Fiend or Fed? Choosing Partners for Illicit Transactions on the Deep Web

• In Event: 033 - Regular Session. Internet and Society

Abstract

The literature on illegal drugs and their markets is vast, but in recent years we have seen the emergence of a new public marketplace in the retail and wholesale drug trade, which has only recently begun to receive attention in the media and in academic work: On the controversial internet space known as Deep Web we find almost every conceivable illegal or controlled substance openly advertised for sale. This is a competitive marketplace, where buyers and sellers discriminate between potential new exchange partners on the basis of identity practices and information provided by feedback and ratings systems. How do vendors and purchasers choose their transaction partners in a competitive marketplace for illicit goods, where real identities are fiercely guarded, where no one holds a local market monopoly, and where it is not possible to employ forms of sanctioning seen in offline retail drug marketplaces? Using ethnographic data from four online marketplaces, following several years of offline drug market ethnographic work, I find that online marketplaces represent a case where transactions are iterated via reputation effects rather than being directly iterated, and where trust in anonymous transaction partners is based on the reputation capital generated by feedback and identity claims. Almost all facets of the retail online drug marketplace are reputation focused, sharing little in common with offline retail and small wholesale drug transactions; these online transaction decisions more accurately mimic decision making processes that I otherwise observed in the wholesale and trafficker levels of the offline market for illicit drugs.

Author

• Rachael Heath Ferguson, Princeton University