A new study published in May revealed the impact law enforcement has when taking down a dark-net market. The conclusion of the study report was the the impact of taking down large vendors would be much greater than targetting markets. It was also found that it would require less budget and resources to track down vendors instead of markets. The study was conducted and published by the The Institute for Operations Research and the Management Sciences (INFORMS).
The Study: Impact of law enforcement
When gathering information for the study, the researches focused on older dark-net marketplaces that are no longer online. Some of the markets on the list include SilkRoad, Evolution and Agora. Looking into this information, researchers found that when taking down a dark-net markets, the affects on vendors are minor. As new markets are already waiting to take the old ones place, vendors are quick to migrate to new platforms.
It was also found that in recent times it becoming common practice for vendors to sell their products on multiple marketplaces at once. Vendors choose to do this for redundancy as it is no longer uncommon for dark-net markets to disappear.
On the other hand, it was found that when vendors were the ones being targeted instead of the markets, the affect was much greater. When a major vendor was taken down the amount of transactions on the marketplace was reduced by almost 40%. The number of active vendors also reduced by over 55%. The main reason for this decline is psychological, with users and vendors fearing potential trouble. It was also found that such arrest sharply reduce the level of trust users have for a given market. Another discovery was that most of the vendors that seize their career after such an arrest tend to sell the same category of drugs as the arrestee.
The Papers conclusion
As a result of the findings, the paper published concluded that law enforcement can have a much greater impact trying to target vendors. When successful, such an arrest has a much larger impact on online drug trade volume, while also psychologically affecting other vendors by inducing "shock". A part of this comes from the fact that markets are the ones that have bared most of the consequences in the past. This resulted in more fear when operating an illicit market rather than being an illicit vendor.
Conclusion
The findings and conclusion of the published research are interesting, but in our opinion are missing an important point. Technically the conclusion might be right, but the paper does not discuss the difficulty in taking down large scale vendors. As it turns out, it is likely easier to trace the servers of a dark-net market rather than individual vendors on a market.
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