That’s why we always recommend using a VPN over Tor—even if you feel you have nothing to hide. This just involves turning on your VPN before you open Tor and connect to dark web sites. Keybase also offers extremely user-friendly secure chat and file-sharing services through its app. Based in Switzerland, ProtonMail is an encrypted email service that is very popular with cryptocurrency enthusiasts. Following the NYT, the BBC launched a dark web “mirror” of their international edition in 2019.
The Top 10 Darknet Marketplaces Of 2025
All of them tried to attract old Hydra clients, and all gained some of the lingering market share, according to on-chain data cited by Chainalysis. These marketplaces all started offering crypto money laundering services through so-called crypto mixers. However, the gains simply weren’t enough to make up for the massive decline in revenue overall.
- “This is so fucked up man, we have the right to do whatever we want to our bodies.”
- Use dark web search engines like DuckDuckGo or specialized onion link directories to find dark web link safely and effectively.
- In particular, MALLET is retrained and evaluated via 10-fold cross-validation.
- This marketplace focuses on selling stolen financial data, such as BINs (Bank Identification Numbers), RDP/VDS access, and verified crypto accounts for money laundering.
- A new, technically advanced market called White House has also been launched, gaining 10,000 listings, 100,000 users and many trusted vendors.
- Using Tor to access dark web links isn’t illegal, but your ISP will notice, and others may too.
In addition, we did not observe big changes in the top opioid commodity origins from 2014 to 2020. Particularly, as shown in Table 8, the United States and the United Kingdom are always in the top 5 advertised origins among years. Co-occurrence of the same opioid suppliers across different anonymous marketplaces. We observed the same listings posted in different marketplaces and illustrate the dependency of the same opioid listings among different marketplaces.
Crimes Of The Times: Introducing Pandora’s Box: The Fall Of LA’s Sheriff
From our measurement, we concluded that anonymous online marketplaces and forums provided easy-access platforms for global opioid supply. We found evidence through extensive analyses of the anonymous online market of pervasive supply, which fuels the international opioid epidemic. Nontraditional methods, as presented here by studying the online supply chain, present a novel approach for governmental and other large-scale solutions.
Below are 2025’s leading darknet markets, ranked by listings, trade volume, and vendor reliability. Each offers unique strengths in cryptocurrency trading and escrow security—essential for navigating the onion network. One of the key factors driving this shift is the increased focus on security.
The Marketplace As An Arsenal
Specifically, we collected approximately 248,359 unique listings and 1,138,961 unique forum traces (ie, threads of posts) from 10 anonymous online marketplaces and 6 forums. We then identified 311 opioid keywords and jargons to recognize 28,106 listings and 13,508 forum traces related to underground opioid trading activities. Finally, we used natural language processing techniques to extract opioid trading information to characterize underground opioid commodities, suppliers, and transactions. This shift poses unique challenges for law enforcement, who must adapt traditional monitoring methods. The fragmentation of darknet markets means that law enforcement agencies can no longer focus their efforts on a few large, easily identifiable targets. Instead, they must gain access to multiple, hyper-secure markets and then regularly monitor this wide array of smaller, highly localized platforms.
Do I Need A VPN If I Use Tor?
When interpreted by professionals, our initial results demonstrate useful findings and may be used downstream by law enforcement and public policy makers for impactful structural interventions to the opioid crisis. In our study, a total of 248,359 listings from 10 anonymous online marketplaces and 1,138,961 traces (ie, threads of posts) from 6 underground forums were collected. Among them, we identified 28,106 opioid product listings and 13,508 opioid-related promotional and review forum traces from 5147 unique opioid suppliers’ IDs and 2778 unique opioid buyers’ IDs. This paper seeks to complement current studies widening the understanding of opioid supply chains in underground marketplaces using comprehensive, large-scale, longitudinal anonymous marketplace and forum data. To this end, we propose a series of techniques to collect data; identify opioid jargon terms used in the anonymous marketplaces and forums; and profile the opioid commodities, suppliers, and transactions. Specifically, we first conducted a whole-site crawl of anonymous online marketplaces and forums to solicit data.
Tor Browser: Accessing The Darknet
Within weeks, Abacus vanished in what many believe to be an exit scam. Archetyp was more than just the next online drug market to fall, having absorbed much of the vendor traffic displaced by earlier market closures. Following the collapse of illegal dark web marketplace Monopoly Market in late 2023, which was widely suspected to have been the result of law enforcement action, the European dark web community entered a brief period of disarray.
Email Services
These sites cater to cybercriminals seeking valuable data, such as credit card numbers, login credentials, and personal information. Telegram channels supplement traditional onion sites, blurring lines between the dark web sites and more mainstream communication tools. Beyond drugs, there are now ever-growing examples of generative AI being used for sexual deepfakes across schools and even of public figures, including the recent case of NRL presenter Tiffany Salmond.
How Are Onion Sites Hosted?
Buyers have accused suppliers of price-gouging, while smugglers rightly demand higher fees for the increased risks they are taking by crossing quiet, watchful borders. In May, the EU’s drugs agency, the EMCDDA, reported that Cannazon — a cannabis-only online market — sold 1.6 tonnes of weed, worth €5.2 million $5.9 million, up 27 percent in volume between January and March. Analysis by VICE News, EU agencies and tech firms reveal that, boosted by coronavirus panic buying, online sales of cannabis, MDMA, cocaine and mephedrone are all flourishing at, or above, prior averages. On the most popular global market, Empire, where many retailers offered lockdown deals, business has been especially brisk, with thousands of positive reviews about drug quality and speed of delivery. In May 2024, Ticketmaster faced a significant data breach affecting millions of customers. The stolen data included names, contact information, and order histories.
Money Laundering
It scans darknet marketplaces and hacker forums to alert you instantly if anything shows up. This way, you can catch any leaks and stop them before they cause bigger problems. If you think the Dark web marketplaces are just online shops, you’re wrong — these sites are the actual weapon stores for criminals. They provide criminals with access to everything they need, from launching attacks to stealing data, etc.
If you happen to live far from your dealer—for me, stocking up on dope used to mean taking a Metro trip and walking through a sketchy neighborhood—this is a significant plus. Being able to have your drugs delivered right to your door is so much simpler. BidenCash and other exit-scam markets such as Torzon and Kingdom Market collapsed between 2022 and 2024. They used “free data dumps” and emotional marketing to build trust before vanishing—an enduring lesson in the risks of social engineering.
Hidden Answers
The durability of these markets tells us that if policing responses keep following the same playbook, they will keep getting the same results. And by focusing so heavily on these hidden platforms, authorities are neglecting the growing digital harms in the spaces we all use. The Russia-only market Hydra is also expanding, creating a new global drug bazaar called Eternos, which is launching in September. Hydra admins announced that the new market would feature IronRat, an artificial intelligence software agent for automated dispute resolution, making the sites even more user-friendly.
Facebook is aware of attempts by many governments to restrict access to a tool that allows strangers across the web to talk and collaborate freely. While its .onion address doesn’t make it much easier to maintain an anonymous account, it does make Facebook more accessible in places where it’s censored. Haystak also offers a premium version that allows advanced search, access to historical content, and email alerts. When you try to connect to a .onion website, Tor will route your traffic through three or more randomly chosen nodes before it reaches your destination website.
