On May 3rd, law enforcement agencies announced that they had seized the servers that hosted the Wall Street darknet illicit market. They also arrested the market’s administrators. A copy of criminal complaint is now published publicly. Criminal complaints like these … Read More
Flare Systems Blog
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What Can We Learn From The Bitcoin Address of a Darknet Illicit Market
The researcher Caleb (@5auth) recently discovered the bitcoin address that the darknet illicit market (Wall Street) administrators used to manage all the purchases made on their market. This leak demonstrates just how much intelligence can be gathered using our BitCluster … Read More
How Relevant Are Darknet Illicit Markets?
The lifespan of most darknet illicit markets is very limited. While some remain active for years, most only stay online for months. With the recent shutdown of Dreammarket and Wall Street, many people are currently asking themselves: are darknet illicit … Read More
Clustering banks based on the offenders targeting them
Banks are all in the business of protecting savings, loans and helping invest. As a result, banks commonly share many practices and tools. In this blog post, we demonstrate how malicious actors tend to target the same group of financial … Read More
Are online offenders quitters?
In a podcast I was listening to recently, offenders who had just gotten out of jail were discussing how everything in life is so difficult. Some may think that dealing drugs or stealing cars makes for an easy living with … Read More
Legalizing cannabis in Canada: an impact on the cryptomarket black markets?
Canada went through an historic transformation on October 17th. On that date, Canada became the first Western industrialized country to legalize recreational cannabis (RC). Given that an estimated 2 million Canadians use recreational cannabis, the legalization of RC removes much … Read More
Why do carders still live with their moms?
What do school teachers and sumo wrestlers have in common? This is just one of the many intriguing questions that Levitt and Dubner ask in the 2005 best-seller Freakonomics. The answer: they both cheat to get ahead. Schools teachers play … Read More
Everything Changes So Fast
Darknet marketplace vendors sell of some truly unique items. They offer, of course, plenty of ‘get rich quick’ schemes and services such as the one below. This ad is for a sports betting tipping service. It was posted by someone … Read More
Online illicit markets
The darknet provides a relatively anonymous environment in which to buy and sell illicit goods and services. Transactions take place in illicit markets that operate in a similar fashion to eBay and Amazon. The markets invite independent vendors to create … Read More
Mapping the darknet
By all accounts, the public internet is a big place. According to some estimates, the public internet now hosts over 1 billion websites. Experts predict that internet users will send or receive in 2019 over 2 zettabytes of data. In … Read More