| Title | Mining the Dark Web: Drugs and Fake Ids |
| Publication Type | Conference Paper |
| Year of Publication | 2016 |
| Authors | Baravalle, A., Lopez, M. S., Lee, S. W. |
| Conference Name | 2016 IEEE 16th International Conference on Data Mining Workshops (ICDMW) |
| Keywords | Agora, authomation, bitcoins, counterfeit documents, cryptocurrencies, dark web, dark Web marketplaces, dark Web mining, Data collection, data mining, data wrangling, drugs, etl processing, Europol, fake ids, FBI, governmental bodies, Human Behavior, human factors, illegal item marketplace, Internet, law administration, nonstandard communication protocols, pubcrawl, Roads, security, security of data, The Silk Road, Tor, Weapons, Web sites |
| Abstract | In the last years, governmental bodies have been futilely trying to fight against dark web marketplaces. Shortly after the closing of "The Silk Road" by the FBI and Europol in 2013, new successors have been established. Through the combination of cryptocurrencies and nonstandard communication protocols and tools, agents can anonymously trade in a marketplace for illegal items without leaving any record. This paper presents a research carried out to gain insights on the products and services sold within one of the larger marketplaces for drugs, fake ids and weapons on the Internet, Agora. Our work sheds a light on the nature of the market, there is a clear preponderance of drugs, which accounts for nearly 80% of the total items on sale. The ready availability of counterfeit documents, while they make up for a much smaller percentage of the market, raises worries. Finally, the role of organized crime within Agora is discussed and presented. |
| DOI | 10.1109/ICDMW.2016.0056 |
| Citation Key | baravalle_mining_2016 |
Mining the Dark Web: Drugs and Fake Ids