
A search of the name “Alexandre Cazes” turned up years of posts on various tech, hacking, and programming forums, with one containing the biggest bombshell yet. Many years ago, on a forum now accessible only through the Wayback Machine, Cazes had posted under the username Alpha02. Almost as soon as AlphaBay launched, law enforcement agencies began investigating and infiltrating it, hoping to track down its founders and bring them to justice. So far, neither Europol nor the Department of Justice has named any of the administrators, sellers, or customers from either Hansa or AlphaBay that they plan to indict.
Office On Drugs And Crime
In 2019, there were approximately 8,400 active sites on the dark web, selling thousands of products and services daily. These sites cater to cybercriminals seeking valuable data, such as credit card numbers, login credentials, and personal information. In July 2017, police in the US and Europe, including the US Federal Bureau of Investigation, the Drug Enforcement Agency, Europol and the Dutch National Police, partnered to take down the site. AlphaBay’s servers were seized with the help of authorities in Thailand, Lithuania, Canada, the United Kingdom and France. The operation included the arrest of suspected AlphaBay founder Alexandre Cazes on 5 July, detained on behalf of the US in Thailand.
- There were also at least half a dozen moderators that helped administer the market and its discussion forum, moderated disputes between buyers and vendors, and promoted the market on Reddit (prior to the shutdown of the DNM subreddit).
- Now, a coordinated takedown and sting involving no fewer than six countries’ agencies had tracked Alpha02 to Thailand.
- When Rabenn asked Miller to start making undercover heroin buys, he couldn’t figure out how to buy bitcoins, let alone the drugs themselves.
- “For now, there are plenty of smaller and more specialized markets for vendors and buyers to continue trading,” Wilson said.
- According to our historical darknet records, DeSnake had connections in Russia although his true identity and location was not publicly known.
AlphaBay: Inside The Infamous Dark Web Marketplace
The ASAP is a moderate design marketplace on the dark web that offers helpful tools like mandatory PGP encryption and two-factor authentication for a safe browsing experience. Like other marketplaces, ASAP Market also requires you to register for an account. But since its relaunch, the developers are focusing more on operational security and ensuring that users can have a good experience on this site. The vendors aren’t required to register or apply for a vendor account while using this platform.
Alphabay Market Link
Since June 2016, they have been offering the finest in cannabis products and mushrooms to our members. Co-op vendors are carefully screened so our vendors are the best on the darknet. One of the most common is the exit scam, where a marketplace suddenly disappears and takes everyone’s money with it.
Since its inception in 1992, the task force has been responsible for the seizure of approximately $600 million and more than 2100 arrests. Reports from late 2023 and early 2024 indicated disruptions in service, with many users suspecting an exit scam — a common practice where darknet markets shut down without notice, taking users’ funds with them. This uncertainty surrounding the platform’s stability has led to concerns about its long-term viability. In a strange and dramatic move, the Dutch national police have created a dark web site themselves that lists darknet vendors by pseudonym, including those under investigation, those who are “identified,” and 15 who have already been arrested in current and past investigations. “We trace people who are active at Dark Markets and offer illicit goods or services,” the site reads.
Some markets are invite-only or have strict registration rules to keep out scammers and law enforcement. For instance, cybercriminals can buy credit card details with a $5,000 balance for just $110. Attorney’s Office for the Eastern District of California filed a civil forfeiture complaint against Alexandre Cazes and his wife’s assets located throughout the world, including in Thailand, Cyprus, Lichtenstein, and Antigua & Barbuda. Cazes and his wife amassed numerous high value assets, including luxury vehicles, residences and a hotel in Thailand.
Trending Darknet Sites
The FBI and DEA had sought the extradition from Thailand of one AlphaBay administrator, Canadian Alexandre Cazes after identifying him in an operation they called Bayonet. But Cazes was found hanged in a Bangkok jail cell last week in an apparent suicide. The website allows visitors to view all the goods and services on display before they buy something. However, the platform lacks an advanced search option and a wallet-free payment option. If any user is found not complying with the law, strict and immediate action will be taken against them.
Security Alert Overload: Why Cybersecurity Teams Can’t Keep Up
AlphaBay has long been rumored to have some sort of connections to Russia or Russians. Its rules have always banned the sale of data stolen from victims in former USSR countries, a common prohibition among Russian hackers intended to shield them from Russian law enforcement scrutiny. And when Alexandre Cazes wrote under the Alpha02 moniker on the site, he sometimes signed off with a Russian phrase for “stay safe.” But when Cazes was later tracked down in Thailand, many assumed AlphaBay’s Russian fingerprints had been designed to mislead investigators.
