12. Online Payments
Every true criminal have their own buying and selling business: skimmers,
cards and documents,
anonymous SIM cards, network adapters, and so on. It
would be a shame if they got caught directly at home, wouldn’t it? Obviously,
buying online in anonymity must not be a cyber-crime world prerogative:
nowadays, more and more people buy on the web, unaware that every order
placed feed the biggest market analysis database ever. Buying online with no
traces in clearnet became utterly impossible: orders are stored in the sellers
databases, payments are managed by banks or traceable virtual payment circuits,
shipments are handled by third-party companies that, due to legal requirements
or, more simply,
company policies, may decide to verify the content of a parcel
without providing any valid reason.
12.1 Buying in the Dark Net
As we saw, Dark Net is the part of the Deep Web containing materials
considered as illegal in some countries. Web criminals use the Dark Net to
exchange information and products of any type; such products, obviously, cannot
be traded in the “normal” market. We’re not referring only to drugs, but also to
weapons,
stolen goods, pornography, credit cards forgery and duplication tools,
prescription drugs, forged identity documents, website databases, 0day software
exploits, and more. There’s no point in warning you about the reliability of
stores and sellers from the Dark Net: since the tools to navigate and purchase are
also designed to ensure anonymity, just consider that frauds and scams happen
all the times.
12.1.1 Dark Net Markets
Actually, the “dark” community in the Clearnet – reddit
[150]
, 4chan
[151]
and
many others – constantly leave feedback and links
to the new selling nodes;
furthermore, especially since
Silk Road (a famous illegal marketplace) has been
shut down, the new selling channels have grown almost ten fold.
12.1.1.1 Types of Dark Net Markets
In the Dark Net, you can find different types of markets, not always sharing
the same transactional method. In years, we saw different types of markets we
can summarize in five broad categories:
1)
Centralized Markets: stores were buyers and sellers use a shared crypto-
currency wallet. They are extremely dangerous, since the managers can decide to
lock an account and then cheat both parties. This category
also includes the
world-famous Silk Road.
2)
De-Centralized Markets: a new type of market – still at the design stage –
based on a transactional system that doesn’t require external navigation tools like
TOR and others. Currently, the most ambitious projects are Bitmarkets
[152]
and
OpenBazaar
[153]
, which are still little used and under development
3)
Forum Market: the most popular ones, since they can be created and
maintained simply with a forum software. They’re totally identical to normal
forums, but also contain listings announcements. Most of them also come with
escrow services (selling methods where a third party arbitrate the transaction) or
sell VIP verification packages, to limit frauds.
4)
Multi-Signature Market: in these types of markets, the transaction takes
place within a shared wallet (just like centralized markets), but here,
in order to
close the deal, two out of three involved parties (buyer, seller and
moderator/middleman) must accept the exchange, so that they can be (almost)
certain of a successful transaction.
5)
Single Sale: this category includes freelance sellers offering any kind of
service through their websites. They’re also the ones who, defining their own
rules, perform the highest count of frauds over the Dark Net.
You must consider that some markets can be accessed by invitation only, so
being connected through the same anonymous circuit they’re distributed with is
not enough.
12.1.1.2 Where to find the Dark Net Markets?
Listing the currently online stores would make no sense, because they can
last a couple of weeks up to some month, while this manual (hopefully) will not
be updated before a couple of years! You should also consider that, after the
attacks against
different anonymous networks, the Dark Net Markets use to shift
from a system to another; in the case of Silk Road, for example, we’ve seen its
resurrection both on TOR and on I2P.
For this reason, I beg your pardon if I won’t be able to update the list from
time to time; however, you can follow one of the portals below:
-
Darkwebnews (
https://darkwebnews.com/dark-web-market-list/
)
-
PsychonautWiki
(
https://psychonautwiki.org/wiki/Comparison_of_darknet_markets
)
By the way, it’s also worth mentioning Grams, a
search engine exclusively
dedicated to the Dark Net Markets (only available on TOR network at this
moment; search for the correct .onion address on Internet).
