Tor marketplaces exploratory data analysis: The drugs case

Abstract

The anonymous marketplaces ecosystem represents a new channel for black market/goods and services, offering a huge variety of illegal items. For many darknet marketplaces, the overall sales incidence is not (yet) comparable with the correspondent physical market; however, since it represents a further trade channel, providing opportunities to new and old forms of illegal trade with worldwide customers, anonymous trading should be carefully studied, via regular crawling and data analysis, in order to detect new trends in illegal goods and services (physical and digital), new drug substances and sources and alternative paths to import socially dangerous goods (e.g. drugs, weapons). Such markets, based on e-commerce retail leaders model, e.g. Amazon and E-bay, are designed with ease of use in mind, using off-the-shelf web technologies where users have their own profiles and credentials, acting as sellers, posting offers, or buyers, posting reviews or both. This lead to very poor data quality related to market offers and related, possible feedback, increasing the complexity of extraction of reliable data. In this paper we present an approaching methodology to crawl and manipulate data for analysis of illicit drugs trade taking place in such marketplaces. We focus our analysis on AlphaBay, Nucleus and East India Company and we will show how to prepare data for the analysis and how to carry on the preliminary data investigation, based on the Exploratory Data Analysis.