mlsanityData to 7 Oct 2026

VendorLink: An NLP approach for Identifying & Linking Vendor Migrants & Potential Aliases on Darknet Markets

arXiv 2305.02763 ↗First posted 4 May 2023cs.CY cs.CL cs.CRcited by 3

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Abstract (arXiv)

The anonymity on the Darknet allows vendors to stay undetected by using multiple vendor aliases or frequently migrating between markets. Consequently, illegal markets and their connections are challenging to uncover on the Darknet. To identify relationships between illegal markets and their vendors, we propose VendorLink, an NLP-based approach that examines writing patterns to verify, identify, and link unique vendor accounts across text advertisements (ads) on seven public Darknet markets. In contrast to existing literature, VendorLink utilizes the strength of supervised pre-training to perform closed-set vendor verification, open-set vendor identification, and low-resource market adaption tasks. Through VendorLink, we uncover (i) 15 migrants and 71 potential aliases in the Alphabay-Dreams-Silk dataset, (ii) 17 migrants and 3 potential aliases in the Valhalla-Berlusconi dataset, and (iii) 75 migrants and 10 potential aliases in the Traderoute-Agora dataset. Altogether, our approach can help Law Enforcement Agencies (LEA) make more informed decisions by verifying and identifying migrating vendors and their potential aliases on existing and Low-Resource (LR) emerging Darknet markets.

Key facts. Cited by 3 papers in the map (data through 7 Oct 2026). Builds on 28 of its 96 references that are in the map. First posted on arXiv 4 May 2023.

Builds on

28 of 96 references.

References · 28

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16 more
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Built on by

Cited by year

Citing papers per year: 2023: 1; 2024: 1; 2025: 1.

3 papers.

  1. 2023IDTraffickers: An Authorship Attribution Dataset to link and connect Potential Human-Trafficking Operations on Text Escort Advertisementscited by 3
  2. 2024MATCHED: Multimodal Authorship-Attribution To Combat Human Trafficking in Escort-Advertisement Datacited by 1
  3. 2025Covering Cracks in Content Moderation: Delexicalized Distant Supervision for Illicit Drug Jargon Detectioncited by 0