COVID-19 crisis | HCQ, other medicines and tests now available for sale on dark web marketplaces

Hydroxychloroquine (HCQ), the antimalarial drug used for COVID-19 has emerged as a heavily-promoted drug on dark web marketplaces, according to British Cybersecurity company Sophos.

For instance Empire Market - one of the most popular places to buy illegal goods on the dark web and one of the few prominent dark web markets has 49 listings for chloroquine and hydroxychloroquine.

A vendor who posted the most ads for hydroxychloroquine on Empire, a total of 33, claims to have an unlimited supply of HCQ and offers to sell 9,000 pills for $1,194.

HCQ is widely used across the world for treating COVID-19 patients and also as prophylactic in high-risk groups like healthcare and frontline workers to prevent from infection. The drug is highly regulated by governments, to ensure hoarding and unauthorised use. They can not be sold without a valid prescription.

Abbott's chloroquine brand Nivaquine P250 MG tablets were also listed by one dark web seller.

"Most of the drugs on offer appeared to be legitimate products manufactured by genuine pharmaceutical companies, but some were clearly scams," said John Shier, Senior Security Advisor at Sophos.

Sophos threat researchers have done deep dive on dark web and found that it isn't HCQ alone, other antiviral drugs such as Gilead's remdesivir and antivirals such as lopinavir and ritonavir were also listed for sale on dark web.

In addition to the drugs, the dark web sellers have also listed personal protection equipment (PPEs), antibody test kits and personal hygiene products in the black market.

COVID-19 boost

Shier says, while a year ago most listings were related to illicit drugs, now COVID-19 pandemic had given an additional boost to the online black market.

"On 30 May 2019, there were 24,569 listings in Empire Market’s Drugs & Chemicals category. A year later there are over 34,000. This amounts to a year-over-year increase of roughly 42 percent. Since markets make their money by taking a cut of every transaction, and for Empire this cut is 4 percent, that’s some healthy revenue growth. With growth like that, the illicit drugs trade on the most popular dark web market doesn’t seem to have suffered during the pandemic. What is new, however, is pandemic-themed sales," Sheir said researchers said.

Empire Market also offers discount sales like the Black Friday sale.

Internet underbelly

The dark web is an underbelly of the internet, that's unregulated. It’s not easy to reach the dark web through a normal browser such as Google Chrome. It requires an anonymous private browser, that's difficult to be traced. All sorts of goods and services are sold and bought on the dark web. The payments are usually made through cryptocurrencies like bitcoins. Empire market transacts a little over $1 million a week.

Sophos warns there are risks. There is no guarantee on the quality of goods. There could be malicious intent, like stealing money from gullible users, charging advance fee, phishing attacks and injecting malware into device.

Even on dark web, some marketplaces have restricted the sale of COVID-19 related products, as they don't want to profit on a pandemic.

"The impact of COVID-19 on Empire Market has been limited, in terms of the number of products being offered. However, it is one of the few prominent markets that has not banned the sale of pandemic-related goods outright and is apparently happy to profit from the coronavirus. As other markets are setting restrictions on the sale of many of the products featured above, for Empire Market, it’s business as usual," Shier added.