Vente de drogues illicites sur le darknet: Enchâssement des marchés de drogues physiques et virtuels
Links seem to exist between virtual and physical markets for illicit drugs. While several authors referred to them, none of their studies really focused on understanding the nature of the links between these two types of markets. Therefore, this research aims to provide us with a better understanding of the links that exist between the virtual and physical markets of illicit drugs. More precisely, it focuses on the frequency of illicit drugs vendors that have sales experience in the physical world, on the level of diversification of those vendors’ activities as well as on the characteristics of their professional networks on cryptomarkets. This study’s data was collected from a survey administered on cryptomarkets that was addressed to illicit drugs vendors who are over 18 years old. The vendors were directly contacted via internal messaging on those cryptomarkets. This study demonstrated that almost half of the vendors in its sample were involved in physical trades of illicit drugs before expanding their activities to cryptomarkets. Those vendors seem to succeed better financially on cryptomarkets than the sellers who have no previous experience in non-virtual illicit drugs dealing. When we analyzed the professional networks of bimodal vendors, we noted that business contacts were mainly met offline. Finally, when we compared the supply sources for bimodal vendors with the ones used by unimodal virtual vendors, we can saw in a significant way that the bimodal vendors restock their products from the physical markets more often than unimodal vendors on the cryptomarkets. We can therefore conclude that links exist between the virtual and physical illicit markets of drugs.
Cryptomarket Illicit drug trafficking Online drug market Offline drug market New technologies