Dark net markets are a competitive environment. As these anonymous markets enable criminals to trade illicit goods or services, this causes vendors to operate under pseudonyms, rather than real-world identities. The constant battle between market admins and law enforcement makes the typical lifespan of a market two years. When a market disappears, active vendors migrate to other markets with the intention to continue their business, or have already pro-actively done so in an effort to ensure business continuity. To secure their reputation across markets, they can try to obtain the same pseudonym on multiple markets, but other individuals could beat them to the punch. A much safer method therefore, is to generate a PGP-key and use the public key as identification across markets. This way, vendors signal their continued trustworthy and reputable service on markets to buyers. In this paper, we leverage the use of PGP-keys to map careers of dark net market vendors. We parse and analyze scraped data from over 90 dark net markets (2011-2015), and discern 2,925 unique careers. By employing group based trajectory modelling, a type of latent class analysis, we infer three different career trajectories - differentiating ‘established’, ‘challenger’ and ‘failed’ vendor careers. We show that these trajectories are heavily unbalanced in terms of longevity and success. We find that on average 80% of careers last just four months and generate very little sales. Only a small group (∼2%) of highly successful vendors have a long and uninterrupted career that lasts years and spans multiple markets. This group is also responsible for at least 31% of the total revenue in our data.@en

In the summer of 2017, an international policing effort - named Operation Bayonet - led by the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) and the Dutch National High Tech Crime Unit (NHTCU) targeted two prominent online anonymous markets. On the one hand, the FBI succeeded in the take-down of AlphaBay, on the other hand the NHTCU took over, operated and shut down Hansa Market. By coordinating these efforts and planning these actions sequentially, both agencies expected users active on AlphaBay to make their way to Hansa Market - which at that moment was in complete control and operated by the NHTCU. To assess the effects of Operation Bayonet, we leverage measurements of the user-base of current market leader, and then safe haven: Dream Market. We investigate the effects of the operation on all newly registered vendors on Dream Market (n=220) during and shortly after Operation Bayonet by mapping their individual and historic characteristics to discern migration patterns and changes in vendor behavior. Compared to ‘simple’ take-downs, like the AlphaBay take-down, the effects of the Hansa Market shut down on vendors seem remarkably different. Vendors do not just simply move on after the Hansa Market shutdown. Few simply migrate, some take precautions like changing their username and/or PGP-key, but many start over with a clean slate - erasing their past reputation completely - and are truly ‘Lost in the Dream’@en

In this article the authors present the lessons learned from previous research efforts into dark markets. First the important features of dark markets are discussed, i.e. anonymity and trust, as well as the question how data on dark markets can be collected. Next, the authors illustrate how this data can be used to study the phenomenon of dark markets itself as well as the impact of police interventions on dark markets.@en