Darknet Market Archives (2013–2015)

A number of other datasets are known to exist but are unavailable or available only in restricted form, including:

• law enforcement scrapes (see the Force briefing), seized server images

• National Drug and Alcohol Research Center (NDARC) in Sydney, Australia; Australian vendor focused crawls, non-release may be due to concerns over Australian police interest in them as documentation of sales volume to use against the many arrested Australian sellers

• unknown Princeton grad student

• Christin CMU group: uncensored SR1 crawls (available on request via IMPACT), large number of other markets crawled 2012–2015_11ya (see Soska & Christin2015; Europol; Bone & Cleveland2018; possibly Hutchings2018; “Plug and Prey? Measuring the Commoditization of Cybercrime via Online Anonymous Markets”, van Wegberg et al 2018; and “Enabling Learning in Resilient Adaptive Systems: From Network Fortification to Mindful Organising”, Georgiadis2019 )

  The Soska & Christin2015 dataset is available in a censored form publicly, and the uncensored dataset is available on request to qualified researchers via IMPACT. Similarly, there are anonymized & non-anonymized versions of their in-depth AlphaBay crawls used in 3 papers. The group notes

  Upcoming data (as of July 2018): We are monitoring a number of other markets as of 2018. We expect to make this data available in 2019, with a six-month to one-year delay.

  Tai et al 2019 (“Adversarial Matching of Dark Net Market Vendor Accounts”) uses additional data from “Dream, Berlusconi, Valhalla, and Traderoute”. Gãnán et al 2020 use the IMPACT dataset to study “Agora, Alphabay, BlackMarket Reloaded, Evolution, Hydra, Pandora, Silk Road 1 and Silk Road 2 from 2011_15ya to May 2017, and consists of 44,671 listings and 564,204 transactions made on digital goods, grouped in 17 categories.”

  “Analysis of the supply of drugs and new psychoactive substances by Europe-based vendors via darknet markets in 2017–2018”, Christin & Thomas2019 uses a rewritten crawler and does analysis of presumably the same dataset but gives a time period:

  …we collected 35 scrapes of four markets—Dream Market, Traderoute, Valhalla, and Berlusconi Market—between summer 2017 and summer 2018

• Digital Citizens Alliance (?)

• Dolliver2015 (claimed NDA prevents sharing SR2 crawls, despite serious anomalies & absurd results in published analysis)

• Hardy & Norgaard2015/Hardy2019: HTTrack-based scrapes of SR2 marijuana listings November 2013_13ya to October 2014

• Marin et al 2016

• Janetos & Tilly2017

• Celestini et al 2016 (AlphaBay/Nucleus/East India Company, monthly crawls for 4 months in 2015_11ya)

• Project CASSANDRA: Wadsworth et al 2017, Wadsworth et al 2018 (22 DNMs, every 2 months from October 2015_11ya to 2016)

• “The Economic Functioning of Online Drug Markets”, Bhaskar et al 2017 (CEP crawls: SR1 2013-08-01, SR2 2013-12-02–November 2014_12ya, Agora December 2013_13ya, Evolution January 2014_12ya, Nucleus November 2014_12ya)

• Dittus et al 2017, “Platform Criminalism: The ‘Last-Mile’ Geography of the Darknet Market Supply Chain”) (AlphaBay/Hansa/Traderoute/Valhalla, June–July 2017

• “Dark Market Regression: Calculating the Price Distribution of Cocaine from Market Listings”, David Everling (2017-07-14–2017-07-21, Dream Market; used in Chun2019)

• “Sex, Drugs, and Bitcoin: How Much Illegal Activity Is Financed Through Cryptocurrencies?”, Foley et al 2019 (active DNMs 2016–2017)

• “Challenging the techno-politics of anonymity: the case of cryptomarket users”, Bancroft & Reid2017 (1 major but unspecified DNM forum, crawled March–May 2015_11ya covering ~2 years of forum posts)

• DATACRYPTO: Paquet-Clouston2016/Paquet-Clouston et al 2018 (AlphaBay: September 2015–February 2016); Martin et al 2018: “31 cryptomarkets in operation between 2013-09-12 and 2016-07-18, including all the largest English language sites (Alphabay, Nucleus, Dream market, Agora, Abraxas, Evolution, Silk Road 2 (Silk Road Reloaded), and SR1).”

