Related papers: Collective Dynamics of Dark Web Marketplaces
Dark web marketplaces have been a significant outlet for illicit trade, serving millions of users worldwide for over a decade. However, not all users are the same. This paper aims to identify the key players in Bitcoin transaction networks…
Dark web marketplaces (DWMs) are online platforms that facilitate illicit trade among millions of users generating billions of dollars in annual revenue. Recently, two interview-based studies have suggested that DWMs may also promote the…
Online marketplaces are the main engines of legal and illegal e-commerce, yet their empirical properties are poorly understood due to the absence of large-scale data. We analyze two comprehensive datasets containing 245M transactions (16B…
Dark Web Marketplaces (DWM) facilitate the online trade of illicit goods. Due to the illicit nature of these marketplaces, quality datasets are scarce and difficult to produce. The Dark Net Market archives (2015) presented raw scraped…
Cryptocurrencies are distributed systems that allow exchanges of native tokens among participants, or the exchange of such tokens for fiat currencies in markets external to these public ledgers. The availability of their complete historical…
The dark web has emerged as the state-of-the-art solution for enhanced anonymity. Just like a double-edged sword, it also inadvertently becomes the safety net and breeding ground for illicit activities. Among them, cryptocurrencies have…
Does recent growth of darknet markets signify a slow reorganisation of the illicit drug trade? Where are darknet markets situated in the global drug supply chain? In principle, these platforms allow producers to sell directly to end users,…
We perform a comprehensive measurement analysis of Silk Road, an anonymous, international online marketplace that operates as a Tor hidden service and uses Bitcoin as its exchange currency. We gather and analyze data over eight months…
Bitcoin is the first and undoubtedly most successful cryptocurrecny to date with a market capitalization of more than 100 billion dollars. Today, Bitcoin has more than 100,000 supporting merchants and more than 3 million active users.…
Wash trading, the practice of simultaneously placing buy and sell orders for the same asset to inflate trading volume, has been prevalent in cryptocurrency markets. This paper investigates whether wash traders in Bitcoin act deliberately to…
The cryptocurrency market is a very huge market without effective supervision. It is of great importance for investors and regulators to recognize whether there are market manipulation and its manipulation patterns. This paper proposes an…
Online game involves a very large number of users who are interconnected and interact with each other via the Internet. We studied the characteristics of exchanging virtual goods with real money through processes called "real money trading…
The darknet markets are notorious black markets in cyberspace, which involve selling or brokering drugs, weapons, stolen credit cards, and other illicit goods. To combat illicit transactions in the cyberspace, it is important to analyze the…
Cybercrime is continuously growing in numbers and becoming more sophisticated. Currently, there are various monetisation and money laundering methods, creating a huge, underground economy worldwide. A clear indicator of these activities is…
When network products and services become more valuable as their userbase grows (network effects), this tendency can become a major determinant of how they compete with each other in the market and how the market is structured. Network…
On February 2014, $650.000.000 worth of Bitcoins disappeared. Currently it is unclear whether hackers or MtGox, the largest Bitcoin exchange, are to be blamed. In either case, the anonymous and unregulated nature of the Bitcoin system makes…
The behaviour of Bitcoin owners is reflected in the structure and the number of bitcoin transactions encoded in the Blockchain. Likewise, the behaviour of Bitcoin traders is reflected in the formation of bullish and bearish trends in the…
The availability of sophisticated technologies and methods of perpetrating criminogenic activities in the cyberspace is a pertinent societal problem. Darknet is an encrypted network technology that uses the internet infrastructure and can…
The cryptocurrency market surpassed the barrier of \$100 billion market capitalization in June 2017, after months of steady growth. Despite its increasing relevance in the financial world, however, a comprehensive analysis of the whole…
Darknet marketplaces, accessible through, Tor are where users can buy illicit goods, and learn to hide from law enforcement. We surveyed the advice on these markets and found valid security advice mixed up with paranoid threat models and a…