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 generally 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 element of the internet. Nearly ten years because it started being applied to an important scale, the dark web remains a lucrative safe haven for traders in a selection of illegal goods and services, especially illicit drugs.

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

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

Not really a free-for-all

There are currently greater than a dozen darknet marketplaces in operation. Protected by powerful encryption technology, authorities all over the world 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 have among the world market onion‘s highest concentrations of darknet drug vendors per capita.

Unlike 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 is set up and maintained by a main administrator who, along side 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 responsible for determining exactly what do and can’t be sold on their cryptomarket. These decisions tend informed by:

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

Experts delve to the dark web

A report from the Australian National University published last week discusses several hundred coronavirus-related products for sale across twelve cryptomarkets, including supposed vaccines and antidotes.

While the study confirms some unscrupulous dark web traders are indeed exploiting the pandemic and seeking to defraud naïve customers, this information ought to be contextualised with a few important caveats.

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

Also, while the analysis focused on products listed on the market, 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 probable minimal, at best.