Drug and gun markets on the dark web have brushed off FBI stings to increase sales to as much as $180 million (£115 million) a year, a study reported yesterday.
The dark web has become a trade centre for illicit goods with sales rising from about $22 million a year in 2012, the research suggested.
The marketplaces exist on a hidden part of the internet that can only be accessed using Tor, a special web browser developed by the US military. It creates internet connections that help people to hide their identities.
Trade on the dark web is usually conducted in bitcoin, the anonymous digital currency. American law enforcers have tried to arrest the illicit market creators and disrupt their sites.
Despite the setbacks, dark web markets are trading in illicit goods worth a total of $300,000 to $650,000 a day, according to the paper published by researchers at Carnegie Mellon University, in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.
In October 2013, the FBI knocked out the Silk Road site, the largest platform for illegal drugs at the time. The agency arrested the site’s owner, Ross Ulbricht, who was sentenced to life in prison last May. He has appealed.
“Far from causing the demise of this novel form of commerce, the Silk Road take-down spawned an entire, dynamic, online anonymous marketplace ecosystem, which has continued to evolve,” the researchers, Kyle Soska and Nicolas Christin, said.
In November last year, the FBI took down the copycat marketplace Silk Road 2.0 as well as some smaller sites. The researchers noted a “significant” impact on sales, followed by an “immediate rebound” as buyers and sellers flocked to Evolution and Agora, two competitor marketplaces.
“The anonymous marketplace ecosystem appears to be resilient, [in] the long term, to adverse events such as law enforcement take-downs,” researchers said. They found Ecstasy, cannabis and cocaine accounted for about 70 per cent of annual “dark web” sales.