The darknet – a wild west for fake coronavirus ‘cures ‘? The reality 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 like 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 with this little-understood portion of the internet. Nearly 10 years because it started being used on an important scale, the dark web remains 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 – much like legitimate trading websites such as eBay.

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

Not really a free-for-all

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

Despite popular belief, cryptomarkets aren’t 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, every one is established and maintained by a central administrator who, along with employees or associates, is accountable for the darkode market‘s security, dispute resolution between buyers and sellers, and the charging of commissions on transactions.

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

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

Experts delve to the dark web

A report from the Australian National University published a week ago looks at 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 certanly 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 this research, they account for about 0.2% of all listed items. The overwhelming most of products were those we are already familiar with – particularly illicit drugs such as cannabis and MDMA.

Also, while the research focused on products listed available, these are most likely listings for products that either do no exist or are listed with the particular intention to defraud a customer.

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