A large-scale longitudinal structured dataset of the dark web cryptomarket Evolution (2014-2015)

Abstract: Dark Web Marketplaces (DWM) facilitate the online trade of illicit goods. Due to the illicit nature of these marketplaces, quality datasets are scarce and difficult to produce. The Dark Net Market archives (2015) presented raw scraped source files crawled from a selection of DWMs, including Evolution. Here, we present, specifically for the Evolution DWM, a structured dataset extracted from Dark Net Market archive data. Uniquely, many of the data quality issues inherent to crawled data are resolved. The dataset covers over 500 thousand forum posts and over 80 thousand listings, providing data on forums, topics, posts, forum users, market vendors, listings, and more. Additionally, we present temporal weighted communication networks extracted from this data. The presented dataset provides easy access to a high quality DWM dataset to facilitate the study of criminal behaviour and communication on such DWMs, which may provide a relevant source of knowledge for researchers across disciplines, from social science to law to network science.