DARKNET BUYERS PHONEBOOK BIBLE
A resource for researchers
Version 1.0.1, 4/22/2021
DISCLAIMER
This guidebook is for informational purposes only, and does not directly condone or encourage contact with anybody listed here, especially those involved in illegal businesses. For the purposes of this guidebook, “Darknet figures” is defined as not only those who directly took part in the ecosystem of the Tor network of onion addresses and the economies therein, but also those who may have played a part in it (authors, journalists, sites, other notable fixtures).
Also, great care has been taken to keep this book as factual and up-to-date as possible, although by the very nature of the Internet, there will always be a little bit of knowledge rot.
This is not only a dictionary of still-active figures. Many of them have been added or left in, despite retirement, arrest, death or otherwise inactivity, in the interests of keeping them alive in our memories for their actions while they were still active, or simply for archival reasons. Inactive characters will be marked with an [INACTIVE] tag, along with a reason.
Finally, due to the nature of pseudonyms and pen-names on the Internet (and exacerbated by the anonymous nature of Tor and the Darknet) most-common names have been placed in alphabetical order as best as possible, and popularly-known aliases stated next to them for neatness. Sites where the administrator and site both have the same name (ex: DarkNetLive, DarkDotFail, etc) have been tagged with [Person] and [Site] labels on their titles to differentiate the entries.
ABOUT
The Darknet Phone Book is the fruit of my effort to create an all-in-one resource for anyone looking to learn more about the Darknet, misunderstood and mysterious as it is to the layman. Originally starting as a glossary and timeline for my own personal use during my research, it quickly grew to encompass a set of biographies, then site entries, then finally became as big as it is today. Plus, it will be constantly updated with new info, bigger entries, and more features, meaning there ’Il always be something new to learn.
Thank you for reading the Darknet Phone Book.
Table of Contents
1: Timeline
2: People
2.1: Vendors
2.2: Market Admins/Staff
2.3: Service/Forum Admins/Staff
2.4: Journalists/Writers/Researchers/Authors
2.5: Hackers/DDoSers/Phishers/Pentesters/Developers
3: Sites
3.1: Markets/Commerce
3.2: News/Information/Literature
3.3: Directories/Search Engines
3.4: Forum/Social Media/Email
3.5: Organizations
3.6: Vendor Shop Services
3.7: Hosting Services
3.8: Cryptocurrency
4: Software's
4.1: Operating Systems
4.2: Chat Software
4.3: Cryptocurrency
4.4: Encryption
4.5: Commerce
4.6: Security
5: Dictionary of Terminology
Timeline
NOTE: Information for this timeline was gathered from multiple sources. Credit goes to Dread user /u/YosemiteGhostWrite’s timeline site Reason at axo6wll7qszvnySuksdmq6x6r2i7gfkbmc3vhxbgopor4fwlh3btqfyd.onion/, the Silk Road Tales and Archives site hosted at antilop.cc/sr/ by researcher LaMoustache, and gwern.net, hosted by Gwern Branwen, among many others. Quotes taken directly from any of the above sites will be marked with a {YGW}, {La_M}, or {Gw}, respectively. Other sources will be credited individually.
This timeline is incomplete, and will be added to in future revisions.
1970s: Students at Stanford and MIT used what was then called the ARPANET to coordinate the purchase of cannabis. {YGW}
1980s: By the end of the 1980s, newsgroups like alt.drugs would become online centres of drug discussion and information; however, any related deals were arranged entirely off-site directly between
individuals. {YGW}
1990s: One of the better-known web-based drug forums, The Hive, launched in 1997, serving as an information sharing forum for practical drug synthesis and legal discussion. The Hive was featured in a Dateline NBC special called The "X" Files in 2001, bringing the subject into public discourse. {YGW}
2000s: From 2003, the "Research Chemical Mailing List" (RCML) would discuss sourcing "Research Chemicals" from legal and grey sources as an alternative to forums such as alt.drugs.psychedelics.
However Operation Web Tryp led to a series of website shut downs and arrests in this area.
Since the year 2000, some of the emerging cyber-arms industry operates online, including the Eastern European "Cyber-arms Bazaar", trafficking in the most powerful crimeware and hacking tools.
In the 2000s, early cybercrime and carding forums such as ShadowCrew experimented with drug wholesaling on a limited scale. (YGW}
2006: The Farmer's Market was launched in 2006.
3" January, 2009: Satoshi Nakamoto, the anonymous creator of Bitcoin, mines the “genesis block” of the BTC blockchain.
2010: The Farmer’s Market moves to Tor.
February, 2011: Ross Ulbricht founds the Silk Road, the first Tor-based market (later referred to as
“Darknet Markets” or “DNMs”) with Bitcoin escrow under the usernames “admin” and “silkroad”.
June, 2011: Journalist Adrian Chen publishes the now-infamous Gawker article about Silk Road, “The Underground Website Where You Can Buy Any Drug Imaginable”. This causes Silk Road’s user numbers to increase dramatically.
