Cloned cards and buying followers: tracking prices on the Dark Web

How much would you pay for a fake passport? How about a hacked Twitter account? Or for 10,000 new followers on your company’s LinkedIn page?

The answers are clear in this Visual Capitalist chart, which tracks the price index of some of the more interesting “products” on sale on the Dark Web.

The chart was made using data from a report by PrivacyAffairs, which tracked the average sales price of the goods and services in 2022.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, passports are big-ticket items, with a European Union member-nation passport fetching a cool US$3,800 on the Dark Web. Interestingly, malware installs can also be big earners, depending on the target computer’s location.

Cloned credit and debit cards are surprisingly cheap, with the most expensive – having a credit limit of US$5,000 – going for US$120, perhaps indicating just how easy it is for criminals to swipe card details.