• Bakken et al 2017, “Coordination problems in cryptomarkets: Changes in cooperation, competition and valuation”: SR2 seller profiles snapshot, 2014-09-15

• Tzanetakis2018, “Comparing cryptomarkets for drugs. A characterisation of sellers and buyers over time” (AlphaBay: September 2015–August 2016)

• Hutchings2018, “Leaving on a jet plane: the trade in fraudulently obtained airline tickets” (unknown “blackmarket”, “December 2014_12ya to August 2016”, but probably using the Christin/Soska crawl and AlphaBay)

• Hayes et al 2018, “A Framework for More Effective Dark Web Marketplace Investigations”

• Hutchings2018, “Flying in Cyberspace: Policing Global Travel Fraud”: unspecified large DNM 2014–2016 (Evolution?)

• Rolando & Beccaria2018, “This place is like the jungle: discussions about psychoactive substances on a cryptomarket” (July 2016, single AlphaBay forum scrape)

• Baravalle & Lee2018, “Dark Web Markets: Turning the Lights on AlphaBay” (June-September 2017 AlphaBay market scrapes)

• Du et al 2018, “Identifying, Collecting, and Presenting Hacker Community Data: Forums, IRC, Carding Shops, and DNMs” (51 forums/13 IRC channels/12 DNMS (0day/Alphabay/Apple Market/Dream Market/French Deep Web/Hansa/Minerva/Russian Silk Road)/26 carding shops, 2016–2018)

• Evangelista2018, “Darknet Markets: Competitive Strategies In The Underground Of Illicit Goods” (Berlusconi Market (2018-06-02, 2018-06-29–2018-06-30), Dream Market (2018-03-06–2018-04-06, 2018-06-30–2018-07-03, 2018-08-19–2018-08-20), Empire Market (2018-06-06), & Olympus Market (2018-06-06))

• Rossy et al 2018, “Drogues sur Internet: Etat des lieuxsur la situation en Suisse” (Google Translate: “This is data collected by several police forces during the seizure and closing of two important crypto markets of the Silk Road 2.0 era and Pandora. The data on Swiss buyers was transmitted to us anonymously. The data concerns 724 purchases made between November 26, 2013_13ya and August 12, 2014_12ya. 11 of them are from the Pandora platform, while the other 713 come from the Silk Road cryptomarket 2.0.”)

• Ball et al 2019, “Data Capture & Analysis of Darknet Markets”, Australian National University’s Cybercrime Observatory; Apollon Market, 2018-12-17–2019-02-25.

• Zhang et al 2019, “Your Style Your Identity: Leveraging Writing and Photography Styles for Drug Trafficker Identification in Darknet Markets over Attributed Heterogeneous Information Network”: Valhalla/Dream Market, “weekly snapshots from June 2017 to August 2017”

• Magnúsdóttir2019, “Darknet Drug Markets In A Swedish Context: A Descriptive Analysis Of Wall Street Market And Flugsvamp 3.0”: “Wall Street Market and Flugsvamp 3.0, in March of 2019”

• Wu et al 2019, “Python Scrapers for Scraping Cryptomarkets on Tor”: one-off scrapes of 7 markets (Dream/Berlusconi/Wall Street/Valhalla/Empire/Point Tochka/Silk Road 3.1)

• Espinosa2019, “Scamming and the Reputation of Drug Dealers on Darknet Markets”: Hansa, March 2017

• Červený & van Ours 2019, “Cannabis Prices on the Dark Web” (AlphaBay: first two weeks of “early October 2015”)

• Du et al 2019, “Identifying High-Impact Opioid Products and Key Sellers in Dark Net Marketplaces: An Interpretable Text Analytics Approach” (AlphaBay 2016–2017 & Dream Market 2016–2018)

• Bradley2019, “On the Resilience of the Dark Net Market Ecosystem to Law Enforcement Intervention” (SR2, raided server images; Bradley received copies of the SR2 server data from an unspecified UK LE agency); Bradley & Stringhini2019, “A Qualitative Evaluation of Two Different Law Enforcement Approaches on Dark Net Markets” (Reddit datasets)

• Yannikos et al 2019, “An Analysis Framework for Product Prices and Supplies in Darknet Marketplaces” (“Dream Market, Wall Street Market, and Tochka Market…We performed the data collection over a duration of a little more than 7 weeks, starting from September 18, 2018 until November 19, 2018”)

• Zheng et al 2019, “Identifying Hidden Buyers in Darknet Markets via Dirichlet Hawkes Process” (Dream Market, Wall Street Market, & Empire Market; single 2019 crawl?)

