Jurisdiction(s):
United Kingdom

Dark web for lawyers: lawful use, criminality, marketplaces, IP risks, crypto payments, tracing and enforcement challenges

Published by a LexisNexis TMT expert

Practice notes

This Practice Note provides an introduction to the dark web. It sets out what the dark web is and surveys lawful and unlawful activities and concepts commonly linked to it. This Practice Note does not examine in detail the legal issues arising from policing or committing criminal conduct on the dark web.

What is the dark web?

The part of the internet labelled the dark web is often depicted by the media as a purely sinister criminal underworld reserved for drug trafficking and other illegality. The picture is more complex. The surface web, which is readily accessible to anyone, by some estimates accounts for only a small slice of the internet. The deep web—that is, the portion hidden from the public and not indexed by search engines—largely consists of pages maintained by organisations and governments and is by far the biggest segment (frequently said to be around 90%). The dark web, a subset reachable solely via anonymity networks such as Tor, short for ‘The Onion Routing’ project, and other privacy-focused browsers, is thought to make up roughly 0.1%. However, networks such...

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Erica Stanford

CMS

Erica Stanford is a digital asset, fintech and AI specialist at CMS UK where she consults in a non-legal capacity. She is an industry expert on fraud and fraud prevention and speaks and writes globally about digital assets, digital crime, scams and the integration of AI. She is the author of the bestselling book Crypto Wars: Faked Deaths, Missing Billions and Industry Disruption, which was awarded 'Highly Commended' in the Business Book Awards. She is also author of Risks Relating to Crypto and Digital Assets in 'Crypto and Digital Assets Law and Regulation, Sweet & Maxwell, 2024, An Outline of Scams and Crime in Crypto (chapter 2) in Nick Furneaux's investigative textbook There's no Such Thing as Crypto Crime, as well as Ethical AI and co-author of AI laws and regulation in AI, Machine Learning & Big Data 2024, GLI. ...

Web page updated on 21/05/2026

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