Market Operators: WTF where is your anti-scraping tech?

From the new RAND report:

http://www.rand.org/pubs/research_reports/RR1607.html

This study collected new, primary data from cryptomarkets, web sites selling licit and illicit products and services on the dark web. This was done through the use of the DATACRYPTO software tool, designed by Décary-Hétu and Aldridge (2013) specifically designed for the purpose of collecting information about online drugs transactions.

Cryptomarket Date of creation Number of listings Number of vendors

AlphaBay 2014/12/22 37,896 2001

Cryptomarket 2014/12/22 8,362 432

Dark Heroes League 2015/05/27 387 76

Dreammarket 2013/11/13 22,284 847

French Dark Net Unknown 1,307 331

Hansa 2015/07/18 4,829 219

Nucleus 2014/10/24 26,538 1,013

Python 2015/07/10 4,208 144

Total 105,811 5,063

For instance, Outlaw, Valhalla, TheRealDeal and Dr. D are markets that were programmed in such a way that the DATACRYPTO tool was unable to stay logged in and collect data. We believe that this is more the result of anomalies in the programming, rather than the use of active crawling countermeasures.

...

The percentage of feedbacks received

Customer feedback as a proxy for transactions will always result in an under estimation of actual transactions. Some customers may be unwilling to leave feedback or may forget to do so after a shipment has been received. Information regarding the proportion transactions without feedback is scant. To estimate it, Aldridge and Décary-Hétu (2014) compared the number of feedbacks their DATACRYPTO tool had collected to the number of transactions advertised on the vendors' profiles on SR1. Their analysis showed that 88 per cent of transactions at the time led to a public feedback. The same method was used by the authors to update the extent of underestimation when data were collected for the present analysis in January 2016. Only one cryptomarket active in 2016 provided a useable vendor transaction metric: DreamMarket.

Based on this limited sample (N = 1,129 vendors), 71 per cent of transactions of vendors were captured through feedbacks. Similarly, a law enforcement representative (LE2) stated that their intelligence suggest that 80.6 per cent of transactions lead to public feedback on large cryptomarkets; a figure that is right in between the two DreamMarket estimates.


Comments


[3 Points] Vendor_BBMC:

Was alphabay only started a few days before Christmas, 2014? I'm sure its bitcoin wallets were active shortly after Evolution exit scammed in March.

https://www.walletexplorer.com/wallet/AlphaBayMarket-old?page=83

Alphabay wallets were doing transactions on 30 April 2014 - about 6 weeks after Evo exit scammed. Either that start date is a typo, or Alphabay operated for 8 months under a different name, or it was a previous business which walletexplorer has mislabelled (carding site?)


[2 Points] None:

What exactly is the concern here? I remember when Gwern dumped their 'toxic terabyte' or whatever there was a lot of discussion about why and why not...but in the end there should be nothing implicating on these sites for you as a buyer or seller. In theory, if someone had full read access to the entire database they should not know anything more about you than they knew from viewing your profile.


[1 Points] METH-HEAD-MIKE-43:

onion websites are limited in their ability to identify scrappers.

  1. Several thousand people could be on the same exit node IP.
  2. No use of JavaScript.


[1 Points] 4-MAR:

AlphaBay 2014/12/22 37,896 2001

Cryptomarket 2014/12/22 8,362 432

Interesting creation dates.