Dark Web Price Index 2020

known | 296 points

Hitman-for-hire darknet sites are all scams. This wired article explains how these offerings are all scams.

https://www.wired.co.uk/article/kill-list-dark-web-hitmen

bilbopotter | 4 years ago

One of the biggest takeaways from this for me is that PayPal has awful security when it comes to compromised accounts. The only reason compromised accounts would trade for prices that high is because hackers have a high success rate of stealing funds from them, and a low chance of getting caught.

Credit cards and bank credentials being worth comparatively much less means that hackers don't have easy ways to secure the funds - either there's a high risk that the transaction is reverted, or there's a high risk that the hacker gets caught and goes to jail. You can tell it's not just an effort issue because the value of the accounts barely scale as the amounts in the accounts increase.

Taek | 4 years ago

It scares me that posts like this always write of Tor like it's not compromised.

I browsed Tor regularly between 2011 and 2013. Late 2012 and early 2013 brought the most precipitous drop in deviant material. Before then, you couldn't throw a stone without coming upon CP(I avoided it like the plague but knew it was there), you could buy literally any drug on the Silk Road safely, and you could easily find bomb-making and asymmetric warfare information. Nowadays? Not so much.

TheAdamAndChe | 4 years ago

> Avoid public or unsecured WiFi. If you must log into an account on a network you don’t 100% trust, use a VPN to encrypt all communications. Even bank websites can be forged to be almost undetectable if an attacker has administrative access to the network you’re using.

I think we should stop fear mongering over shady wifi. In a world with HSTS and CT, these types of attacks ars incredibly difficult to pull off.

bawolff | 4 years ago

You would be very hard pressed to find a cloned card + PIN anywhere. That's the holy grail and information like that would never find it's way outside of a team. Think about how easy it is to go to an ATM and use it.. Why would you sell that information for $25?

The rest of it seems fairly accurate based on jstash/unicc/etc.

rwmurrayVT | 4 years ago

I love the lady in the comments section, just being boss and looking for tips to become a criminal

darth_avocado | 4 years ago

If you get on torsearch or similar tor search engines, you see ads for similar stuff. You also see links in forums and such for places selling what you want. These are the types of prices the ad's themselves claim. Is the author taking all those numbers at face value? Or is this some more in-depth research where it was possible to purchase one or more services? If it's former, I don't find these numbers to mean much.

The links can be dead by the time you get to them. You don't know if it's just another honeypot. You don't know if you'll get what you pay for.

itchyjunk | 4 years ago

How can you build a dark web price index and not mention drugs at all?

hashmal | 4 years ago

What makes malware "low quality", "high quality", "premium", 70% reliability, etc. Sounds like it's all low quality to me, because outside on the regular market zerodays can be 100k-1M or more. If I remember correctly, Alphabay used to be where darknet zerodays were listed before it was taken down.

netsec_burn | 4 years ago

Why do bank accounts with money in them sell for less than the amount in them? Is it counterbalanced by the risk of withdrawing from them?

lifeformed | 4 years ago

The most surprising thing to me on that list was the AAA emergency road service membership card for $70.

Why would this be so valuable? Stealing somebody else’s free emergency tow? Isn’t a membership itself only like $120 a year?

ed25519FUUU | 4 years ago

Why hacked Facebook/Gmail/Instagram/etc accounts are so expensive?

qwerty456127 | 4 years ago

I haven't explored the darknet in over 5 years, but some of these prices seem a bit high. Around 2014-2015 I saw PayPal accounts listed for $3 a piece ($5 if you bundled it with SOCKS proxy access). Which could mean a couple things: PayPal security has gotten tighter, restricting the supply of accounts; PayPal security has actually gotten worse, increasing the actual value of the accounts; or maybe these guys are doing "market" research and determined that their profit margins were higher charging $25 for the same product. It could also mean that the writers of this article didn't do enough digging to find a "better" deal. Interesting read but I'm not sure how much I trust their numbers

b1ur | 4 years ago

> The “quality” [counterfeit money] tend to cost around 30% of the banknote value.

This was the most surprising to me. Seems like it’s extremely high priced. You get a 30% discount for using counterfeits and potentially getting the secret service on you? Maybe that is a reflection of its quality but... Yea, no thanks.

Edit: Ohhhh My bad read it wrong. 70% off... better but these would have to be amazing quality.

SV_BubbleTime | 4 years ago

What shocked me is no price for youtube followers. I guess twitter, ig matter where youtube followers don't.

wolco | 4 years ago

Can anyone point me to some of the 'how to cash out' guides mentioned? Doing some research in this area and quite interested to learn about techniques used in practice and how they compare to those proposed in academic literature.

anonymousDan | 4 years ago

> AAA emergency road service membership card $70

I think the renewal for my AAA membership was $74. Why would anyone pay for a fake membership for $70?

mullen | 4 years ago

Why is malware listed in quantities? lol

Did they scrape data from various black market sites naively?

malwarebytess | 4 years ago
[deleted]
| 4 years ago

Let's say I decide to pay $800 for ddos attack. Provider pockets the $800 and doesn't carry out the attack. What's my recourse? Contact customer service? Nope. Contact the police? Hmm. You see the whole thing is a scam. There are plenty of articles online about it.

bilbopotter | 4 years ago

One thing I hate about the underground is the blatant racism to deny service, and then having to pretend that this is not a reflection of the general society but not being able to talk about it.

From forgers to illegal sex workers. Even the rationales are flimsy.

vmception | 4 years ago

I don't believe any of this. $20 for a credit card that has up to $5000 on it? Which criminal would sell something worth $5000 for $20? Even PayPal accounts with over $3000 selling for $100? Makes absolutely no sense. The other line items about Malware with "slow spread" is absurd. This is BuzzFeed level cyber journalism.

Thorentis | 4 years ago