If convicted of all charges, each defendant would face a statutory maximum sentence of life in federal prison. Avalyan is charged with one count of distribution of cocaine, one count of distribution of MDMA, and one count of distribution of distribution of methamphetamine. Gevorgyan is charged with one count of possession with intent to distribute MDMA and one count of possession with intent to distribute ketamine. Grigoryan is charged with one count of possession with intent to distribute methamphetamine. Nersesyan is charged with three counts of possession with intent to distribute methamphetamine, one count of possession with intent to distribute cocaine, and one count of possession with intent to distribute MDMA.
Even if you’ve never visited these markets, your personal and financial data might already be there, having been leaked through a data breach. Criminals use this information for money laundering, opening bank accounts, applying for loans, and draining your finances. Since 2020, 2easy has sold massive stealer logs with sensitive data like passwords, bank cards, and initial access credentials.
Darknet Drug Vendor Pleads Guilty To Distributing Illicit Prescription Drugs
These shifts—sourced from platform data and user trades—reflect a maturing market balancing speed, anonymity, and cost. Security is key—fresh wallets per trade and encrypted comms cut risks by 30%. Below, we detail crypto usage in our top 10 and provide a tool to optimize your trading in deep web markets.
Hundreds Nabbed In Global Crackdown On Dark-web Drug Marketplace
The UNODC (United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime) maintains that almost all firearms are originally manufactured through legal means. We review and list tools and products without bias, regardless of potential commissions. Markets like Abacus and Alphabay lead with advanced filters and real-time analytics, a trend adopted by 80% of top 10 in 2025. This boosts usability by 25%, reducing trade errors by 15% vs. 2023’s basic designs.
Uphold CEO Simon McLoughlin Talks Stablecoins, Regulation, And The Future Of Crypto
Jerrell Eugene Anderson, 34, of Santa Clarita, the alleged leader of the ring, was sentenced Thursday to 96 months in federal prison for the scheme, the U.S. attorney’s office announced. “The system is being used in places where the Russian diaspora are living, for example in Bali. People are selling via dead drops in France, Greece, and the UK, where one site is teaching people how to become kladmen and drug cooks” — says Daly. “So it’s a very young version of the Russian system, but people are taking parts of it.” This is all while the druglords at the top of the chain preach a libertarian, self-development type of rhetoric in YouTube videos, styling working for their platforms as a way out of the considerable adversity certain Russians face. “Many of these are young people, including young women, who are abused and have had fingers chopped off and bones broken. Because, like in the normal drug world, reputation is everything, and the big businesses cannot be seen to be taken advantage of.”
- Specifically, we collected approximately 248,359 unique listings and 1,138,961 unique forum traces (ie, threads of posts) from 10 anonymous online marketplaces and 6 forums.
- Response times average 12 hours, with a 92% shipping reliability rate—disputes occur in 3% of transactions, resolved in 48 hours for 87% of cases, backed by a 93% escrow success rate.
- Individuals may be attracted by predictable supplies, choices and perceptions of reduced risk.
- For example, confirm Alphabay’s link via community threads to dodge scams costing $1M+ annually.
- Cryptomarkets emerged in 2011 with the launch of Silk Road on the Tor network.
Explicit And Illegal Content
Select BTC for speed (e.g., Bohemia), XMR for privacy (e.g., Incognito), or USDT for cost (e.g., ASAP). XMR’s 40% adoption in 2025 cuts tracking risks—BTC’s blockchain exposed 15% of trades in 2024. Check onion links against trusted directories like dark.fail—30% of 2025 links are phishing traps.
Response times average 14 hours, with a 93% shipping reliability rate—disputes occur in 2% of transactions, resolved in 36 hours for 90% of cases, backed by a 94% escrow success rate. Vendors like “CryptoTrader” and “FastMed” offer 97% reliability, leveraging ASAP’s multi-crypto support (BTC, XMR, LTC, USDT), though its vendor pool is smaller than Torrez’s, limiting scale. Alphabay Market storms the top tier at #5, a giant with $20 million monthly trades and a 20% market share—the largest in our rankings. Relaunched in 2021, it hosts 60,000+ listings—drugs (50%), digital goods (25%), fraud tools (15%), counterfeit currencies (5%)—serving 25,000+ users and 3,000+ vendors. Its escrow system is unmatched at 99% success, resolving 95% of disputes in 24 hours, while its onion routing boasts a 97% uptime, scaling seamlessly despite its size. Prior to its takedown by law enforcement, narcotics traffickers and cybercriminals openly traded in illegal drugs and services on Nemesis, which was designed with built-in money laundering features.
