On January 12th 2022, UniCC – a darknet marketplace for stolen credit cards – announced its retirement on a prominent carding forum. UniCC had risen to become market leader following the retirement of Joker’s Stash, and amassed sales of $358 million. Law enforcement agencies have seen notable successes in identifying and apprehending darknet market operators. Their focus tends to fall on the largest markets, or those that have operated the longest.
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- For example, some illicit actors primarily operate off-chain, but move funds on-chain for laundering.
- Global law enforcement agencies face mounting challenges in tracking and dismantling dark web operations.
- Nevertheless, by analysing the income of each multiseller, we observe that the median income still reflects their high income, as shown in Fig.
- Emerging threats include the use of stablecoins for financial stability and privacy coins for anonymity.
However, from June 28 to July 10, 2025, this dropped to USD 13,000 across just 100 deposits. At publishing time there is no indication that Abacus has been taken down by law enforcement but this scenario is not to be ruled out yet. Below, we’ll take a closer look at three key trends that defined crypto crime in 2024 and will be important to watch going forward. We are also seeing a continued trend vis-à-vis the types of assets involved in crypto crime. AMBCrypto’s content is meant to be informational in nature and should not be interpreted as investment advice.
Blockchain analytics tools must evolve to include privacy coins and decentralized systems. In 2025, alliances between cybercriminal syndicates and state-backed hackers have grown more common. These collaborations increase the scope and impact of attacks, often targeting infrastructure, defense systems, and financial institutions. Rivalries between nation-state actors have also spilled into the dark web, with turf wars emerging between different sponsored groups over control of marketplaces and services. Dark web operators use mainstream social media platforms to promote illicit goods.
Blockchain intelligence firm TRM Labs reports that Abacus shutting down so abruptly has all the indications of either an exit scam or a covert law enforcement operation dismantling the activity. According to our metrics today, it looks like 2024 saw a drop in value received by illicit cryptocurrency addresses to a total of $40.9 billion. However, 2024 was likely a record year for inflows to illicit actors as these figures are lower-bound estimates based on inflows to the illicit addresses we’ve identified up to today. Abacus Market, the largest Bitcoin BTC-driven darknet marketplace in the Western world, has abruptly gone dark, bringing about suspicions of a major exit scam.
Then, we investigate both market star-graphs and user-to-user networks, and highlight the importance of a new class of users, namely ‘multihomers’, who operate on multiple marketplaces concurrently. Specifically, we show how the networks of multihomers and seller-to-seller interactions can shed light on the resilience of the dark market ecosystem against external shocks. Our findings suggest that understanding the behavior of key players in dark web marketplaces is critical to effectively disrupting illegal activities.
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The ability to understand and counteract its growth will define the future of cybersecurity and digital law enforcement. These platforms run on peer-to-peer protocols without central servers or administrators. Smart contracts manage vendor-buyer interactions, and blockchain-based dispute systems replace traditional moderators.
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Operational security has increased, with mandatory PGP encryption, two-factor authentication, and more frequent use of VPNs and anonymization tools. Abacus’s exit follows the June 16, 2025 law enforcement seizure of Archetyp Market, marking the latest in a series of shutdowns in the Western DNM ecosystem. Community consensus and users close to the Abacus team ruled out an FBI operation as a likely reason, leaning more towards an exit scam explanation for the sudden takedown of the platform. In what concerns user deposits, TRM Labs reports that the platform received last month an average of $230,000 per day, across 1,400 transactions. In the meantime, the US government is working on developing state-of-the-art blockchain forensic analysis tools for tracing private coin transactions and Japan has passed a ban on Japanese exchanges offering privacy coins altogether.
How Did Abacus Market’s Exit Impact The Darknet Ecosystem?
The organized crime section of this report, which discusses the nexus between Mexican cartels and Chinese fentanyl precursor manufacturers, indicates that this corridor still exists, although overall inflows to these manufacturers have seen a dip. The total amount of BTC received by darknet entities decreased from 6m BTC in 2012 to 150k BTC in 2019. However, if we consider the amounts in USD, we see that darknet entities are receiving increased amounts of money — in 2019, currently about $920m. Between 2011 and 2019, darknet entities received 5–15% of their bitcoin from other darknet entities.
