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. As for drug markets serving Western customers, ASAP Market held a 25.0% share, followed by Mega and Incognito. Western drug flows in particular come from US-domiciled exchanges and trace flows from those to darknet markets. The entity “DNM Aggregator” that appears within each category refers to a service we’ve identified as being in control of multiple, disparate darknet markets. Throughout the history of the darknet market ecosystem, at different turns one marketplace has typically played the dominant role. The last several years’ examples include Silk Road, AlphaBay, Wall Street Market, and Hydra, most recently.
UK Sanctions Target Russia’s Crypto Network To Curb Military Funding
The sentencing—121 months in federal prison—marked the culmination of a multi-year investigation led by the FBI, with critical support from the US Postal Inspection Service. In addition to counterfeit merchandise, MGM Grand Market offers access to stolen credit card information, compromised bank accounts, and other financial fraud-related services. In order to test that theory, we compared on-chain flows to our identified addresses to monthly fentanyl-related drug seizures at the U.S.-Mexico and U.S.-Canada borders, using data from the U.S. Regardless, the DNM criminal economy continues to proliferate unimpeded by the intervention of law enforcement.
Harrods Reveals Supply Chain Breach Impacting Online Customers
The shutdown of Archetyp, a major dark web drug market, demonstrates that law enforcement takedowns have only short-term effects, as such markets quickly re-emerge and adapt. Persistent trade and resilient user communities limit the long-term impact of these interventions. Focusing solely on dark web markets may overlook broader digital harms occurring on mainstream platforms. The darknet marketplace ecosystem has demonstrated remarkable resilience and adaptability over its 14-year evolution. The DNM ecosystem will continue to evolve through a repeating cycle of dominance, law enforcement disruption, and subsequent market replacement.
Crypto ATMs ‘wouldn’t Exist’ Without Crime
As outlined in the report, geopolitics and drug trafficking have become inextricably linked, that’s why the volume of shadow economy in the Dark Web will remain to grow and accelerated by ongoing tensions. The law enforcement community needs to develop new ways to monitor illegal drug trades in the Dark Web and adjust their tactics to the dynamically changing threat landscape. 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.
Over time, ambitious individuals created infrastructure for these transactions, where for a fee, sellers have access to a digital ‘storefront’ to sell their products in a centralized marketplace. The engine of the marketplace protects the total number of users registered on it, but based on the number of unique shops, likely it may exceed 15,000 unique actors. We showed that a small fraction of traders is responsible for a large fraction of the trading volume, and by analysing the networks of buyers and sellers, we found different resilience regimes. Shocks tend to induce serious structural changes in the multiseller network, but impact the multibuyer network much less severely. Interestingly, the S2S network shows an intermediate level of resilience, which suggests that the S2S network might play the role of a supply chain network on the dark web. Furthermore, after a shock, the activity of buyers is resumed almost immediately, while the activity of sellers recovers more slowly.
Treasury Designates Cryptocurrency Exchange Chatex
- Immigration and Customs Enforcement, in collaboration with Europol, the Joint Criminal Opioid and Darknet Enforcement Team, and various national and international partners, announced the results of Operation RapTOR May 22.
- These marketplaces accounted for over 97% of illicit revenue generated through Bitcoin and TRON transactions.
- Vendors today are choosing to establish vendor shops and engage in direct deals through a diverse array of encrypted communication applications and email.
- Archetyp’s takedown might make headlines, but it won’t stop the trade of illicit drugs on the dark web.
- This shift poses unique challenges for law enforcement, who must adapt traditional monitoring methods.
- The marketplace is well-known for its bug bounty programs and robust security mechanisms, including mandatory 2FA.
AFM specialists analyzed over 4,000 crypto wallets, identifying those linked to criminal proceeds. As a result, 67 addresses connected to RAKS were blocked, freezing assets totaling 9.7 million USDT. Since 2021, Abacus Market’s revenue has increased substantially, and in 2024, it more than doubled, growing by 183.2% YoY. This increase may be due in part to the closures of top DNMs, the shift to the exclusive acceptance of XMR by other active markets, and delistings of XMR by popular centralized exchanges.
With every transaction conducted in Monero — a cryptocurrency known for its privacy features — law enforcement had significant difficulty tracking financial flows. 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. The Western darknet market ecosystem experienced a number of challenges during 2024.
