The now-defunct Silk Road website, showing products that were allegedly available. Photograph: AP The UK is home to more online drug dealers than any country in Europe, according to a new report that estimates the value of the monthly trade in drugs through darknet markets to be as much as £16m a month globally. British dealers generate just more than 16% of the monthly global revenues – about £1.8m – across the eight largest marketplaces, taking home an average of £5,200 each, according to research commissioned by the Dutch government. It found that three years after police in the US seized the Silk Road – the original online drugs marketplace – and arrested its founder, the numbers of drug deals taking place in successors to the site had tripled, revenues had doubled and six times as many product listings were available to buyers. Researchers from Rand Europe , working in conjunction with academics from the UK and Canada, in January collected data on drug deals from the eight largest darknet markets, which are Amazon-type online marketplaces that can only be accessed with an encrypted connection. They found that by far the most vendors operated from the US, which hosted 890 drug dealers, with the UK hosting 338. However, British dealers proved to be far busier, averaging almost double the number of transactions each over the month. Germany and the Netherlands were joint third in the numbers of dealers, with 225 each, although Dutch vendors made fewer but on average larger transactions, and operated in a far smaller jurisdiction. The report says: “The Netherlands appears to have a substantial concentration of cryptomarket vendor activity (13.4 vendors per million population) in comparison to the United States (2.8 vendors per million population) and the United Kingdom (5.3 vendors per million population).” The […]
