It is estimated that the crypto market covers 5 to 10% of kidney transplant market. 2 Not surprisingly, wealthy candidates will turn to alternative options. Every year, around 10% of those on the wait list die or become too sick to be transplanted. In 2018, the number of kidney transplantations in the USA was around 21,000 however, the number of transplant candidates in waiting list was around 100,000. Transplantation is considered the best mode of treatment for patients with end-stage kidney disease.

In recent years, transplantation tourism and modern slavery have become of great concern, globally. 1 Below, we will briefly present some of the activities that occur in the dark web. To make its magnitude clearer, in 2017, it was estimated that only 4% of the web was available on the surface web, and the remaining 96%, with 7.9 zettabytes, belonged to the dark web. These two features make the dark web, a perfect place for illicit transactions, such as trade of private medical information, illicit drugs, and weapons (biological, nuclear, chemical, etc.), as well as organ trafficking and many other illegal activities.

Data and persons are anonymous in the dark web, where commerce takes place by cryptocurrencies, such as bitcoin, and cannot be traced easily by the governments. The third layer is the “dark web” or “the dark side of deep web” that is only accessible by unique browsers, such as Tor (“The Onion Router”). These two layers can be reached via regular Internet browsers. The interconnected network (Internet) can be imagined as an iceberg that has three layers: (1) the “surface web” that can be reached via conventional search engines like Google (2) the “deep web” that is made of entities such as transactional databases and password-protected email accounts, which are supported by logins and are not indexed in search engines.

Onion router dark web