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. Currently, CanTEST stands as Australia’s sole drug checking service, with Queensland set to introduce its own services and Victoria considering similar measures. Drug checking, according to Dr. Barratt, offers a pragmatic approach to reducing health risks in an unpredictable drug market. By detecting hazardous substances early, these services can prevent potential overdoses and alleviate pressure on emergency health systems. Researchers analyzed 103 illicit drug samples purchased from the now-defunct dark web forum Test4Pay, in a collaborative effort involving the Australian National University, UNSW Sydney, and the Canadian testing facility Get Your Drugs Tested.
Price Analysis
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. The linear regression results therefore represent the estimated percentage of sales within any one country attributable to any one drug classification (the constant) followed by an estimation of the yearly percentage point change over the study period. All regressions were run with robust standard errors using the Huber-White sandwich method to account for a lack of normality in the dependents, heteroscedasticity, and data points with high leverage owing to the nature of the data collection process.
“The disruption to the online supply of fentanyl in particular is notable,” Professor Broadhurst said. Professor Broadhurst says fentanyl is a designer synthetic opioid that can be up to 80 times more powerful than morphine. In July, new market Cryptonia was added after Nightmare shut themselves down and ran off with people’s money. Using TOR, like using other web browsers for online tasks, is legal in the country.
Darknet Takedowns Disrupt Drugs Markets
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. 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. Australian cryptomarket vendors sell a wide variety of illicit drugs, and are disproportionately represented in global terms for sales of ecstasy, opioids and, particularly, methamphetamine.
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On Dec. 6, he was sentenced at a Sydney District Court to a 35-month intensive corrections order that must be served in the community, following a finding of special circumstances, including risk of self-harm. “It is a lot to take on whilst currently managing through some personal problems,” the seller said, explaining they had been overwhelmed with a rush of purchases. Many Australian vendors on the dark web operate like a traditional business, employing marketing tactics you would expect to see in a legit retail environment. Unique branding, proud track records of happy customers, competitive pricing and benefits, money back guarantees and quality assurance — that’s the pitch from most sellers.
Our analysis also focused on the price of illicit drugs that are sold on the darknet. Here we found large disparities between the prices of illicit drugs sold by foreign-based cryptomarket vendors and those located in Australia. For example, average prices for ecstasy sold by Australian vendors were more than six times the price of those sold by their foreign counterparts. Methamphetamine and cocaine were approximately three times more expensive when purchased from an Australian cryptomarket vendor.
Top Dark Web Marketplaces Of 2025: A Deeper Dive Into Illicit Trade Markets
- We’re back with another video in our Webz Insider video series on everything web data.
- At the beginning of the study period sedatives in India accounted for almost a quarter of all sales, and India, China and Canada all saw this part of their market grow over the time period, at just over 6% per year.
- And then there’s malware—click the wrong link or download the wrong file, and your device could get infected.
- The perception that drugs may be intercepted entering the country therefore contributes to the high prices that local consumers pay for illicit drugs.
- Police say the 38-year-old received cryptocurrency in exchange for prohibited drugs on thousands of occasions since 2017.
Using the postal system, Chris mailed MDMA – in liquid, tablet and powdered form – cocaine and ketamine in huge quantities to buyers all over Australia and the world. For amphetamine and methamphetamine, however, there was no difference between dark-web and offline samples. Coauthor Dr. Monica Barratt, a senior research fellow at RMIT University in Melbourne, Australia, said that this potential mismatch between expectation and reality is what motivated the team to conduct the research. RMIT University acknowledges the people of the Woi wurrung and Boon wurrung language groups of the eastern Kulin Nation on whose unceded lands we conduct the business of the University. RMIT University respectfully acknowledges their Ancestors and Elders, past and present. RMIT also acknowledges the Traditional Custodians and their Ancestors of the lands and waters across Australia where we conduct our business – Artwork ‘Sentient’ by Hollie Johnson, Gunaikurnai and Monero Ngarigo.
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- These markets host hundreds, or in some cases thousands, of people who sell drugs, commonly referred to as “vendors”.
- The lower risk of detection when receiving drugs from Australian-based sellers was one of the main reasons the domestic trade has boomed, Dr Martin said.
