BENGALURU: Buying a gun has never been easier. Nor has buying a gram of cocaine or stolen credit cards. At the click of a mouse, you can pretty much buy anything illegal — be it an automatic pistol or 250 gms of orange bud cannabis from Europe or a concise guide to bombmaking — and get it parceled to a location of your convenience. Welcome to D-commerce or shopping in the murky world of the Dark Web.Over a period of two weeks, ET posed as an eager buyer and trawled through the Dark Web marketplaces like AlphaBay, Dream, Valhalla, Outlaw and Hansa Market to understand the variety of illegal merchandise that's up for sale. "I can deliver 10 grams of Nepali super pollen hashish to Pune and it's very safe. There is no need to worry," assures 'JariBootiWalla', a seller on one of the websites. Another dealer called 'forestlife' claims that he "can deliver 7 grams of therapeutic dark green weed to any location in India and its very safe because it's within the country".So, how does commerce in the dark web work? One can't find these portals by googling. Think of the internet as a three-layered rabbit hole. The uppermost layer is the surface web — which can be accessed and searched using engines like Google , Bing or Yahoo. The Amazons, Flipkarts of the world reside here.One layer below is the Deep Web : anything that standard search engines can't find which include websites that are legal but not entirely searchable like some government websites. Further down is the dark web — a very small part of the internet which has been deliberately hidden and isn't accessible through standard web browsers like Chrome or Firefox. To access the dark web, users need to log into close networks like Tor, using special web browsers like the Tor browser.Once you place an order in a dark web portal, vendors insist on bitcoin payments to beat KYC norms which regular ecommerce websites ask for executing cross-border payments. And then, there is delivery — the complexity of which varies depending on the goods purchased. Drugs like hashish and cannabis — which are sourced within the country — are simply couriered, bubble wrapped and water proofed. Things get a little more complex when arms have to be shipped from abroad. The gun is disassembled to five or six pieces and each one of these parts is shipped separately, explained a dealer called 'Nighwares'.Other dealers insisted that the buyer would have to collect the weapon from a location in the same city. For instance, the barrel of the gun would fit inside a musical instrument like a miniature pipe organ, the dealer said."The dark web is only a mechanism for hiding your identity," said cyber law expert Pavan Duggal. Once an order is placed, its needs to be executed and that needs a physical presence. "There are big (offline) networks through which they are able to deliver it to the relevant address," adds Duggal, pointing out that Interpol has been training its enforcement officers to tackle the dark web.There is also a thriving market for guidebooks for bomb-making (starting as low as $2) — including crude explosives made of household items. After payment, the book is delivered online via a separate link, said a dealer. Stolen data is also freely available on the dark web. A seller called 'KingCarder' was peddling "valid ID's and passport details of people from Asia and Europe at $2.99 each". There is also a sea of hacked social media account information, credit card data and email accounts up for sale for as low as $1.75 on AlphaBay and Dream Market. Another seller 'vimproducts' claimed to have "Indian emails and passwords from a stock market related site".Hackers were also plying a variety of services on a freelance basis — from breaking into "web servers, FTP servers, web applications, custom Remote Administration tools (RATs) to social engineering."