Dark Commerce: How a New Illicit Economy Is Threatening Our Future Audiobook (Free)

A comprehensive look at the world of illicit trade

Though mankind has traded tangible goods for millennia, recent technology has changed the fundamentals of trade, in both legitimate and illegal economies. In the past three decades, the most advanced types of illicit trade have damaged with all historic precedents and, as Dark Commerce shows, today operate as though on steroids, tied to computers and social media marketing. In this new world of illicit commerce, which benefits state governments and diverse participants, about Dark Business: What sort of New Illicit Economy Is Threatening Our Future trade can be impersonal and anonymized, and huge profits are made in short intervals with limited accountability to retailers, intermediaries, and purchasers.

Louise Shelley examines how new technology, marketing communications, and globalization energy the exponential growth of dangerous types of illegal trade-the markets for narcotics and child pornography online, the escalation of sex trafficking through internet advertisements, as well as the sale of endangered species for which profits total in the hundreds of millions of dollars. The illicit overall economy exacerbates many of the world’s destabilizing phenomena: the perpetuation of issues, the proliferation of hands and weaponry of mass devastation, and environmental degradation and extinction. Shelley explores illicit trade in tangible goods-drugs, human beings, arms, animals and timber, fish, antiquities, and ubiquitous counterfeits-and contrasts this using the damaging trade on the net, where intangible commodities cost customers and organizations billions as they get rid of identities, standard bank accounts, usage of pc data, and intellectual property.

Demonstrating that illicit trade is a business the global community cannot afford to ignore and must work together to handle, Dark Commerce considers diverse ways of responding to this increasing task.