Trust Assessment of a Darknet Marketplace

Since darknet marketplaces became popular, many came online and went offline after a short time, often taken down by law enforcement or performing exit scams. In order to succeed in running a darknet marketplace, operators need to earn trust from the users of their platform. However, in anonymous environments like darknet marketplaces, it can be difficult to determine which technical measures or policies intended to build trust can actually be trusted.In this paper we evaluate the trustworthiness of the darknet marketplace UnderMarket 2.0. By scraping and analyzing data from the marketplace, we reveal that numerous fraud indicators exist. We show in a further evaluation that UnderMarket 2.0 intentionally uses various measures to gain trust in order to defraud customers.