Examining the Uncharted Dark Web: Trust Signalling on Single Vendor Shops
Why this work is in the frame
A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Despite their growing popularity, cryptomarkets generate risks for participants. This has promoted the reemergence of a more personal transaction model on the dark web: single vendor shops. To date, little is known about how single vendors display trust to attract potential customers without relying on the structural trust provided by cryptomarkets’ review and escrow systems. A total of 108 single vendor shops were identified. A coding grid was used to determine whether vendors displayed any of the four categories of trust signals typically found on cryptomarkets (i.e., signals related to identity, marketing, security, and signals that directly express trust). While the majority of single vendor shops were involved in illicit drug dealing, other products such as electronics, weapons, and fake documents were also offered. On average, shops displayed few trust signals. However, variations between different kinds of vendors were found: while vendors involved in illicit drug dealing displayed more identity- and marketing-related trust signals, vendors involved in fraud displayed more security-related signals and signals that directly expressed trust. Differences between vendors might be due to the nature of the products they offer and to the level of competition in their respective markets.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it