We’re back with another video in our Webz Insider video series on everything web data. Watch our cyber team share their key insights from their investigations into the biggest dark web trends in 2022. Exodus Marketplace emerged in early 2024 as a successor to Genesis Market, focusing on malware-harvested device logs. It reportedly controls around 7,000 infected endpoints across 190 countries Top 10 Dark Web Markets. 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.
- While the above-mentioned examples of interventions effectively reduced the volume of the darknet drug trade, the policy recommendations presented above were designed to be implemented among potential customers.
- Listings measured in units or milliliters were also excluded due to the difficulty distinguishing personal purchases from wholesale ones.
- Abacus Market was launched in 2021 and now lists over 40,000 illicit goods, including hacking tools, counterfeit documents, and listings for drugs.
- Opponents of strict dark web policing sometimes argue that such operations drive criminal activity to even more hidden or encrypted platforms, making detection harder.
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The world’s first internet-facilitated sale, in the early 1970s and on the internet precursor Arpanet, was for an undetermined amount of cannabis. Today, strangers may contact you on social media offering drugs to buy. For as many people who believe this is something of a utopian development, you can be sure many more view it as dystopian—especially if the dealers are in fact scammers or selling dodgy goods. Tor2door’s been a standout since 2020—over 20,000 listings and a custom-built site that’s not some cookie-cutter junk.
Opiates, while representing a smaller portion of overall drug use, have a significant presence, particularly in the Krasnodar region, which warrants further investigation. Marijuana usage is widespread and accounts for a disproportionate share of all illicit drug consumption. This aligns with prevalent beliefs worldwide, as cannabis is the most widely used illicit substance. The higher amounts of cannabis products represented on the marketplace in the regions of Russia, the lower opiate overdose, and other harmful circumstances with significant negative correlations found. The supply of cannabis is about 10 times higher than opiates in terms of weight on the market.
- It scans darknet marketplaces and hacker forums to alert you instantly if anything shows up.
- Spanish police arrested the suspected 30-year-old German administrator in Barcelona.
- Some fake sellers take your crypto and never ship what you ordered, or phishing sites that look like real marketplaces but steal your login info.
- For every illegal drug, there is a combination of emojis that dealers and consumers use to evade detection on social media and messaging platforms.
- CACI’s DarkBlue Intelligence Suite is designed to address these exact challenges, offering comprehensive monitoring and analysis of the dark web’s most secure and decentralized spaces.
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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. According to a recent trend, the dark marketplaces faced a decline in revenue. Chainanalysis, a blockchain analysis firm, conducted research that shows that the revenue decreased from $3.1 billion (2021) to $2 billion (2024). As mentioned earlier, launching a cyberattack doesn’t require any hacking skills.
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It enhances buyer transparency by importing vendor feedback with PGP proof. Torzon offers a premium account option for additional benefits and is valued at approximately $15 million, accepting payments in Bitcoin (BTC) and Monero (XMR). Some dark web marketplaces even host content that’s not just illegal but extremely harmful, so it’s really important to understand the risks before diving in. Some are looking for illegal stuff they can’t buy elsewhere, like drugs or counterfeit documents. Darknet markets, also known as “cryptomarkets,” are online marketplaces that operate on the dark web, a part of the internet that is not indexed by search engines and is only accessible through specialized software like the Tor browser.
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In May, 2020, an online-crime unit in the northern German city of Oldenburg was asked to investigate. British, American, and Australian forces then helped to follow the clues to verify real-world information about them. But according to Meta, no more than 1 in 2,000 views on Facebook is of content that violates its restricted goods policy. Between July and September 2024, Meta says that 96 percent of drug sales content that violated its terms was removed before a user reported it. TikTok, meanwhile, removed 99.5 percent of content violating its policy on alcohol, tobacco, and drugs before it was reported, according to its Community Guidelines Enforcement Report for the second quarter of 2024. In response, social media companies’ algorithms to detect drug-selling behavior are getting smarter and are aggregating images and emojis, Fuller says.
By recognizing and accounting for regional differences, policy makers can design and implement more effective strategies to combat drug use and mitigate its harms. The following graphs show the average amount of grams of psychoactive substances in a region adjusted per 100,000 population. The averages were obtained by averaging the data across all samples to get a more accurate result and eliminate the possible influence of seasonality, weekends, holidays, etc. The variables used in the correlation matrix in the study were related to drug use-related problems in 2019 (all variables are relative).
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Based on our observations from analysis on dark web data using Lunar, we’ve identified the top 7 marketplaces on the dark web in 2025. We developed Lunar to monitor the deep and dark web, including dark web marketplace sites. Darknet marketplaces in 2025 illustrate a resilient and evolving underground economy. Major active platforms include Abacus, Russian Market, BriansClub, and Exodus. Law enforcement takedowns, such as Archetyp, demonstrate both impact and adversary adaptation. For cybersecurity professionals, focusing on payment methods, vendor migration, and marketplace specialisation offers the most effective path to actionable intelligence.
