Now that you understand what the dark web is all about, you might wonder why other people do things on it. Darknet marketplaces like to exist on the dark web because it offers a service that the regular internet, or more accurately, the “surface web,” does not. In the wake of recent headlines announcing actions against Hydra Marketplace by the U.S. and German governments, darknet markets have made an ironic entrance into the spotlight.
Blockchain intelligence firm TRM Labs reported that both Abacus Market’s dark web and clearnet infrastructure are now inaccessible, a likely exit scam by its operators. Contact moderators via the market’s system (e.g., Abacus’s 36-hour resolution)—provide order details, PGP-signed proof, and screenshots. Our top 10 resolve 90%+ disputes within 48 hours, with Alphabay at 24 hours, ensuring fairness in 95%+ of cases. Escrow reduces fraud by 25%—our top 10 average 94%+ success, with Alphabay at 99%, securing $20M monthly. Funds are held until delivery, resolving 90%+ disputes within 48 hours, vs. 40% scam rates in direct deals. The world of crypto now contains many coins and tokens that we feel unable to verify.
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Conversely, transaction networks obtained from the blockchain contain the entire transaction data of the DWMs and U2U transactions, allowing a thorough investigation of the ecosystem as a whole. In fact, previous studies on DWM transaction networks have revealed crucial aspects of the ecosystem13,14,15. 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.
Why Prefer XMR Over BTC?
Response times average 12 hours, with a 94% shipping reliability rate, supported by a 95% escrow success rate—disputes are resolved in 36 hours for 90% of cases. Vendors like “DarkMedic” and “GhostCode” excel with 98% ratings, benefiting from Incognito’s mandatory 2FA, which keeps scams below 1%. Its privacy-first approach attracts quality vendors, though its smaller size limits scale compared to Torrez.
Multiseller Network
Stopping their growth takes serious effort from US agencies like the FBI, often working hand-in-hand with international law enforcement. 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. If you fall for it and log in, they immediately steal your credentials and either sell or use them for other scams. The site gives out free samples of the stolen data every now and then to gain more customers.
This keeps trust solid between buyers and sellers, a key piece of its 95% seller rating, backed by over 40,000 reviews. Its Tor routing holds steady at 94% uptime, with small 2023 outages fixed fast via beefed-up DDoS defenses, keeping interruptions low. Currency use shows a privacy-minded crowd—BTC takes 60% of trades for its speed, while XMR’s untraceable edge rose to 35% in 2025 from 25% in 2024, spurred by tougher law enforcement moves. Darknet or dark web marketplaces are a hidden part of the internet that surface web users can’t access; they can only be accessed with special anonymity software called Tor. Many people (mostly criminals) use these sites to perform illegal transactions such as selling banned goods and services. Overall, our study provides a first step towards a better microscopic characterisation of the DWM ecosystem, indicating a direction of investigation that may be of interest to both researchers and law enforcement agencies.
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In this darkest corner of the internet, that gun becomes an illegal weapon. “Over the years some markets … developed a robust catalog of illicit services like money laundering, fiat offramping, and products that enable cyber-criminal activities like ransomware and malware attacks. One such sophisticated darknet market, Hydra, offered all that and more,” Chainalysis explained. Mega Darknet Market is the dominant drug supply source for drug vendors on other darknet sites, holding a 63.4% share of that market. When looking at darknet drug markets serving Russia-based customers, Kraken Market captured 30.9% of market share, with Blacksprut and Mega Darknet markets closely following.
Torrez Market Security
As such, it would be expected of dark web markets to move away from transparent cryptocurrencies (like bitcoin) to something private (like monero). According to Chainalysis, XMR is seeing increased adoption among dark web markets, with 67% of dark web markets supporting it in 2021, compared to 45% in 2020. Of course, someone writing about how crypto still is or isn’t used for illicit purposes widely doesn’t do much without hard data.
