I have never heard about detecting gravitational lensing coming from empty space. Do you have any info/references on that?
Closest references I could find: http://phys.org/news/2013-02-dark-galaxies-ways-collision-he...
"In the Bullet Cluster, a collision between two galaxy clusters appears to have caused a separation of dark matter and baryonic matter." - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dark_Matter
http://www.lsst.org/lsst/science/scientist_dark_matter
http://scienceblogs.com/startswithabang/2011/04/20/how-gravi...
http://www.ifa.hawaii.edu/~ger/ASTRO-110_sp08/Lecture28_Dark...