Seller’s reputation and capacity on the illicit drug markets: 11-month study on the Finnish version of the Silk Road

Abstract

Aims: This 11-month study analysed illicit drug sales on the anonymous Tor network, with a focus on investigating whether a seller's reputation and capacity increased daily drug sales. Design and setting: The data was gathered from Silkkitie, the Finnish version of the Silk Road, by web crawling the site on a daily basis from November 2014 to September 2015). The data includes information on sellers (n=260) and products (n=3823). Measurements: The measurements include the sellers' reputation, the sale amounts (in euros), the number of available products and the types of drugs sold. The sellers' capacity was measured using their full sales potential (in euros). Fixed-effects regression models were used to estimate the effects of sellers' reputation and capacity; these models were adjusted for the types of drugs sold. Findings: Overall, illicit drug sales totalled over 2 million euros during the study, but many products were not sold at all, and sellers were active for only a short time on average (mean=62.8 days). Among the products sold, stimulants were most widely purchased, followed by cannabis, MDMA, and psychedelics. A seller's reputation and capacity were both associated with drug sales. Conclusion: The Tor network has enabled a transformation in drug sales. Due to the network's anonymity, the seller's reputation and capacity both have an impact on sales.

User names of illegal drug vendors on a darknet cryptomarket

“…But how can anyone trust someone when they know nothing about them and there is no legal authority to monitor the actions? This problem has been tried to solve with several trust systems provided by cryptomarkets (Décary-Hétu & Leppänen 2013;Nurmi et al 2017), but those systems are not completely without problems (e.g. Hardy & Nordgaard 2016: 521, 533).…”

Drug traders on a local dark web marketplace

“…The authors collected the material for this article from Sipulitori. Sipulitori is a Finnish Tor network site that is the country's largest drug trading web market, formerly alongside the now defunct cryptomarket Silkkitie (see [33]). The data set consists of 9300 forum posts and responses, collected on a single night as a complete slice of all threads at that time on the site.…”

“…The drugs in question can be illegal (e.g., narcotics), or legal ones (e.g., hormones, medicine) that are traded without sufficient permits. Like other, more well-known Tor marketplaces (see e.g., [2,15,33,45], and also [3,13,16,37,40] for critical discussion), the site also hosts other types of traffic (e.g., sales of weapons, prostitution, hacking, and scams). This article is part of a larger project, in which the authors study information practices on the dark web, focusing on Sipulitori.…”

Information Protection in Dark Web Drug Markets Research

“…On such sites, dealers are openly promoting their wares, in environments where it is often also possible to leave vendor feedback, based on safety of the trade, price/quality ratio and so forth. These are online environments that are, furthermore, open for anyone able to locate them and use a modified browser [4]. Both of these criteria take some skill to apply, as for example search engines tend not to list drug trading Dark Web sites, but in fact not much skill is required beyond curiosity [3].…”