Darkweb Tries to Fill the Void After White House Drug Market Shut Down

• White House dark web market shut down a month ago, just two yeas after it started.
• Resarchers estimate the owners might have made over $5 million and $1.3 million.
• Other markeplaces are expected to take up the demand and cover for the created void.

With the White House Market shutting down last month, experts expect new online marketplaces to rise up to fulfill the demand. They expect that these new online drug markets will borrow certain elements of White House Market’s operational process and working standards, including high-grade Pretty Good Privacy (PGP) encoding and prioritizing hard-to-trace currencies such as Monero.

The owners and operators of White House Market, one of the Darkweb's biggest drug markets, declared on October 1, 2021, that they would be shutting down, much to the shock of the Darknet users. These anonymous operators did say they may come back some time soon, but this possibility seems slim.

When it closed, WHM had 900,000 users - with over 326,000 active users and 3,000 vendors. These sellers also traded in credit card and bank fraud, forged documents, and illegal and prescription drugs, with the most common among these being cannabis and ecstasy, opioids like heroin and oxycodone, and hallucinogenic drugs such as ketamine and PCP, cocaine, steroids, and amphetamines, or meth.

Surprisingly, WHM also boasted exceptional digital security, reliable customer service, and ethical standards that prohibited the sale and purchase of child pornography, contract killing job offers or hires or market weapons, explosives, or poisons.

The online marketplace appeared in August 2019, and while it has not reached the same level of popularity as Silk Road or AlphaBay, it was still one of the largest. At present, it is unknown how much money was made by WHM’s owners and operators until they shut down.

Considering they charged 4% per transaction in Monero, researchers at the Carnegie Mellon University estimate they might have made as much as $1.3 million over the past two years from an estimated $35 million in sales. High estimates indicate that this volume could have been $5 million from facilitating $120 million in sales.

The US Department of Justice announced on Tuesday that their Operation HunTor was a big success. This declaration comes less than 30 days after White House shut down its doors. A handful of vendors on White House were tied with the Operation, and now the question of whether they are facing prosecution or not is up in the air.

However, the drug marketplace is not a place for an easy retirement, and WHM’s admins will have to look out for criminal prosecution. This has been the case with all major drug markets of the past, including Silk Road, AlphaBay Hanza, and all others. Minor mistakes like those made by AlphaBay’s administrator led to his seizure by the Dutch police and subsequent death in his jail cell weeks later. The same happened with Paul Engstrom, one of the most popular and successful cocaine dealers operating on WHM. He is now being indicted by the US Department of Justice as announced on Tuesday.

At present, a newly re-established AlphaBay seems to be the strongest contender for taking up WHM’s user and seller base. It is now run by DeSnake, one of the original AlphaBay’s admins. This market will probably take up a major part of WHM’s share, while other smaller markets will take up the rest. With that said, the US DoJ crackdown will produce a lot of dynamism and turbulence in the market, so the future global Darknet markets remain to be seen.