Roman assisted his co-conspirators by pressing counterfeit Adderall pills, packaging them, and distributing drug orders into the mail using the U.S. A fourth co-conspirator, Gregory Castillo-Rosario, who was arrested in October 2024, ran the Mrjohnson account. Attorney’s Office for the Eastern District of Virginia charged Joshua Vasquez, Joseph Vasquez, and Rafael Roman by criminal complaint with conspiracy to distribute 500 grams or more of methamphetamine.
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One China-based pill press manufacturer which advertises on clearnet business-to-business (B2B) websites has on-chain ties to drug vendors on Abacus Market. Below is a screenshot from the Abacus Market website showing the range of items it sells, with drugs and chemicals representing the overwhelming majority of its products. This increase may be due in part to the closures of top DNMs, the shift to the exclusive acceptance of XMR by other active markets, and delistings of XMR by popular centralized exchanges. 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. Blacksprut, which rose to prominence with Mega in the wake of Hydra’s 2022 sanctions designation, law enforcement seizure, and subsequent collapse, came in third with 13.6% less revenue YoY. Historically, DNMs have been known for the illicit drug trade, but in recent years have differentiated themselves with unique service offerings.
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Incognito Market sold illegal narcotics including heroin, cocaine, LSD, MDMA, oxycodone, methamphetamine, ketamine, and alprazolam, as well as misbranded prescription medication. While concealing their identities with a unique username or “moniker,” users were able to search thousands of listings for narcotics of their choice. Incognito Market was available globally to anyone with internet access using the Tor web browser on the “dark web” or “darknet.” Incognito Market was designed to facilitate seamless narcotics transactions, incorporating many features of legitimate e-commerce sites such as branding, advertising, and customer service. Until it shut down in March 2024, Incognito Market sold more than $100 million of narcotics—including hundreds of kilograms of cocaine and methamphetamine.
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- In addition to fentanyl, the presence of nitazenes in the global supply of dangerous synthetic opioids has increased, and China-based vendors have established themselves as the initial source.
- After the Biker DLC, players can now purchase buildings for illegal drugs and counterfeit products manufacture, and distribute them through a darknet website called "The Open Road" where law enforcement cannot be notified of the player's trade.
- Treasury’s OFAC in its first action as a J-CODE member for operating Nemesis Market, a darknet platform that sold opioids and concealed profits through crypto wallets.
- In fact, it is routine for individual’s participating in these dark web communities, par for the course of engaging in the markets.
- From June 11 to 13, the agency said, a series of coordinated law enforcement actions targeting the platform’s administrator, moderators, key vendors and technical infrastructure took place across Germany, the Netherlands, Romania, Spain and Sweden.
Further market diversification occurred in 2015, as did further developments around escrow and decentralization. In October 2013, Project Black Flag closed and stole their users' bitcoins in the panic shortly after Silk Road's shut down. Atlantis, the first site to accept Litecoin as well as Bitcoin, closed in September 2013, just prior to the Silk Road raid, leaving users just one week to withdraw any coins. In the 2000s, early cybercrime and carding forums such as ShadowCrew experimented with drug wholesaling on a limited scale. Since the year 2000, some of the emerging cyber-arms industry operates online, including the Eastern European "Cyber-arms Bazaar", trafficking in the most powerful crimeware and hacking tools. One of the better-known web-based drug forums, The Hive, launched in 1997, serving as an information sharing forum for practical drug synthesis and legal discussion.
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On March 21, 2018, Reddit administrators shut down the popular subreddit /r/DarkNetMarkets citing new changes to their content policy that forbids the sale of "Drugs, including alcohol and tobacco, or any controlled substances". In June 2025 Europol took down the Archetyp Market with an estimated 3200 registered vendors and 600,000 customers worldwide. Later that month, the long-lived Outlaw market closed down citing a major bitcoin cryptocurrency wallet theft; however, speculation remained that it was an exit scam.
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After the Biker DLC, players can now purchase buildings for illegal drugs and counterfeit products manufacture, and distribute them through a darknet website called "The Open Road" where law enforcement cannot be notified of the player's trade. They function primarily as black markets, selling or brokering transactions involving drugs, cyber-arms, weapons, counterfeit currency, stolen credit card details, forged documents, unlicensed pharmaceuticals, steroids, and other illicit goods as well as the sale of legal products. CHICAGO — A Homeland Security Investigations (HSI) New York investigation, in coordination with law enforcement partners, has resulted in charges against two men for allegedly operating Empire Market, a dark web marketplace that enabled users to anonymously buy and sell more than $430 million in illegal goods and services around the world. One of the most high-profile targets of Operation RapTor—the largest coordinated global crackdown on darknet drug trafficking to date—was Incognito Market, a dark web narcotics marketplace that operated with remarkable scale, anonymity, and apparent impunity. It marks the most significant JCODE operation to date, building on years of enforcement actions and marketplace takedowns, including Kingdom Market, Tor2Door, Bohemia, and Nemesis. “Under the JCODE umbrella, law enforcement agencies across the globe have joined forces to take down criminals who use the darknet to buy and sell narcotics.
