While it has legitimate uses, it’s also a hub for cybercriminals, hackers, and other threat actors. Plus, dark web search engines can also allow political dissidents to bypass government censorship, or for journalists to safely engage with whistleblowers. While it can be used for illegal activities, there are also perfectly legitimate forums, social networks, and communities. The deep web refers to all online content not indexed by search engines, such as virtual private networks and internal business systems.
Alphabay Market
- What I like is their no-fentanyl rule—shows they’re trying to keep things less messy.
- Tor remains the most prevalent method due to its ease of use and robust anonymity features, but the popularity of I2P is steadily growing due to its increased resistance to surveillance and censorship.
- This shift could complicate law enforcement efforts and make it more challenging to track illicit activities.
- DarkOde Reborn is a great darknet market where you can find anything you want.
This boosts usability by 25%, reducing trade errors by 15% vs. 2023’s basic designs. If the website you are trying to visit has Neutral mark it means we could not verify if this website is a legit or a scam one, since it has mixed reviews. Cannaexpress is a cannabis‑exclusive bazaar boasting walletless Monero payments, smart PGP logins, a 5 % vendor commission and a polished modern UI. Social engineering remains a significant threat in the cyber landscape, and we expect to see more sophisticated tactics in 2025. Criminals will increasingly exploit psychological manipulation to deceive victims, using advanced techniques that involve personalized and context-aware phishing schemes.
At the time, it had over 600,000 users, 17,000 listings, and approximately €250 million in transactions. Authorities seized €7.8 million and arrested operators in Germany, Spain, Sweden, Romania, the Netherlands, and the US Europol leads takedown of Archetyp. BriansClub remains a long-standing credit card data shop since at least 2014. Despite a 2019 breach that exposed over 26 million credit cards, it continues to operate, indicating sustained trust in its data pipelines. N 2025, dark web websites frequently change domains and are often short-lived.
Cypher Marketplace
Despite this growth, the average number of unique posts per month has remained the same compared to the previous year. While some of this growth may be attributed to the reposting or combining of older leaks, cybercriminals are clearly interested in distributing leaked data – whether new, old, or even fake. Consequently, in 2025, we are likely to witness not only a rise in company data hacks and leaks through contractors, but also an overall increase in data breaches.
Platform Fragmentation And Multi-Channel Approach
Activities on dark-web marketplaces are closely monitored by international law enforcement agencies. Purchasing or selling illegal goods—such as controlled substances, counterfeit documents, or stolen data—can result in significant legal penalties, including fines, criminal charges, and imprisonment. Even users who access these platforms without intent to buy illegal items risk suspicion or investigation. Significant technological innovations and trends have reshaped dark-web marketplaces over recent years.
Daily deposits dropped by over 90% in the final weeks, despite reassurances from its administrator. This behavior was consistent with known exit scam patterns seen across other darknet markets. Cases like Nemesis Market and Monopoly Market indicate that law enforcement agencies now prefer to take down DNMs without announcing it publicly — and potentially alerting vendors under investigation. This allows them to compile intelligence and make arrests at optimal moments. In the interim, many in the DNM community will assume the marketplace performed an exit scam and continue their activity on other platforms. Bayonet/GraveSac, and has become the preferred method for disrupting the ecosystem.
Dark Web Marketplaces
Buyers and sellers frequently face risks from malicious actors posing as legitimate vendors or customers, potentially leading to financial loss or exposure of sensitive personal information. Despite Telegram’s anonymity, the dark web is still a hot spot for illegal trading of malware, illicit goods, and stolen data (such as stolen credit card information). Even with the increase in law enforcement pressure, the dark web market still achieved a revenue of $2 billion in 2024. Therefore, as long as this dark part of the internet exists, these marketplaces will flourish and emerge.