• Bancroft et al 2019, “Producing Trust Among Illicit Actors: A Techno-Social Approach to an Online Illicit Market” (The Majestic Garden; selected forum posts, 2017–2018?)

• Kwon et al 2020, “Knowledge Sharing Network in a Community of Illicit Practice: A Cybermarket Subreddit Case” (/r/AlphaBay scrape from a “cybersecurity firm”, June 2016–July 2017)

• Smith & Frank2020, “Dishing the Deets: How dark-web users teach each other about international drug shipments” (“Data collected for this research was obtained from two forums and one cryptomarket between the period of November 2017 and April 2018.”: /r/DNM, Dread, & Dream Market respectively)

• Ubbink2019, “Characterization of illegal dark web arms markets” (Berlusconi, weapon lists, May–June 2019)

• Norbutas et al 2020, “Reputation transferability across contexts: Maintaining cooperation among anonymous cryptomarket actors when moving between markets” (aside from using this & Soska, “We collected data from AlphaBay in June and July 2017, shortly before the cryptomarket was seized.”)

• Arps & Christin2020, “Open Market or Ghost Town? The Curious Case of OpenBazaar” (OpenBazaar crawls: June 25, 2018–September 3, 2019)

• Zhou et al 2020, “A Market in Dream: the Rapid Development of Anonymous Cybercrime” (Dream Market: 2018-10-30–2019-03-01)

• Yang et al 2019, “Anonymous market product classification based on deep learning” (“In order to conduct research on the anonymous trading market, a one-month crawler was used, and anonymous market data was collected by OnionScan.”)

• Rhumorbarbe et al 2018, “Technical Note: Characterizing the online weapons trafficking on cryptomarkets” (“Weapons related webpages from nine cryptomarkets were manually duplicated in February 2016…The selected markets are: Aflao marketplace (AFL), AlphaBay (ALB), Dr D’s multilingual market (DDM), Dream market(DMA), French Darknet (FRE), The Real Deal (TRD), Oasis (OAS), Outlaw market (OUT), Valhalla (aka Silkkitie) (VAL).”)

• Cheung2019, “‘We must work together for the good of all’: An examination of conflict management on two popular cryptomarkets” (Tochka Free Market (TFM)/Wall Street Market (WSM) forum posts, vendor profiles, reviews, and market rules, unspecified 2019 (?) date)

• Veringmeier2019, “Repeat Buying Behavior of Illegal Drugs on Cryptomarkets” (single scrape, AlphaBay July 2017?)

• Recon2020: announcement (Grams DNM search engine successor?)

• Broadhurst et al 2020, “Fentanyl availability on darknet markets” (“Data were collected over 84 days (from 2 January to 2019-03-27) from 64 ‘scrapes’ of six omnibus darknet markets: Berlusconi, Dream Market, Empire, Tochka, Valhalla (‘Silkkitie’) and Wall Street.”)

  • Broadhurst et al 2021, “Impact of darknet market seizures on opioid availability” (“Data were collected over 352 days, from 2 January to 20 December 2019 [2019-01-02–2019-12-20] (excluding weekends), combining 251 scrapes from initially 8 darknet markets: Apollon, Empire, Dream, Nightmare, Tochka (also known as Point), Berlusconi, Valhalla (also called Silkitie), and Wall Street. In April three ‘new’ markets (Agartha, Dream Alt and Samsara) were added after Wall Street and Valhalla were seized by law enforcement and Dream voluntarily closed. In July Cryptonia was added as a substitute for Nightmare, which closed in an exit scam (where a business stops sending orders but continues to accept payment for new orders). Cryptonia operated until a planned (voluntary) closure in November.”)

• Ladegaard2020, “Open Secrecy: How Police Crackdowns and Creative Problem-Solving Brought Illegal Markets out of the Shadows”

  To estimate the scale of encryption-signing, information hub activity, and seller migration, I downloaded and extracted data from key original sources using python and wget. For the encryption-signing analysis, I collected data from the discussion forums associated with 5 cryptomarkets: Silk Road and Silk Road 2; BlackMarket (another early cryptomarket); and the 2 largest cryptomarkets in 2014–2015_11ya: Agora and Evolution. I supplemented collected files with data from public archives (Branwen2016). For the analysis of information hub activity, I collected data from 3 market-independent forums, and visitor data from 2 additional websites were shared with me by their operators. Last, I collected data on post-intervention trade and seller migration from the 3 largest markets after Silk Road was shut down: Silk Road 2, Evolution, and Agora. I collected these data daily, from October 2014_12ya until September 2015_11ya. Agora lasted throughout the period, but Silk Road 2 was shut down in early November 2014_12ya, and Evolution closed in medio March 2015_11ya. (Most of these data are available at darkdata.bc.edu or upon request.)

