We believe that the findings and pattern analyses presented here, which place concentration on the supply side, might suggest a new direction to focus and will serve as a useful complement to current research conducted within the domain of addiction medicine. 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. This has led to record levels of uptime at Empire, which is now accessible for 95 percent of each day, compared to 70 percent in January, according to users. Essential darknet resources, such as community forums for vendor reviews or specialist search engines, have been rebuilt from the ground after police seized them.
Characteristics Of Suppliers
Central and Eastern regions are most affected; the leaders are Moscow and Saint Petersburg cities and oblasts. Correlation matrix of Hydra marketplace indicators with official statistical variables. Listings included offerings of prescription medication that was falsely advertised as being authentic. For example, in November 2023, while operating in an undercover capacity on Incognito Market, a law enforcement agent purchased and received several tablets purported to be oxycodone. Testing revealed that these tablets were not oxycodone and were, in fact, fentanyl pills. They bought some, and days later it arrived in a small, clear, plastic bag complete with a thank-you card — a sign of how easy it is to buy drugs on the so-called darknet.
A pale, ashy shade in powder form, it turns pitch-black when mixed with water. This opaqueness makes the flash of blood impossible to see, so you never quite know whether you’ve hit a vein. Track and analyze darknet activities using our advanced cyber threat intelligence platform to stay ahead of emerging threats.
Ethical And Legal Boundaries In Monitoring Darknet Marketplaces
This paper seeks to complement current studies widening the understanding of opioid supply chains in underground marketplaces using comprehensive, large-scale, longitudinal anonymous marketplace and forum data. To this end, 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. Specifically, we first conducted a whole-site crawl of anonymous online marketplaces and forums to solicit data.
Archetyp Market
- Regional distribution of all drugs for sale presented on Hydra, in grams per 100,000 population in Russia.
- This paper recognizes that the data it uses originates from the darknet, a virtual illicit market.
- Articles from Journal of Medical Internet Research are provided here courtesy of JMIR Publications Inc.
- 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”.
- Contrary to popular belief, making a loved one become abstinent (even if you can) won’t cure the underlying issues that may have led them to use in the first place.
Security researchers have been monitoring forums within the cybercriminal underworld to investigate the leading markets operating in 2024. The researchers focused on the five most common drugs sent in for testing—MDMA, cocaine, amphetamine, methamphetamine and LSD—to ensure that there would be enough data points to produce reliable results in each case. They only included samples that were purchased in-person or on dark-web cryptomarkets, excluding samples that participants simply stated were from “the internet.” In total, 62,596 drug samples met these criteria. However, you can trace its roots to the development of technologies like the Tor network or Freenet. In March 2000, an Irish grad student named Ian Clarke created the software application, Freenet. This was the initial framework for anonymous communication and file sharing.
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Five or six times a day, a man from Texas injects a dose of carefully measured fentanyl. He does it when he wakes up and before he goes to work, and sometimes on breaks. It makes him drowsy, but he says people can’t usually tell he just used. GoodRx is not available outside of the United States and therefore, access to the site is blocked. If you are trying to access this site from the United States, please try heading to our homepage or our drug directory. If those pages do not work and you believe you are receiving this message in error, please reach out to
Dark Web, Not Dark Alley: Why Drug Sellers See The Internet As A Lucrative Safe Haven
First, we learned how many drugs, in grams per 100,000 population, were found on the “shelves” of the Hydra dark market on a subnational level. In 2019, on an average day, the total quantity of drugs available for purchase on the darknet, in batches of 5 g or less, amounted to 124 kg. It was a period of COVID-19 restrictions, so we have data on the decreasing amounts of drugs distributed monthly in Russia during COVID-19 restrictions. A strong and significant correlation between the quantities of heroin for sale and lethal overdoses or fatal poisoning was established.
The Marketplace As An Arsenal
For example, there might be varying types of heroin or fentanyl, but we could not subcategorize them due to the lack of precise ontology. Addressing this challenge requires deep domain knowledge and expertise, which is constantly evolving. Another limitation is pointed out in the paper that multiple online suppliers might belong to the same vendor. This problem might be addressed by studying the product overlapping patterns over time to merge suppliers, which might reveal more interesting hierarchical clustering patterns.
In our study, we only selected marketplaces with more than 30 opioid listings. In this way, we gathered 5 active underground marketplaces with opioid listings. Note that some high-profile underground marketplaces and forums are frequently deactivated or have been shut down by law enforcement authorities 23. Hence, we also gathered snapshots of 5 underground marketplaces and 6 forums collected by the anonymous marketplace archives programs and previous research projects 20.
He progressed to prescription painkillers, and then, when they became too expensive, to heroin. The subcommittee identified more than 500 sales, totaling $230,000, that involved the six online sellers. The greatest number of purchases came from Ohio, Pennsylvania, and Florida. To get extremely potent opioids, users turn to the dark web—and sometimes, Google. While some drugs might be less expensive on the dark web, others can be more expensive due to various factors including quality, demand, and shipping costs. Prices can vary widely depending on the factors mentioned previously, and it’s important to note that they can change quickly based on market trends.
Exploitation Of Anonymity For Harm
Subsequently, we conducted a comprehensive, large-scale, longitudinal study to demystify opioid trading activities in anonymous markets and forums. 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. From our measurement, we concluded that anonymous online marketplaces and forums provided easy-access platforms for global opioid supply.
Nevertheless, the research was performed according to institutional requirements for ethical research practice. Data visualization and imagining approaches were used to help interpret the results of this study step. Diagrams and pictures were created using Python’s Matplotlib and Seaborn libraries 29 to illustrate the patterns and trends across different regions and for other drug types. We have built the interactive maps and conducted the preliminary visualizations to construct the hypothesis. This provided a baseline understanding of the spread and prevalence of various drugs.
The Senate subcommittee did not look closely at darknet sites, the investigator told me, because they found so much on the open web. The Senate investigator said Chinese authorities might have been lax in shutting down these websites in the past because opioid overdoses are not as big of a problem in that country as they are in the United States. The drug user in Texas said he first began using opioids when a doctor prescribed him hydrocodone for a bad cough he had as a teenager.