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Law enforcement agencies from around the globe arrested 288 people suspected of buying or selling drugs on the dark web. HSI is proud to stand with our law enforcement partners at the forefront of confronting the drug epidemic head-on at a time when illegal narcotics distribution is causing an alarming number of overdose deaths nationwide.” Archetyp was founded in May 2020 as an online marketplace to facilitate the illicit drug trade. This also means that Operation Dark HunTor likely isn’t the final word on dark web arrests and that illicit marketplace vendors may have to proceed with a little more caution. When German police took down the dark web marketplace DarkMarket in January, they did more than shutter the largest underground online drug bazaar operating at that time.
Described by blockchain firm Elliptic as “the most prolific crypto-fueled black market ever seen online,” Haowang Guarantee trafficked in laundered USDT, fake IDs, and tools for industrialized fraud, often exploiting victims trapped in scam compounds. Treasury’s OFAC in its first action as a J-CODE member for operating Nemesis Market, a darknet platform that sold opioids and concealed profits through crypto wallets. TRM Labs previously reported that 97% of Chinese chemical vendors surveyed accepted crypto, revealing how stablecoins have become critical infrastructure for global trafficking networks. Cartel-linked money couriers have funneled at least $5.5 million in stablecoins like USDT to Chinese fentanyl precursor suppliers, according to a March report from Chainalysis, which revealed what the firm dubbed an “on-chain fentanyl economy.”
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- Wall Street’s demise showed that admins can’t escape justice, even if they try a classic exit scam.
- This is 1000x more than authorities seized in the bust.
- The controlled substances sold by vendors on Empire Market included heroin, methamphetamine, cocaine, LSD, opioids, and others.
- They seized Archetyp’s servers in the Netherlands, arrested the alleged 30 year old German admin in Barcelona, and targeted high volume vendors.
- Charges included those against a group called "Pill Cosby" that allegedly distributed more than 1 million fentanyl-laced pills in Ohio and against a man who allegedly bought data that belonged to a murdered couple in Georgia.
Dozens of Dream Market drug dealers were nabbed e.g. a U.S. heroin syndicate. This announcement coincided with Operation SaboTor, a multinational effort targeting opioid vendors. It specialized in narcotics, stolen data credit cards, credentials and contraband. As Europol’s Rob Wainwright noted, users flocked to Hansa expecting refuge, only to be swept up in a trap. On July 19 20, 2017 the Dutch and Europol publicly announced Hansa’s takedown, having collected data on 10,000 buyer addresses and seized 1,000 BTC in escrow. Law enforcement had modified Hansa’s code to log private messages and even capture passwords and IP addresses.
After trying LSD at age 20, they reflected on their life of alcohol abuse and drug-related anti-social behavior and realized that it did not fit with the prosocial desires they had as a child. Time and again, the ecosystem as a whole has shown to be resilient to police intervention.” “If they did arrest some of the most prominent vendors, there may be a bit of impact,” says Christin. As Monaco noted Tuesday, the dark web drug racket was already a billion-dollar industry before the pandemic drove it to new heights. That shift resulted in the arrest of some seemingly significant players in the dark web drug trade.
Testing on those tablets revealed that they were not authentic oxycodone at all and were, in fact, fentanyl pills. Upon visiting the site, users were met by a splash page and graphic interface, which is pictured below. Incognito Market was designed to foster seamless narcotics transactions across the internet and across the world and incorporated many features of legitimate e-commerce sites, such as branding, advertising and customer service. Lin operated the market under the online pseudonym Pharoah or Faro. According to the investigation, Incognito Market was an online narcotics bazaar that existed on the dark web.
In September 2024, the US Secret Service’s Cyber Investigative Section, Netherlands Police, and the Dutch Fiscal Intelligence and Investigation Service (FIOD) seized web domains and infrastructure linked to UAPS, PM2BTC, and Cryptex. These actions were part of a coordinated effort among US government agencies and foreign counterparts to combat Russian illicit finance. Fraud shops are services found mainly on the dark web that sell stolen data and personally identifiable information (PII), which cybercriminals use for scams, identity theft, and ransomware attacks. Interestingly, this vendor has also been a trusted supplier for OFAC-designated fentanyl traffickers Alex Adrianus Martinus Peijnenburg and Matthew Simon Grimm, having received close to $1.5 million in purchases from them. The vendor’s listing of a protonitazene analog boldly states that the compound has a potency 20x greater than that of fentanyl, as seen below.
