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The darknet – a wild west for fake coronavirus ‘cures '? The truth is more difficult (and regulated)

The coronavirus pandemic has spawned reports of unregulated health products and fake cures being sold on the dark web. These include black market PPE, illicit medications such as the widely touted "miracle" drug chloroquine, and fake COVID-19 "cures" including blood supposedly from recovered coronavirus patients.

These dealings have once again focused public attention on this little-understood part of the internet. Nearly ten years since it started being applied to a substantial scale, the dark web remains a lucrative safe haven for traders in a variety of illegal goods and services, especially illicit drugs.

Black market trading on the dark web is carried out primarily through darknet marketplaces or cryptomarkets. They are anonymised trading platforms that directly connect buyers and sellers of a variety of illegal goods and services – much like legitimate trading websites such as eBay.

So how can darknet marketplaces work? And just how much illegal trading of COVID-19-related products is happening via these online spaces?

Not a free-for-all

There are still more than a dozen darknet marketplaces in operation. Protected by powerful encryption technology, authorities around the globe have largely failed to contain their growth. A steadily increasing proportion of illicit drug users around the world report sourcing their drugs online. In Australia, we've one of many World Market Onion's highest concentrations of darknet drug vendors per capita.

Despite popular belief, cryptomarkets are not the "lawless spaces" they're often presented as in the news. Market prohibitions exist on all mainstream cryptomarkets. Universally prohibited goods and services include: hitman services, trafficked human organs and snuff movies.

Although cryptomarkets lie beyond your realm of state regulation, every one is established and maintained by a central administrator who, alongside employees or associates, is accountable for the market's security, dispute resolution between buyers and sellers, and the charging of commissions on transactions.

Administrators will also be ultimately in charge of determining exactly what do and can't be sold on their cryptomarket. These decisions are most likely informed by:

the attitudes of the surrounding community comprising buyers and sellers
the extent of consumer demand and supply for many products
the revenues a niche site makes from commissions charged on transactions
and the perceived "heat" that could be attracted from law enforcement in the trading of particularly dangerous illegal goods and services.

Experts delve to the dark web

A written report from the Australian National University published the other day talks about several hundred coronavirus-related products on the market across twelve cryptomarkets, including supposed vaccines and antidotes.

While the research confirms some unscrupulous dark web traders are indeed exploiting the pandemic and seeking to defraud naïve customers, these records should really be contextualised with a few important caveats.

Firstly, the number of dodgy covid-related products on the market on the dark web is relatively small. According to the research, they account for about 0.2% of listed items. The overwhelming most of products were those we're already knowledgeable about – particularly illicit drugs such as for instance cannabis and MDMA.

Also, while the analysis dedicated to products listed for sale, these are likely listings for products that either do no exist or are listed with the precise intention to defraud a customer.

Thus, the actual sale of fake coronavirus "cures" on the dark web is likely minimal, at best.