A Geographic Analysis of Drug Trafficking Patterns on the TOR Network

Abstract

ABSTRACT. As globalization processes continue to impact patterns in drug-trafficking operations worldwide, a cyber-based dimension of the drug trade has recently emerged via the Tor Network. This study employed geovisualization and exploratory spatial data analysis to examine drug distributions of heroin, cocaine, new psychoactive substances, and prescription drugs advertised on Agora, the largest international marketplace on the Tor Network at the time of data collection. Data were collected using webcrawling software and mapped to determine the presence of statistical outliers internationally or hotspots within Europe. Global Moran's I testing revealed that drugs sourced from Europe were randomly distributed. Box maps confirmed the visual analysis that six countries (including Canada and the United States) dominated world listings across the four drug types. Globally, heroin and cocaine markets were found to be almost exclusively retail based, while new psychoactive substances and prescription drugs were sold from countries with established pharmaceutical and chemical industries.

A geographical analysis of trafficking on a popular darknet market

“…The specialisation of Indian vendors in the distribution of prescription drugs (see Figure 3) is also worth to be highlighted, especially when considering the small number of vendors they represent, compared to that of the other countries present in the category (see Figures 4 and 5). This was also observed on the cryptomarket Agora [9]. By contrast, sellers 'from' Australia, Germany, the United Kingdom or the United States seem to diversify their activities.…”

“…Thus, even if the possibility exists that sellers do not provide accurate information, it seems unlikely that they do so in regards to the shipping country and the products offered for sale [8,18,25]. In addition, the stated origin country tends to be accurate, as evidenced by studies based on darknet orders [19], seizures of postal parcels at the borders [43] and coherence between online information and knowledge regarding the offline market [8,9].…”

“…Indeed, the overview of the worldwide market would otherwise be uncertain and specific patterns (predominance of a product category, specific spatial distribution, etc.) could also be unclear or even hidden (see Appendix 1 for details about the new classification we performed), as also observed by other researchers [8,9,18,22]. Data analysis was performed using R [23], RStudio v. …”

“…Indeed, recent researches studying country specific differences in substance availability on the Agora cryptomarket found that China, despite a small number of sellers, was overrepresented in NPS. Using only the number of listings and sellers to draw their conclusions, the authors mentioned that China was probably involved in the production of NPS [8,9]. Another study, investigating wholesale activity on cryptomarkets, found that wholesale transactions were especially concentrated in China.…”

“…In addition, from a country-specific perspective, trends regarding different categories of product might be detected, and eventually monitored, from both demand and supply points of view. Despite the added value of a geographical analysis, only a few studies provide a country-specific perspective and they are focused on drugs trafficking and the darknet market named Agora [8,9]. Differences in the availability of specific substances among shipping countries were observed by these research works.…”