Kraken Market (Dominant Russian-Language Platform)
Given the tooling’s ability to capture new password updates, the perpetrators could easily maintain control over his accounts, and they opened bank accounts in his name and had his physical mail sent to an address where they could receive it. Archetyp’s takedown might make headlines, but it won’t stop the trade of illicit drugs on the dark web. It should force us to think about where harm is really happening online and whether current strategies are looking in the wrong direction. Last year, nine people were charged in federal court in Florida with laundering money for Mexican drug cartels. They allegedly used black market crypto exchanges — not ATMs — to wash the money. In Florida, a darknet Ecstasy dealer was busted for using a bitcoin ATM at a vape shop to make more than $32,000 in crypto transactions, according to federal prosecutors.
The large number of U2U-only sellers is in accordance with previous results that showed that the trading volume in the U2U network is significantly larger than that of DWMs13 (also see Supplementary Information Figure S8). The period of dominance by Silk Road is unique, because the ecosystem structure is effectively composed of and dominated by a single market, expressed by a market share equal to one, as shown in Fig. After the shutdown of Silk Road, in the last quarter of 2013, the ecosystem evolves to a structure where several markets coexist. This structural change is reflected in the median net income of sellers and buyers, as shown in Fig. While the curves for the seller and buyer median net income were negatively correlated before Silk Road’s shutdown, after that moment they became positively correlated. Specifically, sellers show a trend of increase and buyers a trend of decrease in their median net income before the shutdown.
Interaction Of Darknet Markets And Vendors
Moreover, the layers of encryption and the bounce of your data from node to node effectively mask your IP address, enabling online anonymity. It allows access to the .onion sites on the dark web that you won’t find using a regular browser. Lin, a self-described crypto developer and fan of privacy coin Monero, said on X that he facilitated a four-day workshop on cyber crime and cryptocurrency for 30 police officers at the Saint Lucia Police Academy in early April. There are also many official forums where you can find the darknet market you need. No matter where criminals hide, we will find them, dismantle their operations, and bring them to justice. This operation was about protecting innocent people from predatory criminals who profit from violence, addiction, and fear.
Hydra Market
This migration is further bolstered by the fact that the majority of new Western DNMs launched in 2024 have been characterized by poor design features or security issues. The median net income is positive for sellers while negative for buyers throughout the whole period of observation. This result is not trivial because, although the classification induces a positive net income for sellers, it is performed on each market and the U2U network separately, while the median net income is computed based on all transactions made by an entity.
- The progress made in disrupting illicit networks demonstrates the impact of collective action, but sustained vigilance and adaptability — empowered by cutting-edge blockchain analytics — will be essential to securing the crypto ecosystem in the years ahead.
- In some cases, established sellers on closed-down markets are welcomed onto new markets as digital “refugees” and have joining fees waived.
- For instance, you can choose the preferred security levels for enhanced protection.
- Another rapidly growing drug marketplace worth mentioning in the Dark Web is called Mega.
Experience the power of The DarkBlue Intelligence Suite and get proactive in your fight against cybercrime. Request a free trial today and strengthen your ability to track and disrupt illicit activities on the dark web. Kazakhstan’s financial crime agency has dismantled the RAKS crypto exchange, accusing it of laundering millions through darknet marketplaces. Nevertheless, the Western DNM ecosystem experienced some innovation in spite of recent enforcement actions. Amongst the most notable was the first merger and acquisition between two marketplaces on the darknet — whereby the struggling SuperMarket was absorbed by the now-Superlisted DrugHub in an operation that lasted around one month. 2024 also saw the establishment of the first Telegram-only Western darknet marketplace, Si Market, which now hosts more than 40 vendors specializing in the sale of psychedelics, cannabis, and cannabis-related products.
Like last year, DeFi projects were the most-targeted crypto entities by hackers, accounting for over 82% of all hacks last year. While DeFi adoption among darknet vendors is growing, it has not replaced centralized exchanges as the primary laundering method. However, the trend is clear—illicit actors are expanding their strategies, forcing enforcement agencies to evolve their tracking methods to keep pace with increasingly sophisticated laundering techniques. 2024 saw 42% fewer new darknet marketplaces (DNMs) launched year over year, with the proportion of Monero-only DNMs launched increasing from little more than a third in 2023 to nearly half in 2024. Historically, DNMs have usually cashed out their funds at centralized exchanges (CEXs).
The Netherlands led the technical takedown of the market’s servers, while a 30-year-old German national, believed to be the site’s primary administrator, was captured in Barcelona, Spain. Telegram, once a popular platform for selling drugs due to its security and perception of non-cooperation with law enforcement, saw many of its drug vendors migrate to alternative platforms like Signal, Session, and WhatsApp. Last month, blockchain analytics firm Chainalysis uncovered direct financial ties between Mexican drug cartels and Chinese suppliers of fentanyl precursors through crypto transactions.
