Into the Reverie: Exploration of the Dream Market

Theo Carr, Jun Zhuang, Dwight Sablan, Emma Larue, Yubao Wu, Mohammad Al Hasan, George Mohler

Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceedingConference contributionpeer-review

1 Scopus citations

Abstract

Since the emergence of the Silk Road market in the early 2010s, dark web 'cryptomarkets' have proliferated and offered people an online platform to buy and sell illicit drugs, relying on cryptocurrencies such as Bitcoin for anonymous transactions. However, recent studies have highlighted the potential for de-anonymization of bitcoin transactions, bringing into question the level of anonymity afforded by cryptomarkets. We examine a set of over 100,000 product reviews from several cryptomarkets collected in 2018 and 2019 and conduct a comprehensive analysis of the markets, including an examination of the distribution of drug sales and revenue among vendors, and a comparison of incidences of opioid sales to overdose deaths in a US city. We explore the potential for de-anonymization of vendors by implementing a Naïve-Bayes classifier to predict the vendor from a given product review, and attempt to link vendors' sales to specific Bitcoin transactions. On the buyer side, we evaluate the efficacy of hierarchical agglomerative clustering for grouping together transactions corresponding to the same buyer. We find that the high degree of specialization among the small subset of high-revenue vendors may render these vendors susceptible to de-anonymization. Further research is necessary to confirm these findings, which are restricted by the scarcity of ground-truth data for validation.

Original languageEnglish
Title of host publicationProceedings - 2019 IEEE International Conference on Big Data, Big Data 2019
EditorsChaitanya Baru, Jun Huan, Latifur Khan, Xiaohua Tony Hu, Ronay Ak, Yuanyuan Tian, Roger Barga, Carlo Zaniolo, Kisung Lee, Yanfang Fanny Ye
PublisherInstitute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers Inc.
Pages1432-1441
Number of pages10
ISBN (Electronic)9781728108582
DOIs
StatePublished - Dec 2019
Event2019 IEEE International Conference on Big Data, Big Data 2019 - Los Angeles, United States
Duration: 9 Dec 201912 Dec 2019

Publication series

NameProceedings - 2019 IEEE International Conference on Big Data, Big Data 2019

Conference

Conference2019 IEEE International Conference on Big Data, Big Data 2019
Country/TerritoryUnited States
CityLos Angeles
Period9/12/1912/12/19

Keywords

  • Cryptomarket
  • Dark Web
  • Illicit Drug
  • Opioid

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