Has Mordor been defeated? Have the (in)glorious days of the Dark Web come to an end?

Referring to the Dark Web as Mordor is a quite accurate yet frightening metaphor. It is, after all, a dark place full of criminal activities and suspicious people.

Although its original intentions were not bad at all, it seems like the Dark Web is mostly used for criminal activities. Reports about drug trafficking, abusive content and hacking regularly make the news.

It is very hard to analyze the content of the Dark Web as the sites are not indexed and, therefore, it cannot be searched easily. Whereas some statistics show that a greater amount of the content is, in fact, legal (37,5% ), Statista and the World Drug Report 2018 claim that around 17% of the content is fraud and around 60% drug related .

It does not come as a surprise, in this case, that law enforcement agencies all over the world have joined forces and made it their priority to march against the armies of Mordor. In the recent past, one report about takedowns of famous sites follows another. In this year alone, several marketplaces were taken down:

Silkkitie (also known as Valhalla), which was running since 2013, was seized in February this year;

Wall Street Market was shut down on April 23th/24th, after the owners planned an exit scam.

And it does not stop there: Law enforcement shut down the Clear Net sites deepdotweb and darkwebindex in May.

And that’s not all. Dream Market is a particular case worth mentioning. Dream Market was the biggest marketplace after the takedown of Alphabay and Hansa Market in 2017, until the admins announced they were shutting it down by the end of April 2019. This message, saying they were shutting it down because of some DDoS attacks, seemed to have come from the admins of Dream, although suspicions raised quickly by users as several details about the note itself seemed off.

Note on the Marketplace DreamMarket on the Darknet TOR

Additionally, some buyers and sellers reported that they could not log in anymore and withdraw their funds, and, even worse, that Dream admins changed their passwords and logged them out to get hold of their stored bitcoins.

Forum Post of vendor TheTerrySukstock

The discussion about the reasons for this shutdown was a hot topic in both Dark Web and Clear Net for weeks. People were not sure if the statement was valid, or if the market has already been taken over by law enforcement and kept alive to collect data. An alternative theory brought up by those who were not able to withdraw their funds was an exit scam of the admins.

The fact is that recent activities and takedowns have left buyers and sellers worried. Is Mordor defeated? The downfall started with the coordinated takedown of Alphabay and Hansa Market, where authorities closed down one marketplace, so that buyers and sellers would move on to the one they were already controlling.

With the recent shutdowns of Dream Market, Wall Street Market and Valhalla, people fear that law enforcement applied similar tactics to monitor them. Is it still safe to buy and sell on the Dark Web? Which marketplaces and forums are compromised, and which users are trustworthy? While trust was always low in the Dark Web, it surely seems to be at an all-time low now.

As a consequence, a large part of the actual buying and selling of illegal items has moved to private and “invite-only” channels. There are even closed groups selling stolen credit card data on Facebook, and usually, chat programs like Telegram or WhatsApp are used for communication between the buyer and the seller.

So perhaps the question is: Has Mordor just closed the doors of the Black Gate to hide its activities from curious eyes? We can’t tell for sure, but it is important to stay on track with what is happening in the Dark Web and where fraudsters and criminals are moving to conduct their business in the future.

About Timo Grossam

Timo Grossam is Senior Product Manager at Risk42. He is an expert in fraud and risk management and a speaker at different conferences, covering subjects like software development within fraud prevention and how to protect a business from criminal activities. Within Risk42 he coordinates the product development team for the risk assessment software platform INFINITY. This includes the prioritisation of technical and functional product features from a customer perspective.

About Risk42

Risk42 offers a highly sophisticated risk management software platform for E-Commerce, Financial Services and Banks. Use cases include risk assessment of payment transactions and risk based evaluation of consumer credit applications. The platform analyses consumer creditworthiness and furthermore prevents fraudulent transactions.