Abstract
Dark web markets have been, for a while now, at the centre of the attention of governmental bodies. After the rise and fall of The Silk Road, more and more marketplaces have followed the same path. Alphabay is the last of these markets to come under the spotlight, for its staggering amount of products on sale (estimated value of around $88M) during our analysis, and $590M of successful transactions during its existence.
In this paper we describe the spider that we developed for this project, our data analysis pipeline and the key findings of our data analysis.
The data analysis focuses on quantitative research, covering Alphabay’s adverts, its sellers and its categories.
The outcomes of the research provide an insight on Alphabay, its general trend and the nature of its ads, which appear being a majority of drug products. United States and the United Kingdom are the most active countries on the website.
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Acknowledgements
The authors wish to thank Simon Delecourt and Edouard Donze, who spent a summer internship at UEL in June–August 2017 and contributed to the preliminary data analysis for this paper.
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Baravalle, A., Lee, S.W. (2018). Dark Web Markets: Turning the Lights on AlphaBay. In: Hacid, H., Cellary, W., Wang, H., Paik, HY., Zhou, R. (eds) Web Information Systems Engineering – WISE 2018. WISE 2018. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 11234. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-02925-8_35
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