Illicit drug sales, for example, are promoted on social media, where platform features such as recommendation systems are affording new means of illicit drug supply. Digital drug marketplaces demonstrate remarkable resilience in the face of legal action. When sites are shut down, vendors and purchasers simply switch to another platform, ensuring that trade remains relatively uninterrupted. To combat online drug trafficking, states are introducing new laws, enforcement measures and digital reforms.
Abacus Market Conducts Likely Exit Scam Amid Increasingly Unstable Western Darknet Marketplace Landscape
Abacus Market’s exit underscores the ongoing instability of Western DNM landscape. Sustained law enforcement pressure has stymied marketplaces’ development, curtailed innovation and increasingly driven users toward independent vendor shops and encrypted communication platforms like Telegram. TRM Labs analysis shows that nearly half of the marketplaces launched in 2024 accepted only Monero — a sharp increase from just over one-third in 2023.
About The EUDA
The map in Figure 3 illustrates the daily supply volumes of total amounts of drugs, measured throughout the year and brought to average. While Hydra specified a category for each listing, we decided to further categorize all listings into 5 categories, aligning with the categorization offered by the Global Burden of Disease study. This adaptable approach ensures that our results can be harmonized for future comparison, providing a comprehensive understanding of the drug market dynamics.
Research tools include public health surveys and medical reports but lack neutral data on drugs’ spread and impact. This study fills this gap with an analysis of the volume of drugs traded on the darknet market. In recent years, the darknet has gained notoriety as a hub for illicit activities, including the sale of drugs, weapons, and stolen data. Despite the criminal nature of many of these activities, the darknet also offers a degree of anonymity and privacy that can be attractive to users who value their online security. In this article, we’ll take a closer look at the top darknet markets, examining their features, strengths, and weaknesses. This approach can cover the needs in public health research of the vulnerable populations and their hidden drug preferences with health circumstances and direct harm of illegal drugs on local, national, and global levels.
Cypher Marketplace
What’s more concerning is that most of the time, we don’t know about these flaws, and by the time we try to fix them, we come to know it’s too late. Like ransomware, criminals can buy software and inject your devices with viruses. With it, they can spy on people, steal their sensitive data, or secretly control their devices. These software are also capable of launching DDoS attacks and phishing campaigns. This expanded reach, combined with anonymity, only makes it easier for them to grow their operations without getting caught immediately.
Abacus’s Rise To The Top Of The Western DNM Ecosystem
- Criminals are leveraging the online domain to increase efficiency and maintain anonymity, and darknet markets are generating US$5–7.5 million in daily revenue.
- The map in Figure 4 demonstrates the daily supply volumes of opiates, measured throughout the year and brought to average.
- “Changes in drug markets due to temporary crises continue to cause behavioral shifts after the crisis is over,” Groshkova says.
- It has gained a reputation for being a reliable source of high-quality data for cybercriminals.
- With its sleek UI and powerful search tools, Vortex makes it easy to navigate thousands of listings with confidence.
For cannabis, the vast majority of the purchases still takes place via traditional street vendors. Online illegal drug markets with cannabis transactions as an important element are still a relatively recent phenomenon. Nevertheless, from a perspective of the user, the transition of the drug markets to the internet brings several benefits. Van Hout and Bingham (2013) show that users see online transactions as being safer than negotiating in a street-level drug market. Décary-Hétu et al. (2016) study the risk-taking behaviour of drug sellers on the dark web and conclude that, compared to traditional drug-market transactions, the risk of violence is reduced as face-to-face transactions are eliminated. Aldridge et al. (2018) argue that online illegal markets may reduce the harm of drug use because they raise the quality and safety of the drugs sold and because, in the course of the transaction, there is less conflict and violence.
In a literature review conducted for this analysis (Udrisard et al., 2022), only 21 studies were identified that attempted to formulate market size estimates for illicit drugs. Europe featured as a region of focus in two of the studies and nine of the studies looked at cannabis alone. The majority used a demand-side approach, while two employed a supply-side methodology (see Box Supply-side approaches to estimating the size of illicit drug markets), and three used a combination of both.
Associated Data
However, the dark web is so complex and vast that if law enforcement takes down one market, it pops up elsewhere. For instance, after the closure of Genesis Market, its website came back after a few weeks. If someone has the market’s code to the infrastructure, no matter how much effort law enforcement puts in, it will keep coming back on another server or can be built again with the same branding.
Apocalypse Darknet Market
To access the marketplace, dark web users must register first and pass the CAPTCHA test to prove they are human. CannaExpress is a specialized darknet market dedicated to cannabis and related products. Focused on speed, quality, and discretion, CannaExpress connects verified vendors with buyers seeking premium-grade cannabis through a streamlined and anonymous experience. With fast order processing, product reviews, and secure payments, it’s a trusted platform for cannabis enthusiasts in the darknet space. DarkMatter is a darknet marketplace built for those who demand both power and discretion.
They used “free data dumps” and emotional marketing to build trust before vanishing—an enduring lesson in the risks of social engineering. In the first arc of the anime series Lupin the 3rd Part V, Lupin III steals digital currency from the “Marco Polo” darknet market. The months and years after Silk Road’s closure were marked by a greatly increased number of shorter-lived markets as well as semi-regular law enforcement takedowns, hacks, scams and voluntary closures. High-volume vendors launch standalone shops using Tor and Monero, reducing dependency on marketplaces. This article reveals the top 10 dark web markets dominating in 2025, their unique characteristics, and the critical implications for enterprise cybersecurity. This highly curated approach ensures quality, consistency, and a marketplace environment built specifically for cannabis enthusiasts no surprises, no shady listings, and no off topic clutter.
Illicit And Risky Use-Cases
The chat corpora were stored as html files, which we imported in the R statistical computing software environment. In R, we extracted relevant data of the html-based chat corpora and stored these data as a dataset for further analysis. Relevant data besides the post itself included its publication date and the Telegram group in which the post appeared. Telegram analysis shows that in the Netherlands, online psychoactive substance trade may have been affected during the COVID-19 pandemic. The direction of this effect was different for different classes of substances.
Key Goods And Services Offered
With multi-layered protections, anonymous payments, and strict vendor vetting, Kerberos offers a fortress-like platform for buyers and sellers alike. Its commitment to privacy and reliability makes it a trusted choice in the darknet ecosystem. Bohemia and Cannabia had long been recognized as leading platforms for illegal transactions on the dark web. The darknet has been a hot topic in recent years, with many people wondering what it is and how it works.
