Cyber Monday Hits The Dark Web: How To Find Great Deals On Illegal Drugs, Stolen Credit Card Numbers

Forget buying a new flat-screen TV from Walmart, or a home theater system from Amazon. Cyber Monday deals on some more, um, original gifts -- such as 50 percent off LSD -- are proliferating on the Dark Web.

Cheap drugs are far from the only offer available within the seedy underbelly of the Internet that's not accessible via normal browsers or traditional search engines. The Dark Net, and the much larger Deep Web as a whole, is inaccessible to the casual Web user, but those who are intrepid enough to wade in found deals on everything from vials of Botox (66 percent off the usual price) and credit cards with a $3,000 balance (available for $45). The deals, posted on various illegal marketplaces, were first discovered by the Dark Net monitoring firm Centient, which was quoted by IBTimes UK.

“Despite law enforcement efforts to take these sites down, we are starting to see an influx of the adverts [advertisements] toward Black Friday with two of the remaining major markets currently boasting over 20,000 adverts,” said Benjamin Ali, senior investigator at Centient. “These two marketplaces have seen a growth in both the number of vendors and adverts on these sites, mainly due to not wanting to miss out on trade.”

Other deals include "buy three, get one free" liquid mushrooms, buy one, get one free British credit cards, one ounce of marijuana for $200 and free delivery on a number of drug products. While Centient didn’t specify which sites were examined, Dark Net and Deep Web sites almost always use the anonymous bitcoin currency.

These figures come a mere three months after Digital Citizens Alliance, an American crime research group, released a report indicating a number of online black markets – including Agora, Evolution and the Andromeda Market – currently list tens of thousands of drugs and illicit services for sale.