The Secret History Of World Market Onion

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

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

These dealings have once more focused public attention with this little-understood portion of the internet. Nearly ten years because it started being utilized on a significant scale, the dark web remains a lucrative safe haven for traders in a selection 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're anonymised trading platforms that directly connect buyers and sellers of a selection of illegal goods and services – just like legitimate trading websites such as for instance eBay.

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

Not a free-for-all

There are greater 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 have one of the world market's highest concentrations of darknet drug vendors per capita.

Unlike popular belief, cryptomarkets aren't 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 outside the realm of state regulation, each one of these is initiated and maintained by a main administrator who, along with employees or associates, is accountable for the market's security, dispute resolution between buyers and sellers, and the charging of commissions on transactions.

Administrators are also ultimately responsible for determining so what can and can't be sold on their cryptomarket. These decisions tend 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 website 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 into the dark web

A report from the Australian National University published last week talks about several hundred coronavirus-related products available across twelve cryptomarkets, including supposed vaccines and antidotes.

While the analysis confirms some unscrupulous dark web traders are indeed exploiting the pandemic and seeking to defraud naïve customers, these details should be contextualised with a couple of important caveats.

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

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

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