It seized 50.8 million euros ($53.4 million) in cash and virtual currencies, 850 kilograms of drugs, and 117 firearms were seized in a series of raids in several countries. The largest number of arrests — 153 — were made in the United States, followed by the United Kingdom with 55 and Germany with 52, according to the European Union law enforcement agency Europol, which coordinated the worldwide operation. One defendant in California led an organization that bought fentanyl in bulk, pressed it into pills with methamphetamine and sold millions of pills to thousands of people on the dark web, he said. Operation Take Back America streamlines efforts and resources from the Department’s Organized Crime Drug Enforcement Task Forces (OCDETFs) and Project Safe Neighborhood (PSN). The defendants fulfilled drug orders through the various vendor accounts by packaging the drugs into parcels and by delivering those parcels to post offices and mailboxes in Los Angeles County and elsewhere.
Operation RapTor And Continued Disruption
However, some researchers suggest hoarding addictive drugs due to the perception of potential shortage as a trigger to use Darkweb during the pandemic 13. Archetyp Market had operated for over five years, amassing more than 600,000 registered users and processing at least EUR 250 million in transactions. The site’s infrastructure, hosted in the Netherlands, was taken offline during the operation. Authorities arrested the alleged administrator, a 30-year-old German national, in Barcelona, while enforcement actions in Germany and Sweden targeted one of the site’s moderators and six of its highest-volume vendors. This section elaborates on the methodology used to identify opioid trading information in the anonymous market and forums. Specifically, we collected approximately 248,359 unique listings and 1,138,961 unique forum traces (ie, threads of posts) from 10 anonymous online marketplaces and 6 forums.
The Dark Web As A Platform For Crime: An Exploration Of Illicit Drug, Firearm, CSAM, And Cybercrime Markets
Research on the Darknet will likely interest many countries and organizations due to the potential implications for cybercrime, national security, and internet governance. Governments, law enforcement agencies, and other organizations may, therefore, be interested in funding Darknet research to understand better and address these issues. The defendants then allegedly shipped the drugs throughout the United States via the United States Postal Service. The takedown of Archetyp Market is a clear signal that law enforcement agencies, supported by advanced blockchain intelligence, can disrupt even the most entrenched illicit platforms. But the resilience and evolution of these networks underscore the need for continued cross-border collaboration, technical innovation, and real-time monitoring to stay ahead of the next generation of darknet threats.
Data sharing is not applicable to this article as no new data were created or analyzed in this study. Most of the arrests were made in the U.S., which is in the grips of an overdose crisis. Synthetic opioids, mostly fentanyl, kill more Americans every year than died in the Vietnam, Iraq and Afghanistan wars combined.
The Dark Web And The Future Of Illicit Drug Markets
Transactional commercial supply in contrast emphasises profits and market-mediated relationships, and sometimes validates predation and exploitation 2. The internet is a modern bazaar 3 of drug-selling modes, expanded psychoactive repertoires 4 and places of community harm reduction, which revise dominant narratives of drug use and PWUD 5. Tor is an internet service which protects those who use it from monitoring and promotes anonymity through data routing and encryption. It also permits services to be hosted anonymously, using what are called onion or location-hidden services. A server can be connected to the Tor network without its location being detected. Today (June 16, 2025), Europol announced the successful dismantling of Archetyp Market, the longest-running darknet drug marketplace, following a sweeping international operation coordinated across six countries.
Evidence suggests that international research collaboration can lead to better citations. One study found that international collaboration can increase research visibility and impact and lead to new research networks and partnerships 53. Another study found that international collaboration was positively correlated with the number of citations received by a research paper 54.
Ways Agentic AI Is Transforming Cybersecurity
The anecdotally reported lower presence of unwanted fentanyl in dark-web drugs is an attraction for many in an era when opioid markets have been flooded with it. And if unwanted fentanyl does crop up online, buyers can easily warn each other by way of the review system or the forums. Established in 2019, Russian Market is a well-known and highly regarded data store on the dark web, specializing in the sale of PII and various forms of stolen data. Despite its name, the marketplace operates primarily in English and serves a global audience. It has gained a reputation for being a reliable source of high-quality data for cybercriminals.
Analog Computing Platform Uses Synthetic Frequency Domain To Boost Scalability
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. Russian Market has consistently remained one of the most popular and valuable data stores on the dark web. The platform’s activity has increased significantly over the past year, indicating its growing influence and market share in the underground economy.
Global Synthetic Drug Markets: The Present And Future
This can lead to a biased view of the research landscape, as papers not included in the database will not be included in the analysis. Cluster 1 (red) is dominated by SDG 16, which focuses on peace, justice, and strong institutions. This cluster also has strong connections to other SDGs, including SDG 8 (decent work and economic growth), SDG 9 (industry, innovation, and infrastructure), and SDG 5 (gender equality).
Characteristics Of Suppliers
Postal Service because it searches for suspicious packages by hand, while services like FedEx and DHL use more rigorous, automated methods. The report recommends that all international packages start to include what they call “advanced electronic data”—special information on bar codes that could help flag drug-bearing packages for postal workers. The expanding use of cryptocurrencies by terrorist organizations and state-sponsored actors illustrates the dual-edged nature of technological innovations — providing both opportunity and risk.
- Science mapping (co-citation, co-authorship, keyword co-occurrence, and bibliographic coupling) and performance analysis (analysis of the number of publications, citations, and their impact) are carried out in this work using bibliometric analysis 35,39.
- This trend corresponds with a systematic increase in the criminal market scores relating to illicit drugs in the latest Global Organized Crime Index.
- Police also took out a vital part of the dark web’s infrastructure, the information and review site Deepdotweb.com, arresting two suspected administrators in May in France and Israel, and seizing €7.5 million (£6.7 million) in bitcoins.
- The dark web offers vital anonymity for vendors and buyers, who use cryptocurrencies such as Bitcoin to process transactions.
- The benefits of making large purchases means that purchases are often made with the intent of social supply 38.
- The top three funders identified in the data are the National Science Foundation from the United States, the European Commission from Belgium, and the Japan Society for the Promotion of Science from Japan.
While marketplaces pop up like weeds—the notorious AlphaBay was recently resurrected by DeSnake, one of its original administrators—skittish or incarcerated vendors may be harder to come by. Europol, which is based in The Hague, built its intelligence on evidence from Germany, which seized the marketplace’s “criminal infrastructure” in December 2021, the agency said. The seized drugs included 141 pounds of fentanyl or fentanyl-laced narcotics, more than 569 pounds of amphetamines, 95 pounds of cocaine, 95 pounds of MDMA and 22 pounds of LSD and ecstasy pills, authorities said. For the first time, FBI agents from all of the bureau’s field offices visited buyers to tell them about the overdose danger of pills sold online, which are often disguised to look like prescription drugs. 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.
Hence, we also gathered snapshots of 5 underground marketplaces and 6 forums collected by the anonymous marketplace archives programs and previous research projects 20. First, an opioid trader, who intends to list the selling information and find potential customers, will first access the anonymous online marketplaces and forums, using an anonymous browsing tool such as a Tor client or a web-to-Tor proxy (step 1 in Figure 1) 5,6. Anonymous online marketplaces and forums usually operate as hidden Tor services, which can only be resolved through Tor (an anonymity network). Figures 2 and 3 illustrate examples of opioid listings in The Versus Project and Alphabay.