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Although other coins are used, such as Monero recently, Bitcoin is still the mostly used in the ecosystem, being supported by more than 93% of markets7,9. The pre-processing relies on established state-of-the-art heuristics to cluster addresses into entities, such as cospending, intelligence-base, and behavioral clustering39,40,41,42. The resulting data set includes for each transaction the source and destination entities, the time, and the value of the transaction. While accessing the Tor network is legal in most countries, many activities on darknet markets may be illegal. Always be aware of the laws in your jurisdiction and the potential legal risks of your actions.
Archetyp Market had operated for over five years, amassing more than 600,000 registered users and processing at least EUR 250 million in transactions. The site’s infrastructure, hosted in the Netherlands, was taken offline during the operation. Authorities arrested the alleged administrator, a 30-year-old German national, in Barcelona, while enforcement actions in Germany and Sweden targeted one of the site’s moderators and six of its highest-volume vendors.
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Trading, buying or selling cryptocurrencies should be considered a high-risk investment and every reader is advised to do their own research before making any decisions. Additionally, Dread forum administrators – who have close ties to Abacus – have cast doubt on the law enforcement theory. He added that Russian-based DNMs such as Blacksprut and Kraken Market generate “substantial profits,” are technologically advanced, and have become “deeply embedded” in regional drug economies.
- In contrast to the other types of sellers, the median income of U2U-only sellers increases after operation Bayonet.
- Over the years, dozens of large DNMs have been established and eventually shut down by law enforcement, including AlphaBay, Dream Market, Wall Street, and, most recently, Hydra.
- For example, since the conviction of FTX’s former CEO of fraud, our 2022 figures have included the $8.7 billion in creditor claims against the exchange.
- Furthermore, following Archetyp’s law enforcement seizure in June, 2025, many of its users flooded Abacus Market, leading to the latter’s largest ever monthly sales volume of USD 6.3 million in June 2025.
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Implementing AI-powered fraud detection, enhancing oversight, and promoting responsible adoption will help build a more transparent and resilient crypto ecosystem. Darknet markets remain highly lucrative enterprises, and if anything, the retirements could give operators the confidence that they can operate a successful market and make their fortunes – without being apprehended. Background research tasks included learning from past drug lords, researching legal matters, studying law enforcement agency tactics and obtaining legal representation. Patterns recommended to avoid include hiring hitmen like Dread Pirate Roberts, and sharing handles for software questions on sites like Stack Exchange. Whilst a great many products are sold, drugs dominate the numbers of listings, with the drugs including cannabis, MDMA, modafinil,108109110 LSD, cocaine, and designer drugs.
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Hydra vendors also offered a robust array of money laundering and so-called “cash-out” services, which allowed Hydra users to convert their bitcoin (BTC) into a variety of forms of currency supported by Hydra’s wide array of vendors. In addition, Hydra offered an in-house mixing service to launder and then process vendors’ withdrawals. Mixing services allowed customers, for a fee, to send bitcoin to designated recipients in a manner that was designed to conceal the source or owner of the bitcoin. Hydra’s money laundering features were so in-demand that some users would set up shell vendor accounts for the express purpose of running money through Hydra’s bitcoin wallets as a laundering technique. Department of Justice announced the results of Operation RapTor—an unprecedented international crackdown on darknet narcotics trafficking. Similar results hold for the full network, confirming that the formation of U2U pairs is a pervasive phenomenon around DWMs.
TRM Labs noted that darknet users tend to migrate to the next “reputable” option when a marketplace falls. Although the site’s administrator, Vito, attributed the problems to DDoS attacks and a spike in traffic, TRM Labs observed that this pattern closely resembles known exit scams. These marketplaces generally fall into two major ecosystems, Russian and Western. The indictment alleges that Parsarad founded Nemesis in March 2021, and that the marketplace grew to serve more than 150,000 users and register around 1,100 vendor accounts worldwide. As the first media outlet to report on blockchain-powered applications, we provide early adopters, developers, and visionary leaders with access to emerging technological landscapes, including wallets and games.
In 2024, fraud shop inflows declined by 50% YoY, a sharp downturn from the last three years. When looking at crypto inflows to DNMs in 2024, the data indicate that wholesale drug purchases were dominant, averaging between 71 and 81% of this year’s total market share. For online pharmacies, wholesale purchases led in 2024, followed by large retail. Besides Hydra operators, other DNM administrators faced criminal prosecution in 2024.
That’s hard to get without some form of centralisation, which always becomes a target. PGP ensures that messages and sensitive instructions are encrypted and cannot be intercepted. Using unique keys for each vendor or market prevents leaks and protects your communication from third parties. Avoid links from forums or random websites, as these can lead to phishing, scams, or malware.
