Silk Road launched in 2011, and although it was shut down by the Federal Bureau of Investigations by 2013, it took less than a month for its successor, Silk Road 2.0, to launch. Silk Road 2.0 was then shut down once again in 2014, and the United States government later seized more than $1 billion worth of Bitcoin in November 2020. To access the darknet, you will need to download and install special software, such as the Tor browser. However, we do not recommend accessing the darknet for any illegal activities, including buying drugs.
Step 1: Accessing The Darknet
Data set summary of marketplaces and forums that were collected for this study. According to the report, most of this fentanyl originates in China. China has cracked down on fentanyl and some of its subtypes, or analogues, but the online dealers often tweak the formulas of their drugs slightly to stay ahead of bans. For example, when China announced it would ban one fentanyl product, called U-47700, on July 1, one fentanyl dealer advertised a “hot sale” of the product through June. “All must go till 1 of July,” the “special offer” read, according to the report. A Canadian market established in 2021, WTN offers over 9,000 products, including narcotics, fake goods, and digital services.
Recently, a group of investigators with the Senate Subcommittee on Investigations Googled “buy fentanyl online” on the open internet, then homed in on the six sites that were most responsive to their requests. An investigator on the committee, who was not authorized to speak publicly about the findings, said these represent a tiny fraction of the hundreds of fentanyl-selling sites on the web. A single study can’t definitively prove whether the dark web offers a safer supply. But these results suggest that, while some substances were indeed less likely to be adulterated, purchasing there is not a silver-bullet harm reduction strategy—and that testing remains vital whatever the source. By paying close attention to where adulterated substances were purchased, local drug checking services can help participants make more informed decisions to protect their health. The researchers focused on the five most common drugs sent in for testing—MDMA, cocaine, amphetamine, methamphetamine and LSD—to ensure that there would be enough data points to produce reliable results in each case.
Set Up A Secure Environment
Since then, he has dedicated his career to writing extensively about crucial infosec, data privacy, and cybersecurity topics. When he’s not empowering PrivacySavvy’s readers to take control of their online security, Saheed enjoys distance running, playing chess, and exploring the latest open-source software advancements. Drug dealers can sell to customers across the world, not just locally. This expanded reach, combined with anonymity, only makes it easier for them to grow their operations without getting caught immediately. Unfortunately, the dark web hosts not only explicit but also deeply illegal and disturbing content.
As a precaution, most dealers only use these platforms for advertising and work out the transaction details via Kik, a chatting app; the main difference is not between the various apps but between the two general styles of dealer found on these apps. There are those like Tony who advertise for face-to-face transactions and others who advertise for online transactions. When placing an order, be sure to provide as much detail as possible. This includes the type and quantity of drugs you want to purchase, as well as any special instructions.
Can I Use A VPN To Protect My Identity On The Darknet?
Listings included offerings of prescription medication that was falsely advertised as being authentic. For example, in November 2023, while operating in an undercover capacity on Incognito Market, a law enforcement agent purchased and received several tablets purported to be oxycodone. Testing revealed that these tablets were not oxycodone and were, in fact, fentanyl pills.
Financial Institutions
A pale, ashy shade in powder form, it turns pitch-black when mixed with water. This opaqueness makes the flash of blood impossible to see, so you never quite know whether you’ve hit a vein. Henderson also wants you to know, whether you’ve ever been on the dark web or not, you’re likely impacted by stolen information sold there. The FBI is considered the primary agency responsible for policing the dark web.
Key Cyber Threats Facing The Financial Sector In 2025
Users of the dark web employ technology to obfuscate their identity, including the Tor browser, which routes users through multiple relays to hide their locations and IP addresses. They also typically use a virtual private network (VPN), which creates a secure “tunnel” for sending and receiving data across shared or public networks by configuring their computing devices as if they were directly connected by a private network. The dark web is a subset of the deep web, which is also not indexed by traditional search engines. Unlike the deep web, the dark web functions not only for security but also for anonymity.
Law enforcement takedowns of cryptomarkets stimulated a process of reconfiguration in the market 20•. At one point, the cryptomarkets were served by a range of sites/forums such as the cross-site aggregator grams, the r/DarkNetMarkets Reddit forum and the DeepDotWeb site. To access the darknet, you’ll need to download and install the Tor browser. This browser allows you to access websites on the darknet by routing your internet connection through a series of servers, which makes it difficult for anyone to track your online activity. Once you have the Tor browser installed, you can search for darknet marketplaces using a search engine such as Ahmia or Grams.
Inspector General Sites
Its content is intentionally hidden and requires special browsers to access. Some of us who use drugs are lucky enough to have physical access to a safe supply. For everyone else, dark-web marketplaces are a pretty reasonable idea. Mercifully, the escrow system now largely keeps dealers from pulling these sorts of tricks (they don’t get paid until the product arrives, after all). Buying directly from an online dealer—as opposed to through one of the marketplaces—is generally inadvisable. There’s no escrow system when you do that and, therefore, no guarantee they’ll actually send you something.
Want To Browse Anonymously?
- Silk Road quickly grew into the largest darknet market, handling hundreds of millions in transactions.
- The biggest takedowns in terms of volume – Silk Road, AlphaBay and Wall Street – have been police-led, but in 2018, the EMCDDA published a study which found that, of the more than 100 markets, just 10 percent closed as a consequence of overt police action.
- In its first operation, the team arrested Austin and seven others and seized weapons, computer equipment and more than 2,000 lethal doses of the deadly drug.
- N 2025, dark web websites frequently change domains and are often short-lived.
- On March 20, 2024, U.S. law enforcement, in cooperation with German and Lithuanian authorities, seized Nemesis Market and stemmed the flow of these drugs into the United States and elsewhere.
This digital currency allows buyers to pay while maintaining a degree of privacy protection. Holding payment in escrow often has the added benefit of “tumbling” or “mixing” digital currency; this is a form of money laundering that severs the connection between a cryptocurrency address sending coins and the address to which they are sent. The first step in buying drugs on the darknet is to set up a secure connection.
What Exactly Is Sold On These Marketplaces?
To avoid blocking from the marketplace, we provided as an input to the scraper a session cookie that we obtained by manually logging into the marketplace and solving a Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart (CAPTCHA). However, some sites, namely, the Empire Market, forced users to log out when the life span of the session cookie was expired. In addition, we set parameters such as sleeping time to limit the speed of crawling. The cycle Christin describes—law enforcement takedowns followed by a slow but robust recovery—has played out on the dark web again and again, repeating roughly every year or two. After the late 2013 takedown of the Silk Road, the first real dark-web drug market, more than a dozen replacements rose up to fill the demand for anonymous online narcotics sales.
Missing The Wider Landscape Of Digital Harms
When purchased on the dark web, drugs sold as MDMA (in both powder and pill form), cocaine and LSD were significantly more likely to contain the substance advertised. This tallies with the idea that when buyers are often able to leave reviews on dark-web marketplaces, vendors there may be more accountable than their in-person counterparts. Law enforcement agencies around the world — but especially in the US — have started to take a keen interest in what takes place in this strange encrypted internet and are certainly getting better at infiltrating and shutting down these sites.