- A well-structured approach ensures transparency while preserving the benefits of decentralized finance without hindering innovation.
- Challenges like cross-border enforcement and privacy concerns complicate regulation.
- After the shutdown of Silk Road, in the last quarter of 2013, the ecosystem evolves to a structure where several markets coexist.
- These days, it lists over 11,600 illegal items, including hard drugs, hacking tools, and all kinds of cybercrime services.
- While some of these markets were shuttered by law enforcement agencies – some took the easy way out with exit scams.
Shuttered Dark Web Marketplaces
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.
The Crime Supply Chain
Using his credentials, cybercriminals committed a variety of online fraud activity over the course of six months. U.S.-based drug vendors on Abacus Market advertising a synthetic opioid called China White, which its customers can purchase using Bitcoin or Monero. The chart above shows that ASAP and Mega Darknet markets led the large retail and wholesale segments respectively. Looking closer at ASAP Market inflows, it won some share of revenue across all drug purchase types, receiving 37.1% of social supply, 35.7% of large retail, 16.5% of small retail, and 13.5% of wholesale purchases. On a smaller scale, Mega Darknet Market placed a few ads with QR codes in public places like Moscow subway trains.
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Marketplaces like Abacus Market, STYX Market, and others have evolved into well-structured hubs with user-friendly interfaces, customer review systems, and dispute resolution mechanisms. Their design mirrors legitimate e-commerce platforms, but their operations revolve around illegal products and services. Some darknet markets are also adopting new infrastructures to avoid shutdowns by law enforcement. OpenBazaar, for instance, has a fully decentralized structure, similar to the blockchain itself or the Tor web browser, that would make it impossible to take down. Users simply download and run a program that allows them to connect directly, rather than through a website.
Card shops are a category of darknet market where users can purchase stolen credit card information. Some vendors offer services to help people “clean” illegally obtained funds using cryptocurrency and fake transactions. They mix and transfer funds through various privacy wallets and escrow services to hide the original source and make the illicit transactions harder to trace. TRM provides blockchain intelligence to help financial institutions, cryptocurrency businesses, and public agencies detect, investigate, and manage crypto-related fraud and financial crime. TRM’s risk management platform includes solutions for transaction monitoring and wallet screening, entity risk scoring – including VASP due diligence – and source and destination of funds tracing. These tools enable a rapidly growing cohort of organizations around the world to safely embrace cryptocurrency-related transactions, products, and partnerships.
- These threats highlight the need for stronger security measures, regulatory oversight, and increasing user awareness.
- The deep web is the portion of the internet that is not indexed by standard search engines.
- Most advocates of cryptocurrency viewed the arrest of the Silk Road founder as a positive development.
- The impact of the COVID-19 pandemic has, however, had different phases, punctuated by the number and level of measures introduced around the world.
- Launched in September 2022, it’s earned a firm spot with 18,000+ listings and $2.5 million in monthly trades via BTC and XMR, holding a 5% share.
Notably, the number of multisellers suffers the largest drop of \(-99\%\) by the end of the first quarter of 2018. Interestingly, while the other categories of sellers show signs of recovery relative to their previous levels, the number of multisellers remains low after that shock (see Supplementary Information Section S4). More recently, the privacy coin Monero has become the cryptocurrency of choice for conducting illegal transactions in the Darknet. Monero is an altcoin that was founded in 2014 and has been gaining ground because nearly all details of transactions including the digital addresses of senders and receivers, as well as transaction values, are concealed. To access sites in the Darknet, users need to use special software such as the Tor Browser as they are on an encrypted network to hide the identities of the people running the sites and services connected to them. Archetyp Market was dismantled in June 2025 during Operation Deep Sentinel in a coordinated raid across six countries.
This highly popular English-language market sold all varieties of narcotics. Many of these markets operate internationally, and some have certain specialties. The .onion top-level domain (TLD) name is the dark web’s version of “.com” or “.net”.
