Article by V. Bhaskar, Robin Linacre and Stephen Machin

Like many other consumer transactions, the buying and selling of drugs are increasingly moving online. This is one very visible dimension of cybercrime – and it has been receiving growing attention from researchers as the online drugs markets have expanded rapidly.

A key feature of online drugs platforms is that they are located on the so-called ‘dark web’, which is accessible via the sophisticated technology of anonymisation software and encryption programs,
and buying and selling transactions
are conducted using the anonymous cryptocurrency, Bitcoin. Our research so far has empirically studied these online drugs platforms by scraping large amounts of data from their websites and by focusing specifically on three economic questions.

Read more... LSE Business Review blog