2012: The Farmer’s Market was shut down and several operators arrested during Operation Adam Bomb, a two-year DEA operation. Officials are believed to have traced the payments made using PayPal and Western Union (the main payment methods used on the site) to track them down.
October, 2013: Silk Road is shut down by US law enforcement officials. Ross Ulbricht, the founder and administrator of the site, is arrested. Information on his seized laptop leads to the arrest of several other SR staff members, including SameSameButDifferent, Libertas, Inigo, and Roger “Variety Jones” Clark, Ulbricht’s mentor and “hidden admin”.
6™ November, 2013: Silk Road 2.0 launches, administrated by former SR member StExo, under the username “DPR2”, and moderated by a number of staff from the original SR.
November-December, 2013: Launch of Dream Market.
2014: Bitcointalk user thankful_for_today releases a fork of Bitcoin called “BitMonero”. After criticism from the community over several issues and the disappearance from development of thankful_for_today, a user called “Johnny Mnemonic” and his team took over development and renamed BitMonero to simply Monero.
14” January, 2014: Evolution Marketplace founded by Verto (also founder of Tor Carding Forum) and Kimble.
February, 2014: Utopia Market, a market modeled after the popular Black Market Reloaded, is launched. It is seized by police eight days later.
April, 2014: Launch of Grams, a Darknet search engine and vendor database.
June, 2014: The people behind Grams launch a new service called Helix, a bitcoin tumbler.
November, 2014: Operation Onymous, a law enforcement operation between agencies in several countries attacked and shut down ostensibly 400 sites (later proven to be a false claim by law enforcement and amended to “upwards of 50”), including Doxbin, Cloud9, and Silk Road 2.0. Other markets, such as Agora and Evolution, were untouched, and in fact enjoyed a surge in users from refugees of other markets. Blake Benthall (Defcon) and Thomas White (StExo/DPR2) were both arrested in the wake of Onymous, although White’s arrest was kept secret until 2019.
18" March, 2015: Evolution Marketplace freezes user fund withdrawal and steals money from escrow wallets, exit scamming. It is believed they got away with over US$12 million.
July, 2017: Operation Bayonet, a coordinated attack by law enforcement, shuts down AlphaBay and Hansa Markets in conjunction, arresting several vendors and market staff. AlphaO2, real name Alexandre Cazes, the administrator of AlphaBay, was also arrested, and committed suicide by hanging himself with a towel in his cell in Thailand a few days later.
October, 2017: Trade Route Market, which gained massive popularity in the months after Operation Bayonet, exit scammed with users’ coins after a lengthy extortionn period by a group called PhishKingz, following said group hacking and robbing their escrow wallets.
December, 2017: On the 9" of December, the admin of Grams posted in their personal subreddit, 1/Grams, that they would be suspending all services, including Grams and Helix, within seven days.
February-March, 2018: Public launch of the Reddit-style Darknet forum Dread in the wake of a crackdown of Darknet and crime-oriented subreddits, most notoriously r/DarkNetMarkets. Dread was launched by previously-known pentester HugBunter and his team.
May, 2019: After a record-breaking six years of activity and growing to become the largest existing market at the time, spurred by the fall of rivals such as Trade Route, AlphaBay, Hansa, and SR2.0, Dream Market announces after a several-months-log period of unstoppable distributed denial of service attacks by an unknown adversary using the Dread username “hereugoagain” (originally “hereugo”), they would be shutting down. The DDoSer had been using an unpatched flaw in the Tor network to cheaply, easily and effectively down market sites. Dream also announced in its shutdown post they would be returning with a new market, posting the onion address they would be using. At the time of writing, this onion address has remained inactive, although two (main) unofficial markets, Dream Alt and Samsara, were launched by individuals unrelated to the original Dream. Both ended up quickly exit scamming.
September, 2019: Popular Darknet news site and directory DeepDotWeb seized and shutdown, and admins arrested.
2! March, 2020: HugBunter and Paris, the admins of Dread, launch Recon, a vendor database and search engine, as a spiritual successor to the popular but defunct Grams.
August, 2020: The Torum cybersecurity and hacking forum shuts down. A few days later, Empire Market, believed to be run by the same people, pulls a large-scale exit scam, and head moderator Se7en reveals the admins had been paying weekly bounties for several months to infamous DDoSer SchwererGustav.
