Anonymous Trading on the Dark Online Marketplace
Piyush Vyas, Gitika Vyas, Akhilesh Chauhan, Romil Rawat, Shrikant Telang, Madhu Gottumukkala
Abstract
Advancement in technology provides numerous solutions to not only legitimate businesses but to illegal trades as well. Selling substances, drugs, and prohibited merchandise and goods on the internet comes under illegal trading. The internet we surf is merely a thin layer of this deeply rooted miraculous mechanism of connecting the world. The dark web is the part of the deep web that utilizes the internet to flourish the illicit intentions of trading illegal items, thereby fostering the ongoing societal devastation. This chapter is exploring anonymous trading on the dark online marketplace using the Silkroad 2.0 dataset. This work aims to analyze the various aspects of dark e-commerce trading and highlight different themes used for trading illicit drugs on Twitter by performing the thematic analysis using Latent Dirichlet Allocation unsupervised machine learning with a 0.44 coherence score. The findings have shown that developed countries are participating in illegal trading, and teenage schoolgoers can be victims of social media drug trading.