Bonus: The Silk Road
Cazes also possessed millions of dollars in cryptocurrency, which has been seized by the FBI and the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA). It’ll be quiet on the dark web until people can find a reliable marketplace again, but eventually they will, said Emily Wilson, the director of analysis at Terbium Labs. Security company McAfee found that the upstart dark market House of Lions was offering vendors from AlphaBay a discount if they moved to their platform. Rowley noticed chatter on forums and subreddits pointing to Dream Market as the next AlphaBay, but people are wary after the Dutch police ploy. “After the closure of the AlphaBay market, many vendors expressed that they were moving their operations to Hansa and Dream Market,” Liv Rowley, an analyst at Flashpoint, said. Learn how to automate financial risk reports using AI and news data with this guide for product managers, featuring tools from Webz.io and OpenAI.
Despite using a VPN, there’s always a risk of the VPN leaking your IP address through DNS or WebRTC leaks or misconfigurations when on a dark web forum or marketplace. Therefore, you must run an IP leak test to ensure that the VPN is working completely fine and is not risking your digital security. In 2013, the FBI shut down the Silk Road, but it was later relaunched in 2014 with the new name of Silk Road 2.0, but the German authorities shut it down in the same year. Other than the Silk Road 2.0, similar marketplaces also emerged, but they all went down sooner or later. Tor2door Market is among the largest dark net shops you must visit in 2025 if you’ve decided to visit such sites. On average, the marketplace consists of more than 11,000 items and 1000 vendors.
The dark net is famous for being a hub of black market websites for buying and selling products and services. If you purchase something from such shops and make payment through conventional payment methods like your bank transfer, credit/debit card, or PayPal, you can be caught easily and face legal consequences. Awazon Market is a top-tier dark web marketplace with claims to revolutionize secure anonymous commerce. 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. This guide outlines different ways of safely accessing dark web stores and the list of reliable dark web marketplaces you can consider visiting in 2025 for research and monitoring purposes.
Each time, Christin points out, the dark web’s overall business took a temporary dive, but came roaring back more quickly after those setbacks and continued to grow as a whole. AlphaBay, for example, had more than 20 times as many product listings as the original Silk Road. (Some research has found that even bad news about the dark web markets only attracts more users to them.) And AlphaBay’s buyers and customers will eventually find a new home. AlphaBay’s takedown “may give people pause. But will it scare people away? I doubt it.” About a week ago AlphaBay, the dark web’s largest contraband marketplace, went mysteriously offline.
Agora’s administrators had taken their site offline that August, citing concerns that a vulnerability in Tor, the online anonymity system that powered the dark web, might be used to locate Agora’s servers. Last week, two men, both in custody, were charged in federal court in Chicago with operating “Empire Market,” a dark web marketplace that enabled users to buy and sell more than $430 million in illegal goods and services around the world. “Seasoned users expected this,” adds Isak Ladegaard, a sociological researcher at Boston College. He says many dark web drug vendors have learned to sell across multiple different marketplaces to diversify their risk.
Alphabay Market
Accessing them may require .onion links and the Tor browser, but caution is advised due to legality and cybersecurity risks. Active for a decade since 2014, it is a widely used credit card shop used to source stolen credit card information such as dumps, CVVs, Wholesale Accounts. It maintains a very strict level of user verification and integration with an official Telegram account to provide real-time updates to users. Various cryptocurrencies such as Bitcoin and Monero can be used to make purchases. It’s been a constant back-and-forth between cybercriminals and law enforcement, with each new site trying to be smarter and more secure than the last. Investigation into AlphaBay revealed that numerous vendors sold fentanyl and heroin, and there have been multiple overdose deaths across the country attributed to purchases on the site.
By running the command below, we filter out all the unnecessary features from the item and feedback files and merge them to create preprocessed_alpha.csv, preprocessed_dreams.csv, preprocessed_silk.csv, and preprocessed_agora.csv files in the data directory. Then, we load these files for all our future experiments as input to our scripts. To remain anonymous about your purchases on the dark web, always use cryptocurrency as your mode of payment. If a seller encourages you to opt for other well-known and commonly used payment methods, then the person is likely to be a scammer, and you must not make any deal with them. Besides this, it supports wallet-less transactions and accepts payments through Bitcoins, Litecoin, Monero, and Zcash.