All of the darknet markets have .onion domains which can only be accessed using Tor. The analysis of Telegram’s black market showed that drugs are one of many illicit products traded on the platform. “Satisfied customer, will be back,” writes one user on the product page of a meth dealer with the handle shardyshardface. “Bravo,” says another for a $5 sample of fentanyl, one of 18 reviews posted on the product’s profile page in the last week. In all, Empire lists over 18,000 narcotic offerings, including hundreds for oxycodone alone.
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The team crawled the content of each of these sites to work out the full catalog of products on offer. They used various techniques to find hidden products, such as entering sequential identifiers to see if they corresponded with real pages. This is all while the druglords at the top of the chain preach a libertarian, self-development type of rhetoric in YouTube videos, styling working for their platforms as a way out of the considerable adversity certain Russians face. “Seagulls” is the term for people who go around looking for likely stash spots and stealing drugs. “Law enforcement has had to start from scratch in hunting them down. Because Russia is frozen out of international policing intelligence, it is hard for these borderless drug businesses to be identified and caught” — says Daly. “Russian (and Ukrainian) hackers, crypto, and online tech experts have always been ahead of the curve in this realm, and so it takes a huge effort from police to take down these kinds of shops and platforms” — says Daly.
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Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s Homeland Security Investigations (HSI) New York Field Office posed as a money launderer on darknet market sites, exchanging U.S. currency for virtual currency. Through this operation, HSI New York was able to identify numerous vendors of illicit goods, leading to the opening of more than 90 active cases around the country, including the investigation into Mr. Shaughnessy in the Northern District of Texas. Just seven weeks after a widely publicised, all-out assault by international investigators on darknet markets – and their supporting infrastructure of review sites and bulletin boards – the entire drug-dealing cryptomarket ecosystem is today operating just as it was before. From at least April 2021 until May 2023, McDonald and others conspired to sell fentanyl and cocaine via multiple darknet marketplaces. But another factor that’s worthy of consideration is the way in which drug dealers and darknet vendors are diversifying their offering and creating a more reliable service—even in the face of transnational cybercrime crackdowns and rampant fraudulent activity.
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He exploited the government postal service to distribute drugs across the country, highlighting a vulnerability in the system. Authorities seized substantial amounts of drugs and cryptocurrency, revealing the sophistication of digital drug dealing and the challenges in combating it. Usually, it takes a few weeks for buyers to transfer to alternative or new sites.
Dr Barratt says there is not yet any proof that Ulbricht’s release from prison will result in a renewed Silk Road website, or an emboldened push towards more online illicit drugs marketplaces. To the UNODC, this suggests “an increase in wholesale activities” on the dark web—though this could also reflect consumers who buy smaller quantities shifting from the dark net to the clear net and encrypted messaging apps. After dropping out of a culinary apprenticeship, the then 19-year-old began to fully devote his time to running Shiny Flakes and ultimately built up one of the most lucrative online drug shops in Germany. Aside from some help in the beginning from his mentor, RedBull (who has by now been arrested) and support from someone with the username DummesSchwein (who disappeared early on), Maximilian S.
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The cycle Christin describes—law enforcement takedowns followed by a slow but robust recovery—has played out on the dark web again and again, repeating roughly every year or two. After the late 2013 takedown of the Silk Road, the first real dark-web drug market, more than a dozen replacements rose up to fill the demand for anonymous online narcotics sales. A massive crackdown called Operation Onymous followed in late 2014, seizing a broad swath of the dark web and arresting 17 people by exploiting a vulnerability in the anonymity software Tor, which serves as the dark web’s fundamental cloaking tool. To shed light on the changes, Daly and blockchain analyst and veteran researcher of Russian darknet markets Patrick Shortis co-authored Breaking Klad — a 40+ page report for Global Initiative. With the help of Russian journalist Andrey Kaganskih and Russian-British journalist Niko Vorobjo, the report details how thousands of such couriers are now operating in Russia, where buying drugs in person is becoming a thing of the past. In 2015, the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) described Silk Road as “a hidden website designed to enable its users to buy and sell illegal drugs and other unlawful goods and services anonymously and beyond the reach of law enforcement between January 2011 and October 2013”.
