Producing Trust Among Illicit Actors: A Techno-Social Approach to an Online Illicit Market

Angus Bancroft, Tim Squirrell, Andreas Zaunseder and Irene Rafanell
Additional contact information
Angus Bancroft: University of Edinburgh, UK
Tim Squirrell: University of Edinburgh, UK
Andreas Zaunseder: University of Aberdeen, UK
Irene Rafanell: University of the West of Scotland, UK

Sociological Research Online, 2020, vol. 25, issue 3, 456-472

Abstract: Illicit market exchanges in cybercriminal markets are plagued by problems of verifiability and enforceability: trust is one way to ensure reliable exchange. It is fragile and hard to establish. One way to do that is to use the administrative structure of the digital market to control transactions. This is common among a specific type of market – darknet cryptomarkets. These are sites for the sale of illicit goods and services, hosted anonymously using the Tor darknet. However, reliance by users on the technology and the market administrators exposes users to excessive risk. We examine a case of a market that rejects several key technological features now common in cryptomarkets but that is nonetheless reliable and robust. We apply a techno-social approach that looks at the way participants use and combine technologies with trust relationships. The study was designed to capture the interactional context of the illicit market. We aimed to examine both person-to-person interaction and the technical infrastructure the market relied on. We find that the social space of the market maintains itself through a shared common security orientation, community participation in key decisions about products sold, performing trust signalling, and relying on lateral trust between members. There are implications for how resilience in cryptomarkets is understood.

Keywords: cryptomarkets; darknet; drugs; trust; digital sociology (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2020
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

Downloads: (external link)
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/1360780419881158 (text/html)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:sae:socres:v:25:y:2020:i:3:p:456-472

DOI: 10.1177/1360780419881158

Access Statistics for this article

More articles in Sociological Research Online
Bibliographic data for series maintained by SAGE Publications ().