People
Vendors:
-- AlpraKing (Quantik)
-- DutchMasters
-- Gammagoblin
-- HeinekenExpress
-- NSWGreat (Cody Ronald Ward, Bliss)
-- OpiateConnect
-- OxyMonster (Gal Vallerius)
-- PharmaK 1ng1
-- Psycellium
-- SamSpade2
-- TheWhiteLight
-- Tony76
-- Trust-In-Us (TeamTrust)
-- 2happytimes2
Market Admins/Staff
-- AlphaO2 (Alexandre Cazes)
-- Backopy
-- Chronicpain (Curtis Green, Flush)
-- Defcon (Blake Benthall)
-- DeSnake
-- Dread Pirate Roberts (Ross Ulbricht, Frosty, Altoid, silkroad)
-- Kimble
-- Libertas (Gary Davis)
-- Penissmith (Bryan Connor Herrell, Botah)
-- SpeedStepper
-- StExo (Thomas White, DPR2, Cthulhu)
-- Variety Jones (Roger Thomas Clark, Plural of Mongoose, Cimon)
-- Verto
Service/Forum Admins/Staff
-- Chronos
-- DarkDotFail
-- DarknetLive
-- DeepDotWeb
-- FOrtuna
-- HugBunter
-- Kaizushi
-- Karpeles, Mark
-- Paris
-- Syntax
-- Winzen, Daniel
-- Witchman05
Journalists/Writers/Authors/Researchers
-- Bilton, Nick
-- Branwen, Gwem
-- Caudevilla, Fernando (DoctorX)
-- Chen, Adrian
-- LaMoustache
-- Monteiro, Chris (Deku_shrub)
-- Nakamoto, Satoshi
-- Ormsby, Eileen (OzFreelancer)
Hackers/DDoSers/Phishers/Pentesters/Developers
-- Clownsec
-- hereugo (hereugoagain)
-- PhishKingz
-- SchwererGustav
Vendors
AlpraKing
(INACTIVE: RETIRED]
Aliases: Quantik.
Biography: AlpraKing was a large-scale alprazolam manufacturer who pressed thousands of Xanax bars daily. He was known for his showmanship-like demeanour, regularly boasting on Reddit about his perceived wealth, power and skill, and for the numerous memes spawning around him and his customers, such as the famed “AlpraCream” video, the picture of a man alleged to be him with a snake on his head, and the infamous video of two of his employees watching bars pour out of the pill press and shouting “dollar dollar dollar 50 cents 50 cents 50 cents”. He also wrote the AlpraKing Kingpin Handbook, a basic guide to “kingpinry” that still makes the rounds on Reddit to this day, inconsistencies and all.
Contact Information/Forum Accounts:
Reddit - AV/AlpraKing {Account Suspended}
Market Accounts:
Dream - AlpraKing
AlphaBay - AlpraKing
DutchMasters
[ACTIVE]
Biography: DutchMasters is a large-scale bulk-only vendor with several resellers, the largest of which being HighGradeMasters, BelvedereDrugs, and CottageIndustry. He also owns the DutchMastersHQ personal forum, and his own private site.
Contact Information/Forum Accounts:
Dread - /u/DutchMasters
DMHQ - DutchMasters
TorBox - mastersofdutch
Tox - 6212C0376A5EC99F2B91346EF4CDC5C?21897DCEB98910D671140A9EA5D8EE936BA1B2D08E5 OF
Market Accounts:
OpenBazaar - DutchMasters
Personal Onion - DutchMasters
Subdread: /d/DutchMasters
GammaGoblin
[ACTIVE]
Biography: GammaGoblin is the longest-lived and most-popular LSD vendor in existence in the Darknet, with consistently-dosed product and over seven years of LSD synthesis and vending experience, as well as local resellers in almost every continent in the world. Due to the high demand for his product, GammaGoblin himself sells only in bulk, and only on very selective platforms, currently only on The Majestic Garden and his own personal onion, known as PushingTaboo.
Contact Information/Forum Accounts:
The Majestic Garden - GammaGoblin
Dread - /u/gammagoblin_official
Market Accounts:
Personal Onion (PushingTaboo) - GammaGoblin
Subdread: /d/GammaGoblin.
HeinekenExpress
[ACTIVE]
Aliases: HE, HExpress
Biography: HeinekenExpress is a large-scale vendor for a wide range of products, notably amphetamines and ketamine, and fill both bulk and personal orders. They have been vending for over 5 years, at the time of writing, on the majority of major markets, as well as their own personal vendor shop.
Contact Information/Forum Accounts:
Dread - /u/HeinekenExpress
Market Accounts:
Wall Street - HeinekenExpress
Dream - HeinekenExpress
Berlusconi - HeinekenExpress
Rapture - HeinekenExpress
Olympus - HeinekenExpress
Nightmare - HeinekenExpress.
White House - HeinekenExpress
Monopoly - HeinekenExpress
Dark - HeinekenExpress
Personal Onion - HeinekenExpress
Subdread: /d/HeinekenExpress
NSWGreat
(INACTIVE: ARRESTED]
Aliases: Cody Ronald Ward, Bliss.
