How Dark Web Evolved Into a Well-Structured Global Criminal Network

Earlier this week, award-winning business journalist Anthony Hilton explained that the dark web and its anonymous marketplaces operate as well-structured businesses. According to Hilton, the dark web itself portrays the structure and characteristics of a well-structured global criminal network.

Over the past few months, law enforcement agencies internationally have started to focus on the crackdown of dark web criminals, drug traders and operations. DeepDotWeb has also provided extensive coverage on the challenges global law enforcement face in dark web drug ring investigations.

In particular, as reported by DeepDotWeb in February and April of this year, law enforcement agencies have discovered that the number of teenagers and young adults participating in dark web drug trading and operations have significantly increased in a relatively short period of time. In February, an Austrian university student was arrested and sentenced to 12 months in probation for ordering drugs from the Netherlands and Canada. Last month, a university student in France was arrested for purchasing and distributing drugs obtained on the dark web at the university.

According to the French police, the illicit activity of the 23-year-old university student could have been undisclosed for the entirety of his stay at the institution if the French postal service didn’t provide customers an after sales service.

Drugs can be easily accessed, obtained and distributed using the dark web because of the existence of independent supply chain of growers, producers, finance, logistics, distribution and sales, as Hilton noted. The distribution of drugs is conducted anonymously by using random addresses of strangers far away from the operation. That way, when the package of drugs is delivered by a service provider such as the French postal service, no traces will be left behind for law enforcement to follow.

More importantly, Hilton emphasized that operations on the dark web are being run on an industrial scale, with hundreds of millions of dollars on the line for many drug operations and rings.

Similar to how conventional businesses operate, dark web criminals facilitate drug trading and distribution with the help of intermediaries and middlemen. Therefore, the distribution, production, development and financing of operations are handled by different organizations and intermediaries. Such complexity in structure makes it more difficult and challenging for law enforcement agencies.

Hilton wrote:

“It divides into software specialists, distributors of that software, hackers, network specialists and financial experts capable of handling and laundering the ill-gotten gains. It has middlemen and subcontractors who will offer hacking services to organisations that lack the required skills themselves. It has specialists in theft, in ransom, and those — often linked to governments — whose desire is simply to do damage. It has distributors who will sell on information gathered illegally to organisations that had no direct connection to the crime itself, some of which will not even know the data was obtained illegally.”

The distribution process of illicit drugs is the major component of most dark web drug rings and is currently being actively investigated by law enforcement agencies. At the moment, the focus is established on ways to prevent anonymous senders from shipping drugs from point a to point b by using unknown aliases and random delivery points. If this issue can be resolved through strict Know Your Customer (KYC) policies and systems, it would be significantly harder for dark web criminals to distribute drugs anonymously.