Important clarifications:
– A great many fraudsters operate on the dark web. It is therefore entirely possible that some of the sites we mention are pure and simple scams.
– This series is not intended to promote dark web sites, nor to give advice on transacting safely on them. Its only purpose is to describe the kinds of goods and services offered for sale within the dark web. For that reason we give no site addresses, and any contact details appearing in the screenshots are blurred.
Having surveyed the goods and services most often sold on the dark web in the previous articles, we turn here to a few less common commercial offers, for the last in the ‘Marketplaces on the dark web’ series.
1 – Rarities
a) Selling rhodium
b) Precious resources: gold and diamonds
c) Selling rare animals
2 – Urban legends
a) Hitmen
b) Red Rooms
1 – Rarities
a) Selling rhodium
Alongside the standard goods (drugs, weapons…), some dark web marketplaces offer rarer or more surprising products. On the Dark Store site, which disappeared not long ago, 1 kg of rhodium could be found for 24,000 euros. The presence of this metal — used in industry and jewellery — on a dark web trading platform struck us as incongruous. The advertised price was suspect too, since a kilogram of rhodium trades at around 800,000 euros on the official markets.
Home page of the Dark Store site
Rhodium for sale on the Dark Store site
Dark Store did not confine itself to rhodium, weapons, drugs and fake banknotes. It also offered graphics cards, underwear supposedly worn by a woman, and lucky dips (‘Random Secret Box’) which might contain items sold on the site. There was even a lottery with a range of prizes. This highly atypical — indeed fanciful, and to say the least questionable — trading site disappeared during November and has no known mirror to date.
b) Precious resources: gold and diamonds
Still on the subject of precious metals, on the Gold & Diamonds site we find… gold and diamonds.
Home page of the Gold & Diamonds site
This deeply cynical site claims to source its supply from clandestine African mines. It states that the workers in those mines are fed and housed, but not paid.
Ethics according to Gold & Diamonds
On the Gold & Diamonds home page we notice two tabs, titled ‘Get in EU Free’ and ‘Free EU Refuge For Women’. African men are offered refugee status in a European Union country in exchange for three years’ work in the EU for Gold & Diamonds.
As is often the case in this line of trade, threats against the candidates’ families serve as the means of pressure that guarantees their obedience.
The offer for women is almost identical. They are offered entry into the European Union in exchange for three years of ‘modelling’ in the service of Gold & Diamonds. The team takes care to specify that this ‘modelling’ involves sexual relations.
The offer for women
c) Selling rare animals
Gold & Diamonds also states that it sells rhinoceros horn, though that does not appear to be its core ‘business’. Some sites, on the other hand, specialise in selling ivory or protected species. The Dark Jungle, for instance, put buyers and sellers of exotic animals in touch with one another; ivory products and clothing made from the skins of endangered species could also be found there.
The Dark Jungle matching platform
Product for sale on The Dark Jungle
The Dark Jungle appears to have gone extinct rather quickly itself: we detected its existence in January 2021, and it disappeared in March.
2 – Urban legends
a) Hitmen
A number of dark web sites do offer to hire out the services of contract killers. For a few thousand euros, the customer can name a target for assassination. For a more modest sum, an assault is sometimes on offer instead. Rates vary according to the harm the customer wishes to inflict on the target.
We close this survey of the dark web’s commercial offers with two kinds of service that have attracted rather more media attention in recent years: hitmen and Red Rooms.
The Hire Russian Killer site
Hire a Hitman
It is highly likely that almost every site offering this type of service is a more or less crude scam. Even so, a number of news stories from recent years suggest that a genuine offering does exist on the dark web.
b) Red Rooms
In the same vein, we come at last to the legendary Red Rooms. According to rumours obligingly relayed by outlets hungry for sensation, these are torture and killing sessions broadcast live on the dark web. For a fee, it would be possible not only to watch them streamed, but some customers could pay a larger sum to give orders to the torturer and so direct the session.
The Red Room site, replicated across more than 1,250 mirrors
Another Red Room site
Two things make us doubt that Red Rooms are real. The first has to do with the Tor network itself, whose relative slowness seems to us ill-suited to real-time video streaming. One could nonetheless suppose that the dark web pages serve only as a purchase interface, and that a link on a faster network is passed to customers. The second has to do with the countdown displayed on the Red Rooms home page. In virtually all of the 1,250-plus mirrors it is the same countdown: 10 days, 6 hours and 21 minutes until the next session — whatever the day or the hour at which you visit these sites.
Here again, we are not saying that every site we have mentioned is a mere tourist trap. Some offers are very real indeed, and therefore represent a threat in several respects. It remains necessary, though, to stay cautious and not to feed the fantasies that circulate about the dark web.