Biography: NSWGreat, real name Cody Ronald Ward, was an Australian vendor of opiates, MDMA, amphetamines and LSD and former member of staff on Evolution Market. At the time of his arrest in 2019, Ward, aged 26, was estimated to have over AUD$17 million tied up in his drug ring. Running his organization of more than 10,000 completed transactions since 2015 from the comfort of his seaside home and working with his partners in crime, Shanese and Patricia Koullias, Ward was known for his abrasive and narcissistic personality, frequently showing off photos of expensive cars and fancy houses on his social media profiles.
Market Accounts:
AlphaBay - NSWGreat
Abraxas - NSWGreat
Agora - NSWGreat
Dream - nswgreat
OpiateConnect
[ACTIVE]
Aliases: OpiateConnect369, OC
Biography: A long-term vendor of opiates and benzodiazepines, OpiateConnect is a controversial figure for his unreliable shipping times in the past and history of oddly-manufactured bars, although his following of loyal customers insists that these issues have all been fixed and everyone who missed out has been reimbursed for their trouble. Despite the rumours, OpiateConnect still maintains a healthy presence on Darknet forums and their own market profiles, frequently referring to all his customers as “my friend”.
Contact Information/Forum Accounts:
Dread - /u/OpiateConnect369
Jabber - [email protected]
Market Accounts:
Apollon - opiateconnect
Empire - opiateconnect
White House - opiateconnect369
Dark - opiateconnect369
Personal Onion - OpiateConnect
Subdread: /d/OpiateConnect
OxyMonster
(INACTIVE: ARRESTED]
Aliases: Gal Vallerius.
Biography: OxyMonster, a vendor of Ritalin, OxyContin, and similar substances as well as a member of Dream Market staff, was arrested in 2017 and revealed to be Gal Vallerius, 38-year-old French-Israeli man who had flown from his home in France to get to the World Beard and Moustache Championship in Austin, Texas, in which he was a contestant. Upon his flight touching down in Atlanta International Airport, however, he was apprehended by authorities who had tracked down his real identity through Bitcoin transactions from his vendor shop’s “tip jar’, which went directly to a LocalBitcoins account under his real name, as well as stylometric analysis of his posts leading to social media accounts. Upon his arrest, law enforcement officials broke into his laptop, finding incriminating evidence and his personal encryption keys in a file labeled “OxyMonster”. He was not only charged with offenses related to his own business, but also due to his role in staffing Dream.
His unbelievable arrest (apprehended on his way to a beard convention), however, has raised suspicion for some, most notably a user under the alias “Shittyk1dz”, who wrote an article on DarknetLive alleging that Vallerius had travelled to Atlanta to meet up with a man named Mark DeCarlo, who he believed to be Dream administrator SpeedStepper. Evidence is tenuous, however, and the article was removed shortly after, although not before being shared among users of Darknet forums.
Market Accounts:
AlphaBay - OxyMonster
Abraxas - OxyMonster
Evolution - OxyMonster
Nucleus - OxyMonster
Dream - OxyMonster
PharmaK1ng1
[ACTIVE]
Aliases: therealpk1, PharmaKing, PerfectXanax, PharmaKing1
Biography: One of the longest-running still-active benzodiazepine vendors, Pharmak1ng1 has been around for years and was one of AlpraKing’s biggest rivals. He is also believed to have supplied the majority of other Xanax vendors at several points in production.
As is usual with Xanax vendors, he has had issues with supply at many points of his history, but if current reviews are to be believed, he is reliable at the time of writing, selling well-pressed flualprazolam bars.
Contact Information/Forum Accounts:
Dread - /u/therealpk1
Auto-reply email - [email protected]
Personal email - [email protected]
Market Accounts:
Agora - PharmaK Ing
AlphaBay - PharmaK1ng1
Abraxas - PharmaK Ing
Middle Earth - pharmaking
Valhalla - pharmaking1
Dream - pharmak1ng
Empire - pharmaking1
White House - pharmakIng
CanadaHQ - pharmak1ng
Personal Onion - pharmaking1
Wall Street - perfectxanax
Dream - perfectxanax
Empire - Perfectxanax
Psycellium
[ACTIVE]
Biography: As a well-regarded vendor who has inhabited most major markets in recent years, Psycellium is also one of the most popular and widely-used GammaGoblin resellers and a Shining Star vendor on The Majestic Garden, selling product in both bulk and personal amounts at good quality.
Contact Information/Forum Accounts:
Dread - /u/Psycellium
The Majestic Garden - Psycellium.
Market Accounts:
Wall Street - Psycellium
Empire - Psycellium
Olympus - Psycellium
Dream - Psycellium
Nightmare - Psycellium
SamSpade2
[ACTIVE]
Aliases: Sam Spade, SamSpade
Biography: Similar to Psycellium, SamSpade2 is a popular, long-term LSD vendor and GG reseller, as well as a verified vendor on The Majestic Garden. He is a favorite among his customers for his decent shipping times, good quality product, and fast communications.
