Quantifying Dark Web Shops’ Illicit Revenue

The Dark Web, primarily Tor, has evolved to protect user privacy and freedom of speech through anonymous routing. However, Tor also facilitates cybercriminal actors who utilize it for illicit activities. Quantifying the size nature such activity is challenging, as complicates indexing by design. This paper proposes a methodology estimate both commercial on Web. We demonstrate this based crawling single-vendor Web Shops, i.e., niche storefronts operated single or small groups. Based data collected from we show that just in 2021, Shops generated at least 113 million USD revenue. Sexual abuse top revenue category, followed financial crime great distance. compare Shops’ with large Marketplace, showing these are parallel economies. Our contributes towards automated analysis Tor. Furthermore our sheds light evolving Shop ecosystem provides insights into evidence-based policymaking regarding criminal activity.