Even in the darkest, most encrypted corners of the internet, they have rules.
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Many are stridently upheld, but as the saying goes, some rules are just made to be broken.
The darknet, mainly used for the trading of illicit goods and only accessible using specific software or network configurations, is home to some of the most nefarious things you can think of.
Child exploitation material, weapons and stolen credit card information are just some of what's out there.
An estimated two-thirds of products on the darknet, though, are drugs. These drugs generate hundreds of millions of dollars in revenue for dealers around the globe each year, according to Swinburne University associate professor James Martin.
Professor Martin has extensively studied this murky online world that includes markets with colourful names like Dream, Empire and The Majestic Garden. There's even one called Berlusconi, named after the scandal-plagued former Italian prime minister.
The further you delve into the darknet, the more you learn of its warped functions.
The administrators of many of the most popular darknet markets have rules. Some voluntarily ban weapons because they only want to engage in what they see as victimless crimes. Child exploitation material cops the same treatment from most darknet markets for the same reason.
"It's a bit like a prisoner being kept separate from the general population," Professor Martin explains. "[Paedophiles] are a despised sub-group. Even though that material is [on the darknet], it's not in the same place as most of the other stuff."
Some markets with a massive array of drugs on offer have even banned fentanyl.
"They consider it too harmful a drug and more of a biological weapon or something like that," Professor Martin says.
Those same markets, though, carry listings for other illegal drugs that can and have been known to kill people.
Criminals live by some strange codes that dictate what is seen as acceptable law-breaking, and the darknet has many a good example.
While some website administrators try and limit harm with voluntary prohibitions, users might actually be wise to fear them more than law enforcement agencies because of their ability to manipulate the very rules and systems they've put in place to protect users.
International police forces last month shut down Wall Street Market, one of the largest active darknet markets, then seized Deep Dot Web, a popular darknet search system and news outlet.
But Professor Martin says it is actually more common for the administrators themselves to shut down a darknet market than it is for police to swoop, and greed is the prevailing reason.
"The way it works is if I'm buying drugs off someone who I've never met before and I've got to give them untraceable, non-refundable bitcoins, that's obviously a bit of a dicey prospect," Professor Martin explains.
"One of the ways that the darknet compensates for the absence of trust that exists in transactions that are non-regulated by the state is by providing what we call an escrow service.
"What that means is that if you're selling drugs and I want to buy the drugs, I authorise the payments to be made to the administrator of the website and that administrator holds it in trust until the drugs arrive.
"Once the drugs arrive, then I authorise payment to be forwarded through to you."
As Professor Martin points out, it's a clever way of generating trust in an anonymous, virtual environment, but you still have to trust the anonymous administrator.
"What that means is that as these sites get bigger and bigger, there are more and more funds that are just waiting in these escrow accounts, waiting to be forwarded through or for the payment to be finalised," he says.
"Say there's $10 million waiting in escrow, the administrator of the site at some point goes, 'You know what? This money is just too tempting. I've been running this site for 12 months'. So they close the site and they nick off with everyone's funds. That's what we call an exit scam.
"That is actually, by far, the most popular reason these sites get taken offline. It's not to do with law enforcement, it's the particular mechanics of how the darknet works."
The darknet is a volatile environment. Even with the necessary software and the know-how, a game of criminal cat-and-mouse can make getting onto some markets a challenge. Sites are commonly offline because of "denial of service" attacks, where hackers exploit vulnerabilities in systems to take markets down in an attempt to extort the administrators.
Why, then, would people enter an environment so turbulent and be faced with the prospect of not only being caught by the police, but scammed by other criminals?
The main answer is simple: safety.
"There's no risk of violence from the darknet because it's not a transaction that takes place in person," Professor Martin says.
While Professor Martin says it's perhaps less convenient to use the darknet for those who have a "friendly neighbourhood dealer" on hand, the drugs available online are also often of a better quality.
Spanish organisation Energy Control analysed 129 samples of drugs purchased on the darknet in 2014, and found 93 per cent of them contained the advertised substance.
A report on the study stresses that the low sample size may not be representative of darknet markets as a whole, but that "substance purity is much higher in [darknet markets] than in the global illicit drug markets".
Cocaine, for example, had an average purity of 70.3 per cent in the darknet study. According to Australian Criminal Intelligence Commission data from 2015-16, the annual median purity of cocaine in the ACT was just 31.5 per cent.
Professor Martin says the most recent data on the number of Australian drug dealers on the darknet suggests there are 152. Getting a handle on the number of users is more difficult, but the amount of drugs available to Australians on the darknet is staggering.
Australian National University researchers led by Professor Roderic Broadhurst found 123,000 unique drug listings when they tracked six darknet markets for 51 days in January and February. Nearly 7400 of the listings were for opioids, including powerful synthetics like carfentanil that are driving a greater risk of overdose deaths.
"Accessing these drugs is almost as easy as buying a book on Amazon," he warned.