Contact Information/Forum Accounts:
Dread: /u/SamSpade2
BitMessage: BM-2cXqV4cjFy 1u2QSHjV Xp5JQnm5uxtNSoBp
The Majestic Garden: SamSpade2
Market Accounts:
AlphaBay - SamSpade2
Empire - SamSpade2
White House - samspade2
Subdread: /d/SamSpade2
TheWhiteLight
[ACTIVE]
Biography: As one of the Darknet’s premier LSD producers and salesmen, TheWhiteLight has enjoyed a distinguished career, with much praise dedicated to his habit of offering sales and giveaways on one of the many markets he’s patronized over the years, as well as The Majestic Garden.
Contact Information/Forum Accounts:
Dread - /u/TheWhiteLight
The Majestic Garden - TheWhiteLight
Email - [email protected]
Market Accounts:
Wall Street - TheWhiteLight
Dream - TheWhiteLight
White House - thewhitelight
Empire - TheWhiteLightL
Subdread: /d/TheWhiteLight
Tony76
(INACTIVE: ALLEGEDLY ARRESTED]
Alleged Aliases: LucyDrop, Marijuanaismymuse, Redandwhite
Biography: The story of Tony76 is muddled and it’s unlikely to ever be sorted out cleanly. What we do know, however, is that on the original Silk Road, there was a vendor called Tony76 who was popular for his one-stop shop for the majority of products. When the Dread Pirate Roberts, administrator of the market, announced a huge sale with benefits for buyers and vendors market-wide for the 20" of April (4/20, a reference to cannabis, hence the title “4/20 Sale”), Tony76 ran a huge sale with discounts for all his loyal customers. A few days later, Tony76 announced that a rival vendor had contacted him and threatened to tank his business with thousands of fake reviews, and that he wasn’t willing to keep so much money in the Silk Road escrow system at any one time. To counter this, he asked all his buyers to release the money from escrow before they received their products. When they did, Tony76 disappeared with all the drugs and all the money.
It is believed he came back later to extort, scam and threaten more money out of DPR and the Silk Roaders under the names LucyDrop, Marijuanaismymuse, and Redandwhite, famously pretending under the last one to be a member of the Hell’s Angels biker gang, promising to murder an alleged dox of Tony 76 (fake, obviously) in exchange for money.
A group believed to be related to Tony76 was arrested, and the story is still being told.
Market Accounts:
Silk Road - Tony76.
Silk Road - Marijuanaismymuse (allegedly)
Silk Road - LucyDrop (allegedly)
Trust-In-Us (Team Trust)
[ACTIVE]
Biography: TeamTrust, led by the vendor Trust-In-Us, is a legendary LSD/psychedelics syndicate, responsible for a number of famous original blotter art. Very selective in their choices, they vend specifically on The Majestic Garden, in bulk only.
Contact Information/Forum Accounts:
The Majestic Garden - Trust-In-Us.
Zhappytimes2
(INACTIVE: ARRESTED]
Biography: A popular vendor with a focus on selling moonshine (illegally-distilled alcohol), 2happytimes2 was also an administrator on the original Dread Forum, alongside the founder, HugBunter. 2happytimes2 is believed to have collaborated with Olympus Market to take down Dread, before being arrested in Operation Dark Gold. In fact, many people believe he was arrested previously and that the law enforcement officials alleged to operate his account in this time took down Dread, before using Operation Dark Gold as a scapegoat.
Contact Information/Forum Accounts:
Reddit - /u/2happytimes2
Dread - /u/2happytimes2
Market Accounts:
Berlusconi - 2happytimes2
Trade Route - 2happytimes2
Dream - 2happytimes2
Hansa - 2happytimes2
Market Admins/Staff
Alpha02
[INACTIVE: COMMITTED SUICIDE IN PRISON]
Aliases: Alexandre Cazes, (allegedly) DeSnake
Biography: A Canadian citizen, Alexandre Cazes founded and ran AlphaBay Market, one of the most culturally-important Darknet markets in existence, while in his early 20s. Before the seizure of AlphaBay and Cazes’ arrest and subsequent suspected suicide in his Thai jail cell in the wake of Operation Bayonet (a tongue-in-cheek reference to them taking down the “Bay” [AlphaBay] of the “Net” [the Darknet]), AlphaBay had made him a rich man, worth over US$23 million.
Cazes, a short, rotund man with an early balding hairstyle and a penchant for posting frequent diatribes on the “pickup artists’ forum” RooshV, considered himself the king of the streets, something federal officers must have picked up when his Hotmail address, “pimp_alex_91”, surfaced in the AlphaBay server. Days after his arrest, Cazes committed suicide, which many people found strange. His lawyer had described Cazes as a happy person, confident in his own chances of escaping a heavy sentence, yet, only a few short hours before his lawyer arrived at this dingy prison in Thailand to discuss strategy, Alpha02, the most-wanted man in the Darknet at the time, had hanged himself with an errant towel from a doorknob.