Projected Growth: Marketplaces, Forums & Users
For cybersecurity professionals, focusing on payment methods, vendor migration, and marketplace specialisation offers the most effective path to actionable intelligence. In 2025, darknet marketplaces primarily accept Monero (XMR) and Bitcoin (BTC). Privacy-focused operators are shifting to Monero due to its default anonymity, compared to Bitcoin’s transparent ledger Darknet markets see BTC inflow drop to $2B. Launched in September 2022, Torzon Market operates on the Tor network and features over 11,600 illegal products, including drugs and hacking tools. Torzon offers a premium account option for additional benefits and is valued at approximately $15 million, accepting payments in Bitcoin (BTC) and Monero (XMR). The first category includes classic marketplaces, which serve as one-stop shops for a wide range of illegal goods.
Ransomware And Cryptocurrency:
The ease of encryption-based communication and anonymous digital payments helps keep transactions hidden from regulators and financial institutions, perpetuating the cycle of fraud and data theft. The dark web, accessible only through special software like Tor, constitutes a small fraction of the deep web and hosts a substantial share of illegal activity. In 2023, it averaged 2.5 million daily visitors, rising to 2.7 million by April 2023. As of 2025, daily traffic surpassed 3 million, with approximately 60 percent of domains hosting illicit content. Roughly 500,000 users regularly frequent darknet marketplaces, where over 37 percent of purchases likely result in further crimes.
Ransomware groups are anticipated to split into smaller, independent units, making them harder to track. Such decentralization, along with the reuse of leaked malware source codes, will allow new, low-skilled actors to enter the ransomware ecosystem. Infostealers and drainers will likely be increasingly promoted as subscription-based services, with traffers aiding in their distribution via scam pages and phishing schemes. In 2025, this trend is expected to continue, pushing cybercriminals to adopt more sophisticated and anonymous operating models, such as closed, invitation-only forums. Premium private cryptors are gaining traction, emphasizing the shift toward exclusive malware solutions. While this topic may seem distant for most people, understanding how these spaces operate is crucial.
ASAP Market Security
It offers a wide range of goods and services with robust anti-DDoS protection (with military-grade security protocols) and no JavaScript, ensuring privacy and uptime. Exit scams occur when the operator of a marketplace decides to vanish with the money they hold in escrow for various transactions between platform users. We expect to see the number of attacks through contractors leading to data breaches at major end targets to continue to grow in 2025. Cloud platforms and IT services often store and process corporate data from multiple organizations, so a breach at just one company can open the door to many others. It is worth noting that a breach does not necessarily have to affect critical assets to be destructive. Not every data breach advertisement on the dark web is the result of a genuinely serious incident.
Abacus Market reigns supreme at #1, a versatile titan that processes $5 million monthly across 35,000+ listings, dominating 8% of the darknet drug trade. Abacus’s escrow system is a marvel, achieving a 98% success rate—resolving 90% of disputes within 36 hours—while its onion routing maintains a 95% uptime, with only minor maintenance-related dips in 2024. Supporting BTC (60%) and XMR (40%), Abacus has seen a 10% shift to Monero in 2025, reflecting privacy demands. ASAP Market takes #6 in our 2025 darknet rankings, noted for its trailblazing multi-currency setup and speedy trades. Starting in May 2022, it’s grown into a strong player with 25,000+ listings and $4 million monthly trades across BTC, XMR, LTC, and USDT, nabbing a 7% share of the darknet scene. Top darknet marketplaces (also called dark web markets or hidden services) are anonymous marketplaces reachable only via specialized networks like Tor.
At 10%, the US ranked 11th — the same as Australia, Hong Kong, Germany, and Japan. Despite being much talked about in recent years, darknet stats from a January 2023 survey reveal that 7 out of 10 people in select countries don’t understand what the Dark Web is or how it works. At 82%, Japan has the largest share of people unfamiliar with the concept of the Dark Web. Similar unfamiliarity levels were recorded in New Zealand (80%), France (73%), Australia (72%), and the United Kingdom (72%). Of the surveyed countries, Germany (65%), India (58%), and the United States (55%) had the smallest share of people unfamiliar with the Dark Web.
This way, Tor makes it much more difficult to trace the traffic back to the original user. Additionally, Tor enables users to access darknet sites hosted on .onion domains, something most common browsers can’t do. We’ve heard a lot about the Dark Web in recent years — but how much do we really know about this mysterious part of the internet?