- When you can’t necessarily count on cryptomarkets offering a safer supply, local drug checking becomes even more essential.
- Although bitcoins are extremely hard to trace, the vulnerability occurs when cash is turned into bitcoins or when they are converted back into cash.
Free samples of cocaine, MDMA and prescription medication were part of alleged dark web dealer Cody Ward’s business plan until he was arrested in February this year. But it all came crashing down last year on a trip to Sydney, when police saw the man acting strangely on the street. Officers’ suspicions were confirmed when they found $770 and 66 grams of cocaine and a small amount of ketamine for sale in his pockets – and kilograms of it inside his apartment. “Australia’s resistance to opening more drug checking facilities stems from an assumption that drug checking ‘green lights’ drug use,” Barratt said.
Last month, a couple, also from the Gold Coast, was jailed after pleading guilty to trafficking drugs online for about a year, completing more than 600 orders that netted them $400,000. In October 2018, police swooped on two Gold Coast men, Simon Byrne and Michael Hutchinson, and arrested them, alleging the flatmates ran a dark web drugs operation from their apartment. The dark web is a part of the internet not found via search engines, where sites are housed on overlay networks that require specific software, configurations or authorisation to access.
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Security researchers have been monitoring forums within the cybercriminal underworld to investigate the leading markets operating in 2024. There’s also a privacy angle—some users live in countries with censorship or surveillance, and the dark web gives them a space to communicate or access information more freely. As of 2020, nearly 57% of the dark web was estimated to contain illegal content, including violence and extremist platforms.
Top 7 Dark Web Marketplaces
Australia is a leading country in the darknet drugs trade, with more online drug vendors per capita than any other nation except the Netherlands, according to research presented at this week’s Victorian Alcohol and Drug Association Conference. You do not have to be a big time supplier to get charged under the criminal code for online drug transactions. For example, you can be charged as a drug trafficker for importing as little as 0.5 gram of MDMA or two grams of coke. Just as it is with drug sales on the street, “a drug conviction can have a long term impact on someone’s life, including limiting career prospects and making it difficult to travel overseas. Finally, there is a misconception that you cannot get caught buying and selling illicit drugs off the dark net. Often people who run these websites pose as buyers and sellers in order to steal personal information.
Cultivating Cannabis in South Australia In South Australia, it is an offence to cultivate cannabis unless a person does so with a medicinal cannabis license and in accordance with strict rules and controls. This page outlines the laws surrounding cultivating cannabis in South Australia, both when it is done lawfully …. Electoral Offences (NT) The NT Criminal Code Act 1983 contains a number of offences relating to elections and politics.
Some buyers don’t mind having the illicit products delivered directly to their home addresses. Vendors use a variety of cases or labels to make the product look like something else. Some use DVD cases, hollow books, torch battery compartments, and other creative methods to hide or “stealth” their products. Uswitch, a Finder-like service from the UK, researched online searches for the dark web in January 2021. The research gave the top 20 countries with search inquiries about the dark web and how to access it.
Dark web markets have exploded in scale and reach in 2025, becoming the most dangerous hubs for trading drugs, stolen data, and hacking tools. These anonymous marketplaces—operating mainly on the Tor network—are now a primary threat vector for businesses and cybersecurity professionals. Barratt envisions a future where harm reduction strategies are tailored to the source of the drug. If a drug checking service knows where a substance came from, they can decide whether it’s more appropriate to share any alarming results locally or online. In the absence of a legal market for these drugs, this violence will continue unabated, much as it has since the beginning of the war on drugs.
Border Force officials know that on the back of that, there will likely be an increase in attempts to import drugs in the mail. “When it’s summer and there lots of music festivals on, there’s an increase in MDMA. “A lot of people might not realise that letters are still a huge part of mail we receive. Aussies are adopting a sneaky new tactic to get drugs delivered straight to their homes. In a statement, Australian Border Force said it and other agencies use “data analytics and intelligence in an endeavour to detect, track and intercept the attempted import of illicit goods via the dark net”. Accused of running what was the state’s largest drug dealing business, Mr Ward and his two co-accused, Shanese and Patricia Koullias, are now before the courts.