“It may be that a person’s entire experience of using drugs has actually started through the darknet, and may indeed be confined to the darknet,” she explained. Some of us who use drugs are lucky enough to have physical access to a safe supply. Mercifully, the escrow system now largely keeps dealers from pulling these sorts of tricks (they don’t get paid until the product arrives, after all). Buying directly from an online dealer—as opposed to through one of the marketplaces—is generally inadvisable. There’s no escrow system when you do that and, therefore, no guarantee they’ll actually send you something.
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While the FBI and the U.S court system deemed Ulbricht a criminal, his supporters amongst crypto and Libertarian circles thought otherwise, minting him a hero instead. At the time, the ability to use Bitcoin to buy and sell items on Silk Road earned the robust respect of crypto-supportive crowds. Most vendors (890) were based in the US, with the UK in second place, followed by Germany with 225 sellers.
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Four Los Angeles County men were arrested Wednesday on suspicion of operating one of the dark web’s biggest drug distribution networks, according to the U.S. More work will be needed to chart the evolution of this new market, however. It’s not hard to see how this kind of activity could undermine conventional law enforcement approaches. But it can also uncover additional information on the nature of this kind of use and its broader impact in society.
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If you happen to live far from your dealer—for me, stocking up on dope used to mean taking a Metro trip and walking through a sketchy neighborhood—this is a significant plus. Being able to have your drugs delivered right to your door is so much simpler. People are buying anything from hacked YouTube Premium accounts to fake watches. Some chat groups trade tips on insurance fraud, credit card fraud or counterfeit money.
- The world’s first internet-facilitated sale, in the early 1970s and on the internet precursor Arpanet, was for an undetermined amount of cannabis.
- While the FBI and the U.S court system deemed Ulbricht a criminal, his supporters amongst crypto and Libertarian circles thought otherwise, minting him a hero instead.
- The second season of the Netflix series “How to Sell Drugs Online (Fast),” produced in Germany, started at the end of July.
- In a Vice documentary on drug sales on social media, it took the host just five minutes to connect with a dealer in London.
- (Facebook and Instagram took action against 9.3 million pieces of drug-related content last year, while Snapchat says it did so in 241,227 cases in the second half of 2023.) But these companies’ actions are sometimes indiscriminate.
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He repeats instructions to himself from The Kladmen’s Bible, an ebook that instructs couriers how to make a living stashing drugs others bought online in clever spots to be picked up. The second season of the Netflix series “How to Sell Drugs Online (Fast),” produced in Germany, started at the end of July. These brutal attacks are often filmed and uploaded to social media – some Telegram groups have posted up to 2,000 clips – as victims are forced to beg for forgiveness. It is routine to see people beaten unconscious, while the most extreme videos feature fingers being broken or cut off, sexual assault and, in at least one case, murder. Of course meeting a dealer on the street isn’t the safest thing in the world but to me it seems better then trusting a random person or group on the dark web. Drug sales on the dark web are trending downward in favor of Snapchat, Telegram, and others.
DF claims they are safe from investigation as the site’s business model differs from that of DeepDotWeb, which took affiliate sales fees in return for keeping lists of URLs updated. “I do not endorse sites and I do not take payment in exchange for anything. When Archetyp went fully offline in June 2025, it triggered the same recovery reflexes seen after past collapses. Within hours, vendors were resurfacing on forums, scrambling to reconnect with buyers, showing proof of their identities and reassuring business continued as usual.
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Suppliers are meeting demand by producing Udemy-like online courses that teach the surprisingly accessible manufacture of synthetic drugs. For a growing number of struggling young people in Russia, the money outweighs the risks, especially if they have a drug habit. Becoming a kladman (Кладмена), which translates to ‘stashmen,’ it’s possible to make over $500 US per week — which is more than double the average weekly salary in Russia ($222).
(Facebook and Instagram took action against 9.3 million pieces of drug-related content last year, while Snapchat says it did so in 241,227 cases in the second half of 2023.) But these companies’ actions are sometimes indiscriminate. The accounts of organizations promoting drug harm reduction and social media personalities who post content about drugs and psychedelics, but who do not sell them, are being caught in the crossfire of efforts to get a grip on the issue. This darknet trade offers an entirely new way for drug dealers to sell their wares and for customers to score. The market is worth some $150 million a year—a small fraction of the $300 billion estimated worth of the global trade in illegal drugs—but it is growing rapidly.
