The Deep, Dark Net

(Winter 2015) Although shut down and its conceptualizer jailed two years ago, Silk Road’s legacy of selling illegal drugs and other black-market activities thrives. On a single day in October, the current leader of these types of websites had 21,372 illegal drug listings and another had about 16,000 listings. When Silk Road was seized in October 2013, it had 13,000 illegal drug listings.

According to Kyle Soska, Carnegie Mellon University researcher, ”more than half of anonymous marketplaces implement websites that are directly derived from the template that Silk Road used, and from formatting all the way to policy, Silk Road invented the status quo that actors in this space have come to expect.” Soska’s research found that these illegal websites average sales between $300,000 – $500,000 a day and have a basic survival strategy of remaining in business for only a short while.

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