• Silfversten et al 2020, “Exploring the use of Zcash cryptocurrency for illicit or criminal purposes” (uses DWO, RAND’s ongoing “Dark Web Observatory”)

• Turk et al 2020, “A tight scrape: methodological approaches to cybercrime research data collection in adversarial environments” (“Concretely, we have been crawling various cybercrime communities for more than four years, including web forums…We have scraped 26 forums (described in Table 1), around 300 chat channels across Discord and Telegram, and an archive of files.”)

• Lamy et al 2020, “Listed for sale: Analyzing data on fentanyl, fentanyl analogs and other novel synthetic opioids on one cryptomarket” (eDarkTrends scrape of Dream Market: 2018-03-22–2019-01-26)

• Duxbury & Haynie2020, “The responsiveness of criminal networks to intentional attacks: Disrupting darknet drug trade” (“Data for our study come from one of the largest currently operating darknet drug markets, Silk Road 3.1. They contain information on 16,847 illicit drug transactions between 7,126 buyers and 169 vendors, representing the entire population of drug transactions on the Silk Road 3.1 during its first 14 months of activity”)

• Moeller et al 2020, “Illicit drug prices and quantity discounts: A comparison between a cryptomarket, social media, and police data” (“Data from Flugsvamp 2.0 was collected in collaboration with the DATACRYPTO project (see Décary-Hétu & Aldridge2015) between May and September in 2018, yielding 826 advertisements. Flugsvamp 2.0 provided specified categories for drug types and prices, but we also verified and coded them manually.”)

• Bradley2020, “Essays in Demand Estimation: Illicit Drugs and Commercial Mushrooms” (Agora, 2014-11-04–2015-09-05_11ya)

• Barr-Smith & Wright2020, “Phishing With a Darknet: Imitation of Onion Services” (spidering of all Tor hidden services, May–July 2019)

• Holt & Lee2020, “A Crime Script Analysis of Counterfeit Identity Document Procurement Online”

• Samreen & Alafi2020, “Voting for Authorship Attribution Applied to Dark Web Data” (forums: DNM Avengers, The Majestic Garden, The Hub, Dread; ~2019-10–2019-12)

• Bracci et al 2021, “Dark Web Marketplaces and COVID-19: before the vaccine” (2020-01-01–2020-11-16; Flashpoint Intelligence commercial crawls of Atshop, Black Market Guns, CanadaHQ, Cannabay, Cannazon, Connect, Cypher, DarkBay, DBay, DarkMarket, Darkseid, ElHerbolario, Empire, Exchange, Genesis, Hydra, MEGA Darknet, MagBO, Monopoly, Mouse In Box, Plati.market, Rocketr, Selly, Shoppy.gg, Skimmer Device, Tor Market, Torrez, Venus Anonymous, White House, Willhaben, Yellow Brick)

• Crowder & Lansiquot2021, “Darknet Data Mining—A Canadian Cyber-crime Perspective” (early 2020-07: EliteMarket, Icarus, AESAN)

• Brunelle et al 2021, “Introducing A Dark Web Archival Framework” (MITRE, ongoing?)

• van Waardenberg2021, “Reputation in AlphaBay: the effect of forum discussions on the business success of cryptomarket sellers” (unpublished Dutch AlphaBay dataset)

• Furumoto et al 2021, “Extracting Threat Intelligence Related IoT Botnet From Latest Dark Web Data Collection” (ASAP, DarkMarket, DarkFox; Dread; 2021?)

• Maras et al 2023, “Keeping Pace With the Evolution of Illicit Darknet Fentanyl Markets: Using a Mixed Methods Approach to Identify Trust Signals and Develop a Vendor Trustworthiness Index” (2020–2022: Vice City, Versus, Cartel, ASAP)

• Goonetilleke et al 2023, “Hydra: Lessons from the World’s Largest Darknet Market” (Hydra: 1 April 2020–2 May 2020; uses the Christin scrapes and an anonymous third-party scrape)