Sharp increase in COVID-19 vaccines on dark markets

The offer of COVID-19 vaccines on dark markets is dangerously rising. Since the end of February 2021, we found 181 new vaccine listings on DWMs, a number five times greater than the 33 vaccine listings registered all time before.

The total number of officially approved vaccines listings is 77 and their temporal evolution shown in the Figure above. All major brands are present and their availability has been steadily increasing. On the contrary, vaccine prices followed the opposite trend, with prices that went from close to a thousand dollars to only a few hundreds.

The rise in the offer of COVID-19 vaccines on dark marketplaces warrant a close monitoring. So far, we analysed more than 23 millions listings and we will continue to increase our sample size in the coming months.

How to cite:

Want to cite and/or use the information provided in this page? It is licensed under CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 - please cite our ongoing monitoring effort as follows:

A. Bracci(+), M. Nadini(+), M. Aliapoulios, D. McCoy, I. Gray, A. Teytelboym, A. Gallo, A. Baronchelli. Dark Web Marketplaces and COVID-19: The vaccines. Preprint arXiv:2102.05470 (2021)

A. Bracci, M. Nadini, M. Aliapoulios, D. McCoy, I. Gray, A. Teytelboym, A. Gallo, A. Baronchelli. Dark Web Marketplaces and COVID-19: before the vaccine. EPJ Data Science 10.1 (2021): 1-26

(+) These authors contributed equally