Alphabay Market Vendors
This makes it one of the few darknet-style markets accessible without Tor, though buyers are still encouraged to use a VPN and anonymous browser for added privacy. So while the Department of Justice has used the indictment to highlight, in Matthew Galeotti’s words, its commitment “to protecting U.S. communities from the harms caused by fentanyl and darknet marketplaces,” there still remains an ongoing risk of such harms. A US grand jury has charged Iranian national Behrouz Parsarad for operating the Nemesis darknet marketplace, which between 2021 and 2024 facilitated the sale of illicit cyberservices and drugs. Cryptomarkets are part of an evolving trend where communities of PWUD adapt and develop technological systems to their ends. The cryptomarket distribution system is emblematic of the move to drug distribution by delivery, whether through the postal system or tailored distribution services. They may now be being superseded in technical prowess by well-crafted, custom-built systems that use messaging apps 55, 56 and rather than representing the future are an established and stable if evolving niche.
Torrez Market Vendors
These days, it lists over 11,600 illegal items, including hard drugs, hacking tools, and all kinds of cybercrime services. Unlike regular e-commerce sites, markets on the dark web often deal with illegal or highly restricted goods and services, such as fake documents, hard drugs, and hacking services. Sure, you might come across listings for legit products like handcrafted jewelry or digital art, but those are few and far between. Niche markets like Drughub (10% pharma share) meet specific demands—15% of 2025 trades are niche vs. 5% in 2022. They offer depth (e.g., rare drugs) over variety, with 95% shipping reliability, appealing to 20% of traders seeking specialized goods.
Chain Data
Transactional commercial supply in contrast emphasises profits and market-mediated relationships, and sometimes validates predation and exploitation 2. The internet is a modern bazaar 3 of drug-selling modes, expanded psychoactive repertoires 4 and places of community harm reduction, which revise dominant narratives of drug use and PWUD 5. These are specialised markets hosted anonymously using the Tor darknet 6. Tor is an internet service which protects those who use it from monitoring and promotes anonymity through data routing and encryption.
Considering social media data (eg, Twitter and Instagram), Nasralah et al 14 proposed a text mining framework to collect opioid data from social media and analyzed the most discussed topics to profile the opioid epidemic and crisis. Mackey et al 13 collected tweets related to the opioid topic to identify illicit online pharmacies and study the illegal sale of opioids in online marketing. Cherian et al 12 gathered codeine misuse data from Instagram posts to understand how misuse is happening and its misused form. However, to the best of our knowledge, no large-scale study, which may cross multiple anonymous marketplaces and is cross-sectional, has been conducted to profile the opioid supply chain and unveil characteristics of opioid suppliers, commodities, and transactions. Bohemia’s 850+ vendors maintain its 22,000+ listings, rated 4.4/5 across 30,000+ reviews, with drugs (70%), digital goods (20%), and fraud tools (10%) as key offerings. Response times average 16 hours, with a 92% shipping reliability rate—disputes occur in 3% of transactions, resolved in 48 hours for 85% of cases, supported by a 92% escrow success rate.
They do not override limits of territory and national borders, but transpire within them 54. In our study, a total of 248,359 listings from 10 anonymous online marketplaces and 1,138,961 traces (ie, threads of posts) from 6 underground forums were collected. Among them, we identified 28,106 opioid product listings and 13,508 opioid-related promotional and review forum traces from 5147 unique opioid suppliers’ IDs and 2778 unique opioid buyers’ IDs.
As a whole, these systems sometimes augment and sometimes bypass face-to-face markets and therefore may not be immediately open to the kind of incidental interventions that harm-reduction services may make. Having said that, user people will be consuming at places where services may be present, such as raves and festivals, but the rise of at-home delivery means that both distribution patterns and locations of consumption are changing. These innovations allow for early confirmation of market changes such as the emergence of fentanyl and other novel synthetic opioids 10, 11 and of new drug delivery systems, such as e-cigarette/vaping methods for drug consumption 12.
This market specialized in selling marijuana related products and magic mushrooms, with no “hard drugs” for sale. DNMs have a limited life and may be shutdown suddenly, leaving users with unfulfilled orders and sellers with no means of communication. Saheed Aremu passionately advocates for digital privacy and cybersecurity in the modern digital age. As one of PrivacySavvy’s resident VPN experts, he guides readers on protecting their online information and anonymity.
Terrorism And Illicit Finance
This operation was about protecting innocent people from predatory criminals who profit from violence, addiction, and fear. Our commitment is unwavering,” said Chief Postal Inspector Gary Barksdale, United States Postal Inspection Service. In addition, financial institutions and other persons that engage in certain transactions or activities with the sanctioned individual may expose themselves to sanctions or be subject to an enforcement action. The prohibitions include the making of any contribution or provision of funds, goods, or services by, to, or for the benefit of any designated person, or the receipt of any contribution or provision of funds, goods, or services from any such person.
