ie, threads of posts) from 6 underground forums.
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Heroin, opium, cocaine, acid, prescription drugs are all readily available. They sit on an encrypted part of internet called “Tor Hidden Services” where URLs are a string of meaningless numbers and letters that end in .onion, and are accessed using a special browser called “Tor”. Saheed Aremu passionately advocates for digital privacy and cybersecurity in the modern digital age.
Malware Sales
As long as people want to buy and sell illegal stuff online, be it stolen data, narcotics, drugs, or malware, these markets will keep resurfacing, no matter how many times authorities take them down. However, if we’re being honest, the majority of activity on darknet markets involves illegal or heavily regulated items. A 2020 study found that almost 57% of sites on the Tor network hosted some form of illegal content.
- Imagine an underground version of your favorite online marketplace, somewhere hidden, exclusive, and often operating outside legal boundaries.
- This can be stopped if law enforcement agencies can break any link, particularly dark web marketplaces, in the chain.
- But the dark net markets learn from each mistake and are becoming more secure and more decentralised, making them incrementally more difficult to combat.
- Nevertheless, the Western DNM ecosystem experienced some innovation in spite of recent enforcement actions.
- Drug dealers can sell to customers across the world, not just locally.
- Note that loading sites with TOR usually takes considerably longer than on the clearnet.
Underground Opioid Trading
The evolving landscape of crypto crime in 2024 highlights a complex interplay between advancing security measures and increasingly adaptive illicit actors. While efforts to curb illegal activities have shown promising results, threat actors continue to innovate — exploiting vulnerabilities within decentralized finance, blockchain infrastructure, and emerging technologies. This incident also marked the never-before-seen attempt of its administrator, Pharoah (arrested in May 2024 and revealed to be 23 year-old Taiwanese national Rui-Siang Lin), to extort the marketplace’s users.
The dark web or darknet is a computer network that uses encryption and randomized relay systems to mask a user’s identity, IP address, and browsing history. A key theme throughout the year has been the resilience and adaptability of illicit networks. Sanctioned entities, terrorist organizations, and ransomware groups have shifted tactics in response to global crackdowns, embracing new technologies and methods to obscure their activities. This adaptability underscores the need for constant evolution in enforcement strategies and international cooperation.
The only way in is through the use of special software that renders all users anonymous and untraceable. Although these marketplaces are continuously shut down by law enforcement agencies, they still work today. Interestingly, new sites get more hype, and it even becomes difficult to shut them down, as they have better security than the older ones. Discover everything about what a darknet market is, top marketplaces, security threats on them, and learn how to protect your data online. Indeed, Hydra was so popular that vendors had illegal ads painted on the streets of cities, advertising drugs or jobs.
The 10 Biggest Dark Web Markets In 2025 – Updated List & Security Insights
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. MDMA prices, on and offline, are often a good indicator of supply-chain status. In most of the UK, 1kg prices for the drug have risen to around £2,000 a kilo, up from an average of £1,500 in January 2019. Buyers have accused suppliers of price-gouging, while smugglers rightly demand higher fees for the increased risks they are taking by crossing quiet, watchful borders. For the first time, FBI agents from all of the bureau’s field offices visited buyers to tell them about the overdose danger of pills sold online, which are often disguised to look like prescription drugs.
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One defendant in California led an organization that bought fentanyl in bulk, pressed it with methamphetamine into pills and sold millions of them to thousands of people on the dark web, he said. The largest number of arrests were made in the U.S., which is in the grips of an overdose crisis. Its focus on financial fraud and high-value transactions has attracted a dedicated user base, contributing to its growing reputation and market value. Five or six times a day, a man from Texas injects a dose of carefully measured fentanyl.
The Top 10 Darknet Marketplaces Of 2025
These sites often look basic or outdated, and their URLs are lengthy strings of random letters and numbers. Keep in mind that visiting the dark web isn’t illegal, but engaging in criminal activity there is. Just like on the regular internet, phishing is a big problem on the dark web as well. Fraudsters create fake versions of popular darknet sites to trick users into entering login details or personal data.
Common Scams And Fraudulent Activities On Darknet Markets
Our goal here was to identify anonymous forum posts with the topics of opioid commodity promotion (eg, listing promotion) and review (eg, report fake opioid vendors). We then analyzed these forum posts to profile underground opioid trading behaviors. As the routines and restrictions of the working day receded for millions on lockdown, buying drugs online has never been so popular, research shows.
- Their study, recently published in the journal Addiction, uncovered a complicated relationship between the quality of drugs and their source.
- In our study, we only selected marketplaces with more than 30 opioid listings.
- And this is what scares Tony and others like him—not getting caught in a single deal, but having a small bust roll into charges for a lifetime’s dealing thanks to the records logged in your phone or on the servers at Instagram or Snapchat.
- It may take anywhere from 15 seconds to several minutes for a page to load, depending on network and site demand.
- More than one in 10 drug purchases made during the UK’s first national lockdown were made on the dark web, according to research by Release.
Often drugs ordered from rogue websites come from foreign countries. It is a felony to import drugs into the United States and ship to a non-DEA registrant. Apart from the dark web markets that are operating online today, some raided platforms influenced many markets. So, as the darkweb merry-go-round cranks up once more, the FBI and Interpol are still claiming to have ended online drug dealing. But their expensive campaigns are no more effective than a traditional shakedown on a bunch of dealers on one street corner in one city.
In conversations with dealers and buyers, a trend emerges among the stories of smooth transactions. Popular hashtags, like #Kush4Sale or #OGKush, are important, and a good place to start. Some users post requests but that’s the easiest way to get scammed or arrested, so, if you’re trying to buy, you’re better off searching for sellers and messaging them directly. Back in the days of Silk Road – one of the earliest darknet markets shut down by the FBI in 2013 – a trained physician named Fernando Caudevilla invited customers to send drugs for testing and posted results online. Professor Fiona Measham, the charity’s director, says that in the early days of dark web markets, researchers found drugs were generally higher quality and less likely to be missold compared to on the streets. Using payment and shipment information that the sellers themselves provided, the Senate investigators identified 500 transactions in 43 states adding up to $766 million worth of fentanyl, going by its street value, just from these six sellers.
