Does Online Anonymous Market Vendor Reputation Matter?

Link: https://www.usenix.org/conference/usenixsecurity24/presentation/cuevas

Conference: Usenix Security 2024 Keywords: : online anonymous marketplace (OAM), social media

Summary

Reputation is crucial for trust in underground markets but it lacks credit system for measuring their reputation. This work use (i) longevity and (ii) future financial success to measure their success on 8 OAM from 2011 to 2023. The findings provide empirical insights into early identification of potential high-scale vendors, effectiveness of "reputation poisoning" strategies, and how reputation systems could contribute to harm reduction in OAMs.

Contributions

1. We quantify the impact of various market and forum-derived features on vendor longevity and find that feedback scores (including imported product reviews from other markets) have a significant impact on increasing longevity across most markets we study;

2. We find that (both positive and negative) reputation signals from forums explain vendor survivability, but overall have little predictive power for vendor success;

3. We demonstrate we can build a generalizable model to predict, more accurately than raw feedback, which vendors may leave the market in the short-term (1–3 months);

4. We find that future financial success is predictable, particularly for the top/bottom 25% of vendors, and even on previously unseen markets.

5. We find that features external to the market, and time-series representations of features not only fail to increase the predictive power, but instead often decrease it.

Data

1. Merketplace: Opensource data + crawler

2. Reddit: /r/HansaDarknet-Market (Sep 2015 - Sep 2017, 264 posts, 3613 comments), /r/DarkNetMarkets (125,300 posts, 1,850,533 comments, October 2013 - September 2017)

3. Nemesis Forum (reddit-like Nemesis darknet forum): 4,018 posts and 12,710 comments from March 2022 to February 2023

Feature

1. Revenue, feedback, and listing

2. Temporal features

3. Forum features

4. Listing category

Survivability Drivers

Average feedback value (FB) Presence in other markets (POM) Category A drugs (MA), category B drugs (MB), and digital goods (MD). Wealth tier

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Results

1. Reputation and cross-market make vendor more survivable

2. Even a little bit Reputation Slander Attack could work (with calculating a case cost, 'It would take 254 1-star reviews for a total cost of ∼ $2, 286 to reduce their average rating by 1 unit and thus increase their (predicted) hazard by 64%')

Future Financial Success Prediction

Random Forest, Time Series Forest classifier

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Vendor Disapperance Prediction

Random Forest, Time Series Forest classifier

Conclusion

Correlation between reputation and OAM

Pros:

1. Crossplatform

2. Interesting perspective (especially the reputation poisoning with fake bad reviews)