Analysis of Dark Net Market Transactions using JMP Pro 13

Abu Bakar Seddeke, MBA Candidate, Marketing Analytics Concentration

Oklahoma State University

This project is about a deep dive into the financial activities occurring on deep-website Agora. The goal of this project was to find out what were one of the most popular and vulnerable businesses on the dark net, financial markets. The origins of the transactions and most used terms/indicators were used to see which transactions were most widely used and the kinds of financial information was most vulnerable to attack. We performed text analysis to see if there were any terms that indicated how these vendors may have obtained/cracked into financial accounts for resell. This data comes from kaggle.com from a user called phillipjames11 and follows the chronicles of the transactions and general posts from Agora and all analysis was done using JMP Pro 13. From our findings, Money Services was the largest section of interest on the site, after drug-related posts and e-books. The text analysis shows that credit cards are highly fruitful for miscreants and second most vulnerable service is PayPal. PayPal and credit cards seem to be advertised as either a proxy bank account to accumulate ill-gotten funds from victims of identity theft or misplace credit card information, or simply drain the victim’s funds from their account.