Archetyp Market, which boasted more than 600,000 users, operated for more than five years and contained more than 17,000 listings for illicit substances, including cocaine, MDMA and amphetamines. Europol also said the market allowed the sale of fentanyl and “other highly potent synthetic opioids.”Authorities seized the site’s online infrastructure, which was hosted in the Netherlands, and arrested its 30-year-old German administrator in Barcelona, Spain. A moderator and six prominent vendors were arrested simultaneously in other countries, and officers seized assets worth about $9 million.
Challenges For Law Enforcement
WizardShop has solidified its status as one of the best data stores in the dark web by providing an impressive quantity of quality data as well as providing a trustworthy, easy to use interface allowing criminals easy and secure buying and selling. Established in 2022, Torzon market is one of the biggest and most diverse marketplaces on the dark web. It is considered very secure thanks to strict user validations and transparent payment and vendor review procedures. Its focus on financial fraud and high-value transactions has attracted a dedicated user base, contributing to its growing reputation and market value. For a local machine configuration, he recommends a computer purchased for cash running Linux, using a local Tor transparent proxy. For operations security he suggests avoiding storing conversation logs, varying writing styles, avoiding mobile phone-based tracking and leaking false personal details to further obfuscate one’s identity.
That push led to the arrest of Ross Ulbricht, the founder of Silk Road, after a long and intense investigation. Once many users begin to rely on the site and store funds in escrow, the operators disappear, taking all the money with them and leaving their customers and clients with nothing. Unfortunately, the dark web hosts not only explicit but also deeply illegal and disturbing content. The markets often share materials related to child exploitation, pornography, and non-consensual recordings, all of which are serious crimes that inflict lasting harm on real-life victims. Such content fuels a dangerous cycle of abuse, violence, and exploitation. While hiring a hacker might sound like something out of a movie, it’s a very real threat.
A strong and significant correlation between the quantities of heroin for sale and lethal overdoses or fatal poisoning was established. The list of the offered on-the-market drug data was gathered from the “darknet market” Hydra, along with the volume delivered and region of the offer. The data were collected using advanced web scraping techniques to extract specific information on drug types, quantities, and corresponding regions. These platforms, operating within the Onion Router (TOR) network (a network that allows anonymous browsing), are anonymous and transient; therefore, specific market names are omitted. We aimed to use the dark web data and officially published indicators to identify the most vulnerable regions of Russia and the correlations between the pairs of variables to measure how illicit drug trade can affect population well-being. Launched in September 2022, Torzon Market operates on the Tor network and features over 11,600 illegal products, including drugs and hacking tools.
During the investigation, federal law enforcement seized cryptocurrency valued at $75 million at the time of the seizures, as well as cash and precious metals. The investigation of DarkMarket was spurred by another, much larger German police investigation into an organization called CyberBunker, which I wrote about in the magazine last year. In 2013, a polyglot group of programmers and hackers, under the leadership of an eccentric fifty-three-year-old Dutchman named Xennt, moved into a Cold War-era bunker near the picturesque town of Traben-Trarbach, in the Mosel Valley. The bunker had previously belonged to the German military, and it was designed to withstand a nuclear attack. Xennt, who had a lifelong fascination with underground fortresses, lived in the bunker. Inside the bunker, Xennt’s team installed servers that hosted dark-Web sites trading illicit products and images, including terrorist material and images of child abuse.
The investigators identified the suspects (many behind thousands of sales on illicit online marketplaces) using intelligence collected following takedowns of multiple dark web markets, including Nemesis, Bohemia, Tor2Door, and Kingdom Market. The menus provided by dealers through messaging apps and on social media are often lengthy and diverse, featuring prized varieties advertised for their purity and sold at significantly lower costs than equivalents available on the streets of London and New York. However, there’s been no formal evaluation of online and street drug sales that can attest to the relative purity and safety of what’s sold in either place—and illegal drugs always come with a safety risk, regardless of where they are bought from.
Archetyp Market was dismantled in June 2025 during Operation Deep Sentinel in a coordinated raid across six countries. At the time, it had over 600,000 users, 17,000 listings, and approximately €250 million in transactions. Authorities seized €7.8 million and arrested operators in Germany, Spain, Sweden, Romania, the Netherlands, and the US Europol leads takedown of Archetyp. The buyers, or “consumers,” are cybercriminals who use these tools to launch illegal activities. The victims, who are common users, businesses, and even banks, who end up paying the price.
