Five Years After Authorities Killed ‘Silk Road’, Drug Sales Still Booming on the Dark Web

Five years ago the FBI arrested Ross Ulbricht and shut down his gigantic dark web drug marketplace “Silk Road”, but despite that, drug sales have never been higher on the deep web.

At its height, Silk Road had just under one million users and over a billion dollars had been bought and sold.

Since Silk Road’s closure five years ago though and Ulbricht’s more recent double-life sentence in prison without parole, dozens of other copycat sites have cropped up, unafraid by the consequences.

In fact, the five biggest drug marketplaces operating today in the darknet have over 120,000 drug listings floating around their site, while Silk Road only ever had 13,000 listings at its peak.

Even though governments and agencies around the world have tried to crack down on the dark web drug trade, they are finding it to be an uphill battle.

Members of the online drug bazaar used the Tor browser, which scrambled their IP address, as well as VPNs and cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin to evade snooping authorities.

In recent years, Thailand has seen a major uptick of arrests of major dark web drug marketplace operators who have used the country as their home base, thanks to the country’s pourous borders.

Many of the masterminds who get caught, are westerners who have millions of dollars seized by Thai authorities and face extradition back to their home countries.

The largest deep web drug market Dream Market has over 70,000 drug listings alone, including everything from opiates and psychedelics to meth and cocaine.

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