Backopy
(INACTIVE: RETIRED]
Biography: Backopy was the administrator of Black Market Reloaded, one of the most highly-regarded markets in the Darknet. He was remembered to have run his market honestly and fairly, and many people who spoke to him said he valued his ideals, which motivated him to form BMR, more than money, as shown in the famous case of BMR getting their escrow wallets hacked and robbed, and Backopy paying back every single user out of his own pocket, at huge personal cost to his own retirement fund.
Backopy is the only known, recorded market administrator to have shut down their market (Black Market Reloaded) without drama, rogue moderators and administrators, or relaunching as a cash-grab scheme.
Chronicpain
(INACTIVE: ARRESTED + RETIRED]
Aliases: Curtis Green, Flush
Biography: Curtis “Chronicpain” Green was a highly-active poster on the Silk Road forums, before being asked to join the staff team officially as a moderator. Following a sting operation where a group of federal agents (including Carl Force and Shaun Bridges) delivered cocaine to his doorstep and arrested him, he became an informant. After Bridges stole a large sum of money from Silk Road using Green’s account, Dread Pirate Roberts, at the urging of Variety Jones, sent someone to assassinate Green; unfortunately, the assassin that he had contracted, a supposed South American cocaine smuggler for the cartels under the username “Nob”, was actually Carl Force himself in his undercover persona.
Force used a can of Campbell’s soup to fake a picture of an asphyxiated and deceased Green. Green later publicly voiced criticism of DPR/Ross Ulbricht’s draconian sentencing.
Defcon
[INACTIVE: ARRESTED]
Aliases: Blake Benthall
Biography: Defcon was a member of the moderation team of Silk Road 2.0. After his arrest, he publicly became an informant for the federal government and surrendered all the data he had on his fellow staff members and vendors.
DeSnake
(INACTIVE: UNKNOWN]
Aliases: (Allegedly) Alpha02.
Biography: DeSnake was the secondary administrator of AlphaBay, and a former carder/fraudster.
Many people believe he was Alpha02/Alexandre Cazes, but others believe he was a different person who still remains at large.
Dread Pirate Roberts
[INACTIVE: ARRESTED]
Aliases: Ross William Ulbricht, Frosty, Altoid, silkroad
Biography: Ross Ulbricht was the creator and administrator of the original Silk Road. The first person to combine using the technologies of Tor, Bitcoin, and PGP, and adding the now-commonplace features of escrow and rating systems, Ulbricht built the multimillionaire business of the Silk Road from the ground up, along with his team of staff, dealing with issues arising from hackers, denial-of-service attacks, extortionists, and law enforcement. After his arrest, he was sentenced to a double life sentence plus 40 years, which he is serving as USP Tucson, Arizona. He was barely in his thirties at the time of incarceration.
Kimble
(INACTIVE: EXIT SCAMMED]
Biography: Kimble, along with her partner Verto, was one of the two founders and administrators of Evolution Market. In March, 2015, both she and Verto disappeared with the site’s funds in an exit
scam.
Libertas
[INACTIVE: ARRESTED]
Aliases: Gary Davis
Biography: Gary Davis, AKA Libertas, was a citizen of Ireland and senior staff on both Silk Road and Silk Road 2.0. Upon his arrest, his lawyers used the excuse that he joined Silk Road as a way to connect with people due to him suffering from Asperger’s syndrome, and that he shouldn’t be incarcerated.
Penissmith
[INACTIVE: ARRESTED]
Aliases: Bryan Connor Herrell, Botah
Biography: Penissmith was a popular forum user, fraud vendor, carder, and AlphaBay senior staff member of their ScamWatch team. He also wrote the infamous “Penissmith’s State of the Darknet” post on DeepDotWeb, in which he put forth his opinion that Darknet markets, the fraud world, and the Darknet community in general were “dead”, and that it was impossible for markets to survive without a strong circle of trust and community.
He was arrested and imprisoned for his work on AlphaBay and his massive history of fraud and carding.
SpeedStepper
(INACTIVE: RETIRED]
Biography: SpeedStepper is the person (or alleged group of people) responsible for the foundation and administration of Dream. He is incredibly popular for his perceived skill at administrating the longest-
running and most popular market in the Western Darknet, as well as his opsec abilities. He was notorious for the sheer number of red herrings he put into the Dream code to waste the time of hackers and law enforcement, although he did have several failings, including the fact that once Dream had made him rich and popular enough, he began to stop caring and simply hired dozens of moderators who hadn’t been vetted or approved, meaning that unprofessional and rogue moderators ran rampant. After Dream shut down in 2019 following a sustained period of unstoppable denial-of-service attacks, he signed a message promising to relaunch at a later date and published the onion address they would use for their rebranding; although many unofficial scam markets popped up claiming to be the official Dream partner market, that URL was never made active, and people began to suspect it was simply another of SpeedStepper’s famous red herrings to allow him to slip away safely.
