ABSTRACT
Increased rewards and reduced risks drive illicit networks. Cybercriminals seek to avoid risks, including detection, arrests, sanctions, and violence. Hence, they employ several strategies to avoid operational risks when accessing darknet sites, communicating, making payments, shipping and delivery, and resolving disputes. Each operation involves transactions that should work together, such that when a transaction is disrupted, it increases its risk and reduces the crime’s benefits. In this study, we examine these risks, and their avoidance strategies, in an attempt to highlight transactions that could be disrupted. We develop a typology of darknet risks, a parsimonious conceptual model abstracted from the literature on risk originators (internal or external) and risk targets (vendors or buyers). This study further clarifies how risk avoidance strategies may be disrupted to increase the risks and reduce the reward of darknet crime.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).