However, they have so far mainly focused on DWM users, without distinguishing between buyers and sellers, and neglecting the different weight that more active users may have in the system. The reason is that the operational structure of DWMs inherently hides the seller–buyer link, as all transactions are made through the marketplace. Buyers send money to the marketplace, which in turn sends the money to the seller. Thus, further analyses in this direction have been hindered by the lack of heuristics able to identify these two key classes of actors in transaction networks and their roles in the structure and dynamics of the ecosystem.
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The seller-buyer relationship is remote and impersonal, and the market is public and open, with features designed to promote professionalism. The design is typical of the kind of cryptomarket in common use in Western Europe, North America and Australia. It contrasts with Hydra, the Russian language market, which is more formalised and monopolistic, and which controls a high proportion of the Russian the drug market 7. Darknet markets in 2025 continue to refine secure drug trading by leveraging Bitcoin and Tor for encrypted transactions.
The relative difference score between the top percentile and all vendors and between the top and sub-top percentiles. Positive scores indicate on average higher normalized network centrality or activity indicators for the more “successful” group. (a) Relative difference between the top percentile and all vendors, current success. (b) Relative difference between the top percentile and all vendors, future success. (c) Relative difference between the top and sub-top vendor percentile, current success. (d) Relative difference between the top and sub-top vendor percentile, future success.
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Overall, stable U2U pairs have shown resilience to the systemic stress caused by COVID-19, suggesting, once again, that these trading relationships are fundamentally independent from the underlying DWMs. Monthly vendor recall of top vendor percentile (top 0–20% vendors in terms of sales) among the top 20% of all users based on the network measures and activity indicators. Higher vendor recall indicates a greater portion of the top vendor percentile was found. The cryptomarket Evolution observed two notable changes in user and post activity. In the initial months up to May 2014, the cryptomarket underwent steady growth in terms of both post activity and the number of active users.
Fraud And Hacking Services
This structural change is reflected in the median net income of sellers and buyers, as shown in Fig. While the curves for the seller and buyer median net income were negatively correlated before Silk Road’s shutdown, after that moment they became positively correlated. Specifically, sellers show a trend of increase and buyers a trend of decrease in their median net income before the shutdown. Consumption may occur much more at home, especially with the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic globally 58. The pandemic has affirmed and extended existing inequalities 59, and the digital market has contributed to that. Individuals who are more affluent and better connected have often continued drug consumption with little interruption.
Conventional Vs Online Drug Distribution Networks
Adaption is needed and has been demonstrated in order to reach PWUD 57. Having said that, user people will be consuming at places where services may be present, such as raves and festivals, but the rise of at-home delivery means that both distribution patterns and locations of consumption are changing. Vendors benefit from lower fees and faster payouts, while buyers access detailed product analytics, including purity tests and shipping success rates. The integration of AI-driven recommendation systems helps users find reliable sellers based on historical data. Newer markets leverage decentralized networks, reducing downtime and censorship.
Vendor Shops Replacing Big Markets
The nodes are sellers that are active in that year, and an edge is placed between two sellers if at least one transaction occurs between them during that year. The network is mostly populated by U2U-only sellers, followed by market-only sellers. After a major external shock in 2017, the S2S network shrinks but, unlike the multiseller network, recovers, and grows again (though slower than the multibuyer network). Although the number of multisellers suffers a severe drop (Fig. 4a) and the multiseller network drastically shrinks (Fig. 6), the net income of multisellers remains persistently the largest among sellers throughout the whole period of observation, as shown in Fig. This suggests that the multiseller activity is sensitive to external shocks but also that it yields higher profits.
Meanwhile, from July onwards, betweenness centrality consistently outperforms both the post activity and topics started activity indicators and performs (nearly) on par with topic engagement. Overall, the topic engagement indicator most consistently achieves high performance in terms of vendor recall. First, network centrality measures require the communication network to have developed and stabilised sufficiently before achieving reliable vendor recall.
Cryptomarket Operations
Initially set up in response to spiralling medication costs in the USA, the early 2000s saw a proliferation of these vendors, both legitimate and illegitimate, often based or purporting to be based in Canada. Monitoring these ‘clear net’ vendors is challenging and legitimacy is often difficult to assess due to the short lifespan of the websites and the use of proxy servers obfuscating the true location of vendor operations (Festinger et al., 2016). Recent blog posts from LegitScript have focused on “How Drugs Are Sold on the Dark Web” (Khalaf, 2018) reflecting a growing concern about these avenues for acquiring prescription drugs, and possible replacement of online pharmacy sources.
In 2020, a total of 6778 pairs of users in stable pairs met inside a DWM, corresponding to 192% of the 2019 level and to 255% of the 2018 level, see Fig. Pairs of users in stable pairs meeting inside a DWM traded for a total of $145 million in 2020, which corresponds to 252% of the 2019 level, and to 593% of the 2018 level, see Fig. The impact of the COVID-19 pandemic has, however, had different phases, punctuated by the number and level of measures introduced around the world. For users in stable pairs who met both inside and outside DWMs, we find that during the first lockdowns in 2020 trading volume fell with respect to January of the same year, suggesting that they were negatively impacted by COVID-19 restrictions. After that, trading volume sharply increased over the whole of 2020, see Figure S8. The number of stable U2U pairs created each day was, however, steady over time during 2020, even though more U2U pairs were created compared to the same period in 2019, see Figure S9.
- These tasks might be further complicated when encryption is used for message contents.
- However, owing to the difficulty of identifying relevant transactions, most studies rely on user surveys17,18 and data scraped from DWM websites19,20,21,22,23,24.
- They may attract new buyers and may change use patterns by offering a greater range of higher-potency drugs.
- For instance, a recent London Metropolitan Police (MET) investigation examined the transactions of a seller profile on a DWM10.
- We estimate that the trading volume of U2U pairs meeting on DWMs is increasing, reaching a peak in 2020 (during the COVID-19 pandemic).
In light of this, we have chosen the parameters conservatively, obtaining estimates for the number of sellers that are in general smaller than the ones produced by other methods. Second, our approach does not explicitly classify buyers, which are entities that were not classified as sellers. There is a gray zone in which some sellers and buyers may not be easily distinguishable in transaction networks. For instance, there may be sellers that make a small amount of transactions, or spend more than receive, which we would classify as buyers. Nevertheless, it is important to stress that the results are robust under considerable variation of the parameters, indicating that the coherent picture emerging from our analysis does not depend on the details of the method.
Vendors with high completion rates gain trust, reflected in detailed review sections. PageRank computes the probability that a random walker, that follows one of the available neighboring edges or jumps to a random node with a particular probability, ends up at a given node. For the directed variant the choice of edge is restricted to following the direction of the edges and adding weights impacts the odds of following any given edge. Similar as for betweenness centrality, we report the results for the variant taking both direction and weighting into account as this provides the random walker with more context. Note that we found this variant of PageRank to indeed have the best performance.
Contribution To The Harm Assessment Of Darknet Markets: Topic Modelling Drug Reviews On Dark0de Reborn
All data needed to evaluate the conclusions in the paper are present in the paper. Additional data related to this paper may be requested from the corresponding author. Additional data related to this paper may be requested from the authors. Research for this project was provided by the Institute for Society, Culture, and the Environment at Virginia Tech. The Authors have no financial or non-financial interests related to this article.
