Car owners are at risk of being sold online criminals' guides to car theft, from how to steal a keyless car to hacking into an Uber account, according to new research by British police. Worrying statistics reveal a dark web of people willing to trade criminal knowledge for small amounts of money.

Assistant U.S. Attorney Jessica Smolar told the court that Prihar and Phan helped sell illegal drugs, firearms and contraband to hundreds of thousands of users and earned millions of dollars in commissions.

Launched in 2018, the 2easy marketplace has experienced rapid growth since last year, when it sold data from only 28,000 infected devices and was considered a minor player, but grew rapidly from 28,000 infected devices to 600,000 in a single year.

The most common uses of websites on the Tor hidden service are criminal, including drugs, illegal finance and pornographic content involving violence, children and animals. However, the dark web has legitimate uses, and it provides users with online privacy.

For the first time, operators of dark web data centers were convicted of making illegal operations in the network possible in the first place. However, they were acquitted of charges of aiding and abetting some 250,000 crimes on the site.

Nearly 250,000 criminal offenses are said to have occurred while running dark web services from 400 servers in an old bunker in Traben-Trabach, with transactions worth millions of dollars involving drugs, counterfeit money or cyber attacks.