There have been many suspects as to who was really behind the SpeedStepper name, from Mark DeCarlo, to Brian Armstrong, to Mark Karpeles, and some people even believe the same person or group who invented Bitcoin under the alias “Satoshi Nakamoto” also ran the SpeedStepper name. A fun theory to believe, but unfortunately, no hard evidence has been shown for any of these theories.
StExo
[INACTIVE: ARRESTED]
Aliases: Thomas White, Cthulhu, DPR2
Biography: Thomas White was a teenage crypto-investor and technology enthusiast. Under the name StExo, he was known for his grandiose speeches on the Silk Road forums and his sale of products such as drug-testing kits, MDMA, and laundering services. He also made several backups of markets and forums in case of shutdown, and it was one of these backups that allowed him to create Silk Road 2.0 soon after the original was shut down.
After his arrest (which was kept secret for several years before being publicized), he was charged with money laundering and child pornography offenses.
Variety Jones
(INACTIVE: ARRESTED]
Aliases: Roger Thomas Clark, Plural of Mongoose, Cimon
Biography: The hidden administrator and mentor to Ross Ulbricht, Variety Jones was an experienced criminal, teaching the young DPR all he knew about opsec, cryptocurrency, securing his market, and running his empire with an iron fist. He also gave Ulbricht financial advice and told him to plan for the future to avoid arrest, as well as being the one to suggest the murder of Curtis Green, which ultimately did not take place. After Ulbricht’s arrest, Jones was revealed to be Roger Clark, a Canadian seller of cannabis seeds living in Thailand and frequent poster on the Overgrow marijuana forums under the username “Plural of Mongoose”.
Verto
[INACTIVE: EXIT SCAMMED]
Biography: Verto was a prominent carder in the fraudster community, as well as the founder and administrator of Tor Carding Forum, the #1 spot for budding and professional carders. His most famous achievement, however, was founding Evolution Market with his partner, Kimble, before exit scamming in 2015.
Service/Forum Admins/Staff
Chronos [Person]
(INACTIVE: SHUT DOWN]
Biography: Chronos was the admin of an eponymous news site and vendor shop service for the Darknet. They also wrote the Chronos Opsec Guide and several more high-quality posts and interviews of several market staff.
DarkDotFail [Person]
[ACTIVE]
Biography: DarkDotFail is the owner of the Dark.Fail link directory and Darknet gateway.
Contact Information/Forum Accounts:
Dread - /u/DarkDotFail
Mastodon: @DarkDotFail
Twitter: @DarkDotFail
Email: [email protected]
Jabber: [email protected]
DarkNetLive [Person]
[ACTIVE]
Biography: DarkNetLive is a journalist and owner of the news site and community information archive named after him. As well as posting original news articles, they also allow submissions of articles, community news, and archival of posts from elsewhere. On top of that, they also host copies of the DNM Bibles and a categorized link directory.
Contact Information/Forum Accounts:
Dread - /u/DarknetLive
Twitter - @Darknetlive
Email - [email protected]
Email 2 - [email protected]
Jabber - Upon request by owner.
DeepDotWeb [Person]
(INACTIVE: ARRESTED]
Biography: DeepDotWeb was the pseudonymous admin of the popular news site and link directory/uptime checker, and most people’s first introduction to the Darknet. He was arrested in 2019 for accepting profit from markets by listing affiliate links in their directory, and the site was shut down.
Contact Information/Forum Accounts:
Dread - /u/DeepDotWeb
Fortuna
[ACTIVE]
Biography: Fortuna is the co-administrator and techmin of Envoy Forum and related projects, and the administrator of the Imperiya vendor shop system (and its related Invictus Marketplace). Also a former vendor on the CrimeNetWork sites.
Contact Information/Forum Accounts
Dread - /u/FOrtuna
Envoy - FOrtuna
HugBunter
[ACTIVE]
Biography: HugBunter is a known pentester and the creator/administrator of the popular Darknet forum Dread, a free-speech forum styled after Reddit and launched in the wake of a number of crime-oriented subreddits, including r/DarkNetMarkets, being mass-banned. He and his team also launched a spiritual successor to the Grams vendor search engine called Recon.
Contact Information/Forum Accounts:
Dread - /u/HugBunter
Jabber - [email protected]
Kaizushi
[ACTIVE]
Biography: Kaizushi is the owner and administrator of KLOSHost (Kaizushi’s Little Onion Server), a security-focused hosting service for professionals. They also offer an email service called Infantile.
Contact Information/Forum Accounts
Dread - /u/Kaizushi
Jabber - [email protected]
General Email - [email protected]
Personal Email 1 - [email protected]
Personal Email 2 - [email protected]
Personal Email 3 - [email protected]
Karpeles, Mark
(INACTIVE: RETIRED]
Aliases: MagicalTux
Biography: Mark Karpeles is the former CEO of defunct clearnet Bitcoin exchange, MtGox (Magic the Gathering Online eXchange). Following the failure of MtGox, the loss of his users’ coins, and his filing for bankruptcy, he moved to Japan.
