A recent report by the company Elliptic shows how, at this time when the Coronavirus is rampant, essential products such as masks and disinfectants are sold on the black market of the web. Payments can be made in cryptocurrency.
In order to prevent unscrupulous people from exploiting the main e-commerce platforms to make money on these products, it was decided to ban all sellers who did not comply with the relevant rules, thereby attempting to maintain a low price for these products.
Amazon, for example, sent a message to all those who sold masks and disinfectants explaining that an excessive price increase on these products could cause the ban from the platform for the seller.
However, this did not stop criminals who obviously found other platforms where they could operate illegally, turning to what is the black market of the web.
The N95 type masks, which can be found at just under 10 euros on Amazon, are selling at crazy prices such as 280 dollars, also accepting crypto as a payment method including Bitcoin (BTC), Litecoin (LTC) and obviously also Monero (XMR).
XMR seems to be the most used crypto by criminals because of its high anonymity, unlike BTC which is only pseudo-anonymous.
The masks on the black market
As the report says, these are indispensable products that are sold according to the law of the market: the more a good is scarce, the more its value increases, a bit like bitcoin with its deflation, but in this case, the scarcity is caused by the emergency so vendors are illegally trying to profit from the tragedy.
As if that wasn’t enough, some criminals have even put on sale a fake vaccine for the Coronavirus for 15 thousand dollars.
