Valued at approximately $15 million, Abacus Market is one of the most lucrative platforms in the dark web ecosystem. Abacus Market quickly rose to prominence by attracting former AlphaBay users and providing a comprehensive platform for a wide range of illicit activities. After AlphaBay closed, Abacus Market took its place as the world’s largest underground darknet marketplaces.
H3 How Do Law Enforcement Agencies Combat Gun Violence Related To Black Market Firearms?
The report ordered by Attorney General Merrick Garland is the first in-depth analysis of firearm trafficking investigations in more than 20 years. However, despite these concerns, very little is known about the size and scope of the weapons trade on the dark web. While small arms falling into criminal groups' hands may have peripheral consequences, a world in which these actors can obtain cluster munitions and chemical weapons would have catastrophic consequences for stability beyond the Russo-Ukrainian War. In addition to cluster munitions, Russia has actively been deploying chemical weapons prohibited by international law. Along with clearly illegal transfers of weapons within and beyond Ukraine, there are murkier questions about transfers of illegal types of weapons from the United States to Ukraine.
See Countries Where Black Market Ships Firearms
About a third of the states have laws that prosecutors may use to penalize gun purchasers who intend to traffic the gun, in certain circumstances. For additional information about the records used in crime gun tracing, including additional information about the Tiahrt Amendments, see our summary on Maintaining Records of Gun Sales.34 We won’t rest until every state has strong gun safety laws and every community is free from the fear of gun violence. The research was based on similar methodologies to those previously used to analyze the dark web drug trade, which take scraped data from marketplaces typically accessed through the Tor network. On one side, markets are seemingly saturated with con-artists trying to scam money, as well as law enforcement agents posing as gun dealers. In France, firearm applicants are subjected to rigorous background checks and sales are denied to those with criminal records.
Federal Law Loopholes
One study using an online survey concluded one in five guns are bought from unlicensed sellers without background checks. These private sellers don’t have to run background checks on their customers and have been a popular choice for criminals and others who shouldn’t have guns, according to federal authorities. Whether it's selling knockoff luxury bags or illegal drugs, black market sellers can make a lot of money. Typically, black markets exist because of laws and regulations that ban certain products even though there is still demand for them.
ABC News Live
The same report stated that a Ukrainian Air Force IL-76 transport jet flew in two L-39 jets to Uganda on 27 January 2017 in the full knowledge the L-39 jets were intended to go on to South Sudan, thereby violating the arms embargo Ukraine had placed on arms sales to South Sudan. At his villa, the Spanish National Police Corps allege that they found documents showing he was negotiating to sell Machar 40,000 AK-47 assault rifles, 30,000 PKM machine guns and 200,000 boxes of ammunition. A rare exception was with the Franco-Polish arms dealer Pierre Dadak who was arrested on 14 July 2016 at his villa in Ibiza on charges of gunrunning into South Sudan. Less is known about the very secretive arms dealers supplying the rebel Sudan People's Liberation Movement-in-Opposition (SPLM-IO) led by Riek Machar other than that the majority of the gunrunners appeared to be European. The American arms dealer and private military contractor, Erik Prince, sold to the government for $43 million three Mi-24 attack helicopters and two L-39 jets together with the services of Hungarian mercenary pilots to operate the aircraft. In July 2014, the Chinese arms manufacturer Norinco delivered a shipment to South Sudan of 95,000 assault rifles and 20 million rounds of ammunition, supplying enough bullets to kill every person in South Sudan twice over.
Shuttered Dark Web Marketplaces
- Prior to the founding of Israel, law enforcement of the British Mandate of Palestine uncovered a cache of weapons in 359 drums of cement during the 1935 Cement Incident.
- Pennsylvania law requires a buyer of a handgun to affirm, on a form, that he or she is the “actual buyer” of the handgun, with a statement that a person is not the actual buyer if he or she is acquiring the firearm on behalf of another person, with an exception for gifts to certain family members.39
- It became an FBI target when nearly a million people were using it and sales rose to roughly $1.3 billion over about two years, the agency said.
- When ATF did so, more than 20 states including Texas sued the agency in federal court, saying the change has exposed millions of gun owners to criminal liability for a “whole host of innocent conduct.”
- The report also shows that the recipients of trafficked firearms were people who had previously been convicted of a felony in almost 60 percent of the cases in which investigators were able to identify the background of the recipient.
Minin was released in December 2002, as according to Italian law, he could not be tried because the weapons he had sold had never reached Italy. Prosecuting arms traffickers and brokers has proven difficult due to loopholes in national laws. Comparatively, AK-47s sold on the Dark web in the United States can cost as much as $3,600, as the price of illegal arms is increased greatly by the distance it must travel, due to the induced risk.
