The darknet – a wild west for fake coronavirus ‘cures ‘? The truth is more complicated (and regulated)

The coronavirus pandemic has spawned reports of unregulated health products and fake cures being sold on the dark web. These include black market PPE, illicit medications such as the widely touted “miracle” drug chloroquine, and fake COVID-19 “cures” including blood supposedly from recovered coronavirus patients.

These dealings have yet again focused public attention on this little-understood part of the internet. Nearly a decade as it started being applied to a substantial scale, the dark web continues to be a lucrative safe haven for traders in a variety of illegal goods and services, especially illicit drugs.

Black market trading on the dark web is carried out primarily through darknet marketplaces or cryptomarkets. These are anonymised trading platforms that directly connect buyers and sellers of a selection of illegal goods and services – similar to legitimate trading websites such as for instance eBay.

So how do darknet marketplaces work? And just how much illegal trading of COVID-19-related products is happening via these online spaces?

Not just a free-for-all

There are still higher than a dozen darknet marketplaces in operation. Protected by powerful encryption technology, authorities all over the world market onion have largely didn’t contain their growth. A steadily increasing proportion of illicit drug users around the globe report sourcing their drugs online. In Australia, we’ve among the world’s highest concentrations of darknet drug vendors per capita.

Contrary to popular belief, cryptomarkets are not the “lawless spaces” they’re often presented as in the news. Market prohibitions exist on all mainstream cryptomarkets. Universally prohibited goods and services include: hitman services, trafficked human organs and snuff movies.

Although cryptomarkets lie outside the realm of state regulation, each one of these is initiated and maintained by a central administrator who, along with employees or associates, is in charge of the market’s security, dispute resolution between buyers and sellers, and the charging of commissions on transactions.

Administrators may also be ultimately accountable for determining what can and can’t be sold on the cryptomarket. These decisions are most likely informed by:

the attitudes of the surrounding community comprising buyers and sellers
the extent of consumer demand and supply for many products
the revenues a niche site makes from commissions charged on transactions
and the perceived “heat” that may be attracted from police in the trading of particularly dangerous illegal goods and services.

Experts delve into the dark web

A written report from the Australian National University published a week ago talks about several hundred coronavirus-related products on the market across twelve cryptomarkets, including supposed vaccines and antidotes.

While the analysis confirms some unscrupulous dark web traders are indeed exploiting the pandemic and seeking to defraud naïve customers, these records must be contextualised with a few important caveats.

Firstly, the amount of dodgy covid-related products on the market on the dark web is relatively small. According to the research, they account fully for about 0.2% of all listed items. The overwhelming most products were those we are already knowledgeable about – particularly illicit drugs such as cannabis and MDMA.

Also, while the study dedicated to products listed available, these are likely listings for products that either do no exist or are listed with the specific intention to defraud a customer.

Thus, the actual sale of fake coronavirus “cures” on the dark web is likely minimal, at best.