In this work we focus on identifying key players in dark net cryptomarkets.
Law enforcement aims to disrupt criminal activity conducted through these
markets by targeting key players vital to the market's existence and success.
We particularly focus on detecting successful vendors responsible for the
majority of illegal trade. Our methodology aims to uncover whether the task of
key player identification should center around plainly measuring user and forum
activity, or that it requires leveraging specific patterns of user
communication. We focus on a large-scale dataset from the Evolution
cryptomarket, which we model as an evolving communication network. While user
and forum activity measures are useful for identifying the most successful
vendors, we find that betweenness centrality additionally identifies those with
lesser activity. But more importantly, analyzing the forum data over time, we
find evidence that attaining a high betweenness score comes before vendor
success. This suggests that the proposed network-driven approach of modelling
user communication might prove useful as an early warning signal for key player
identification