When the Silk Road marketplace was shut down in October 2013, many
felt the arrest of its owner Ross Ulbricht signaled the end of the dark
market as means to sell illegal and unauthorised goods including
counterfeits. The intervening months have shown this to be demonstrably
not the case, with many more competing markets being launched, including
a new and improved Silk Road 2.0.
Anonymous market place in the deep web
Dark market sites are not part of the regular, common-or
garden-internet which most of us inhabit on a day to day basis as they
can only be accessed through the Tor network.
The Tor anonymising network is a system of pseudo-anonymous
networking, originally sponsored by the U.S. Naval Research Laboratory
that allows users to access various internet resources such as web sites
and forums with some degree of privacy. Tor also enables access to a
number of hidden resources inaccessible to normal internet users.
Commonly called “onion sites”
1,
these locations feature content often excluded from the ‘clear net’.
Hidden onion sites on Tor are generally only accessible to those who have installed the Tor browser bundle
2,
a specially designed set of software which allows access to Tor through
a modified version of Firefox. However, regular web users can take
advantage of services such as tor2web.org and onion.to to access onion
sites. These services act as a web-based proxy gateway to Tor and allow
access to sites such as The Tor Directory and the Hidden Wiki
3 (directories of many of the most popular services hosted via Tor) via a slightly amended URL
4
However, it is vital to note that while using such methods provides
simple access to onion sites, it does not provide any of the anonymity
and protections that the full use of the Tor browser affords users.
Using a service such as tor2web also places trust in the operator of the
proxy. As such, any visits to the Tor network using a web-based proxy
should be employed with caution (and indeed, a recent exploit of the Tor
browser itself shows that anonymity cannot be guaranteed when using the
network ).
5
Browsing these sites can be something of a shock for the average web
user, whose idea of living dangerously on the internet probably amounts
to checking their Facebook feed while in a meeting with their boss. The
world of Tor is a far darker place, with hit men offering to take out
your unfaithful spouse, alongside drug dealers and pornographers. Throw
in a healthy dash of scammers and hackers and five minutes with the Tor
browser will convince you that you are not in Kansas anymore.
The primary means of carrying out transactions in the Tor world is
through the transfer of Bitcoin, a decentralised crypto-currency that
adds another layer of anonymity to proceedings.
It is perhaps unsurprising that such an environment is also an
attractive potential market for counterfeiters. Using dark markets, such
as Silk Road 2.0 or Hydra marketplace, sellers are able to advertise
and sell a swathe of counterfeit products, with few of the risks
associated with operating on the clear net.
Available in the deep web
A quick sweep of a few of these sites, turned up listings for openly
counterfeit designer clothes, bags, sunglasses and watches, offered for a
fraction of the price of the real item.
Watches and jewellery are readily available
Cigarettes and prescription style medication such as Viagra are also
widely available on many dark market sites. These may come from grey
market channels, or could be totally counterfeit and harmful to health.
Counterfeit drugs are a big problem
Other products available include counterfeit coupons offering huge
discounts at a number of web and bricks and mortar stores, as well as –
presumably stolen – memberships to online services such as Netflix,
Hulu, or Xfinity Online.
While the quality of these products found was not tested, many users
seemed happy with what’s on offer, providing feedback in the same way
that a user of Ebay or Amazon might. Sellers are then able to build up
trust and reputation on a site, a very important attribute when sellers
are effectively untraceable and buying anything involves a significant
risk of completely losing every penny spent should the seller disappear.
To manage this risk, many sites have implemented sophisticated
systems of escrow, that do not release payments until the buyer is happy
with the received product. Such systems have been very popular since
they were developed and have significantly reduced the risk of buying
materials from dark market sites.
For rights holders, the presence of counterfeit versions of their
products pose obvious reputational risks, especially when featured
alongside listings of illegal drugs or weapons that make up much of the
rest of these dark market sites.
At present, the clear net still offers sufficient avenues for
counterfeiters to sell their product on sites such as Aliexpress, DHgate
and iOffer. However as enforcement actions against such sites become
more common place, the unregulated dark markets will offer a potential
refuge to those engaged in the sale of counterfeit goods.
The anonymous nature of the Tor network and Bitcoin transactions
makes it far more difficult to shut down sites or investigate vendors
than on the wider, public internet.
However, when infringing products are found on Tor, there is scope for a
carefully designed system of test purchases to provide additional
information and data on those offering products through these
illegitimate channels.