When someone wants to buy a gun and knows they won’t pass a federal background check due to a felony record, a mental health problem or some other reason, there are plenty of options. One of the best-known black markets in American history was Prohibition, or the period from 1920 to 1933, when the manufacturing, transportation, and sale of alcohol was illegal. Because they are engaging in illegal activity and taking a risk, black market sellers can typically charge more than they would if they were selling a legal product. Drugs are an obvious example of this; there has long been a demand for these products despite the danger of some drugs and the laws against using them. Additionally, black markets tend to take a business away from law-abiding entrepreneurs.
‘Like Buying A Bar Of Chocolate’
The firearms that are imported and passed around are commonly small arms and lighter weapons (SALW) compared to large machinery, such as tanks and aircraft. After the UWSA announced a restriction of weapons supply on August 28, 2025, speculation arose that this announcement contributed to a spike in black market arms prices. Efforts to combat arms trafficking in Asia are further complicated by the involvement of transnational organized crime groups, which operate across borders and engage in various illicit activities, including arms smuggling. In Southeast Asia, porous borders and post-conflict zones facilitate the smuggling of firearms, often linked to non-state actors, including separatists, criminal syndicates, and terrorist groups. Although arms trafficking is widespread in regions of political turmoil, it is not limited to such areas, and for example, in South Asia, an estimated 63 million guns have been trafficked into India and Pakistan.
Unlike the federal Form 4473, Virginia law defines “actual buyer” to mean a person who executes the required consent form, or other such firearm transaction records as required by federal law.69 Pennsylvania law requires a buyer of a handgun to affirm, on a form, that he or she is the “actual buyer” of the handgun, with a statement that a person is not the actual buyer if he or she is acquiring the firearm on behalf of another person, with an exception for gifts to certain family members.39 Massachusetts law prohibits any person from using any of the state’s gun licenses for the purpose of purchasing a firearm for resale or transfer to an unlicensed person.37 Therefore, subject to limited exceptions, any person who acquires a firearm in order to transfer it to someone else without a background check violates California law.36 On January 16, 2013, President Obama released a memorandum to federal agencies requiring them to submit any firearm taken into their custody to the National Tracing Center to be traced.33 In the absence of state and local laws, however, other law enforcement officials are not subject to this requirement. As described in our summary on Universal Background Checks, federal law only requires licensed dealers, and not unlicensed private sellers, to conduct background checks on purchasers and maintain records of sales.
“The gist of the opposition to Armslist lies in opposition to the private ownership of firearms,” the statement said. Sellers on the site contacted by reporters from digital news outlets the Verge and the Trace said they tended to trust their gut while negotiating sales and would sometimes check out the buyer’s online presence, but “only a handful” would actually take prospective customers to a licensed dealer for a proper background check. “When I heard them say that they decided to ban all gun-related ads because a few users cried out for it, it inspired me to create a place for law-abiding gun owners to buy and sell online without all of the hassles of auctions and shipping,” Gibbon said. In September 2020, seven guns that Villarreal flipped turned up at crime scenes in Reynosa.
Ready To Explore Web Data At Scale?
In addition, although federal law requires licensed dealers to conduct background checks, ATF does not have the resources to fully enforce this requirement. The law in Maryland is more limited, because it presumes that the true purchaser played an active role in soliciting the person who filled out the required forms and underwent a background check. Maryland, Massachusetts, and Pennsylvania also have strong laws aimed at buyers who intend to traffic the firearm. Unlike most states, California law requires a background check for every sale of a firearm.
Pond agreed to surrender 114 pistols, rifles, and shotguns to federal authorities as part of his plea agreement. There’s at least one other federal case aside from Villarreal’s where a seller on Armslist told investigators he was involved in shipping guns to Mexico. “You get people working for the cartel, or people working for a trafficking group, they’re looking for guns they want, they will travel throughout states just to get ’em.”
Furthermore, trafficked firearms were used to commit additional crimes in almost 25 percent of the cases, Dettelbach said. The report also shows that the recipients of trafficked firearms were people who had previously been convicted of a felony in almost 60 percent of the cases in which investigators were able to identify the background of the recipient. The second-highest share of firearm-trafficking cases investigated by ATF was straw purchases, when someone buys a gun for a person who can't get it legally themselves. The guns were used in 368 shooting cases, which are harder to investigate because unlicensed dealers aren't required to keep records of their sales that could allow federal agents to trace the weapon back to the original buyer, said ATF Director Steve Dettelbach. That represents 54% of the illegally trafficked firearms in the U.S. between 2017 and 2021, Justice Department officials said. Despite efforts to regulate firearms, there are multiple avenues for entrepreneurial criminals to bypass controls and traffic weapons across international borders.