Paris
[ACTIVE]
Biography: Paris is the co-admin and head of staff of Dread forum. He is also an experienced pentester and programmer, co-creating the Endgame DDoS protection and the deCaptcha.
Contact Information/Forum Accounts:
Dread - /u/Paris
Jabber - [email protected]
Syntax
[ACTIVE]
Biography: Syntax is the lead designer of the Dread team, having created the UI and looks for Dread, Recon, the vendor shops, and the Endgame protection service. Unlike HugBunter and Paris, she seems to prefer staying out of the spotlight, and is mostly inactive on Dread.
Contact Information/Forum Accounts:
Dread - /u/Syntax
Winzen, Daniel
[INACTIVE: RETIRED]
Biography: Daniel Winzen was the owner and administrator of Daniel’s Hosting and its related services, such as Daniel’s Chat. He was a frequent user of the chat and the Galaxy series of social media sites. He shut down all his services in 2019 after a series of hacks and data losses stemming from hackers’ beliefs that he was involved in the dissemination and hosting of child pornography.
Witchman05
[ACTIVE]
Aliases: BadMedicine
Biography: Witchman05 is a former member of staff of Dread Forum, as well as Intel Cutout and Onionland. He is also a journalist, having written several dozen articles, and the administrator of Envoy Forum and related projects. He also wrote the Darknet Phone Book (this book).
Journalists/Writers/Authors/Researchers
Bilton, Nick
[ACTIVE]
Biography: Nick Bilton is a British-American journalist and the author of the book American Kingpin, detailing the story of Ross Ulbricht, the Silk Road, and the law enforcement agents who took him down. He currently works at Vanity Fair.
Branwen, Gwern
[ACTIVE]
Biography: Gwerm Branwen is a researcher and writer who writes about and archives data pertaining to DNMs and a number of other subjects.
Contact Information/Forum Accounts
Reddit - /u/Gwermn
Reddit - r/Gwem
Personal Site - gwern.net
Email - [email protected]
Caudevilla, Dr Fernando
[ACTIVE]
Aliases: DoctorX
Biography: A family doctor based in Spain, Dr Fernando Caudevilla hosted a majorly popular thread on the original Silk Road forums to give medical and harm reduction advice to drug users, and is now the founder and main man aboard Energy Control, the #1 drug-testing service in the world, based near his home in Spain. Currently, he is mostly inactive on most forms of social media while he works on a book detailing his time in the Darknet, titled: “The Incredible Adventures of DoctorX in the Deep Web”.
Contact Information/Forum Accounts:
Dread - /u/DoctorX
Twitter - @EC_es
Facebook - /energycontrol
Reddit - /u/EC-International
Email - [email protected]
Chen, Adrian
[ACTIVE]
Biography: Adrian Chen is a New York-based journalist and writer known for his correspondences and interviews with shadier characters, such as the members of Anonymous, and for his infamous Gawker article about the Silk Road, “The Underground Website Where You Can Buy Any Drug Imaginable”.
Contact Information/Forum Accounts:
Twitter - @adrianchen
Email - [email protected]
LaMoustache
[ACTIVE]
Biography: LaMoustache is the pseudonym of a researcher and the owner of the Silk Road Tales and Archives site at antilop.cc/sr.
Contact Information/Forum Accounts:
Email/XMPP- [email protected]
Twitter - @lamoustache
Reddit - /u/lamoustache
Monteiro, Chris
[ACTIVE]
Aliases: Deku_shrub
Biography: Chris Monteiro is a journalist, researcher, moderator of several Darknet-themed subreddits, owner of the news blog pirate.london, and frequent target for hitman attacks. He’s also fairly well-known for writing the majority of Wikipedia articles about Darknet subjects, and for collaborating with other researchers.
Contact Information/Forum Accounts:
Twitter - @deku_shrub
Personal site - pirate.london
Medium - @deku_shrub
Nakamoto, Satoshi
[INACTIVE: UNKNOWN]
Biography: Satoshi Nakamoto is the pseudonym of a person or group credited with creating Bitcoin, mining the genesis block of the BTC blockchain, and creating the forum Bitcointalk.
Contact Information/Forum Accounts:
Bitcointalk - satoshi
Ormsby, Eileen
[ACTIVE]
Aliases: OzFreelancer, Eiley
Biography: Eileen Ormsby is an Australian journalist, blogger and author. As well as owning the true-crime/Darknet blog “All Things Vice”, she has also been present at the trial of Ross Ulbricht and interviewed Roger Clark in prison. She is the author of several non-fiction crime books, The Darkest Web, Psycho.com, Little Girls Lost, Silk Road, Murder on the Dark Web, Stalkers, and Blue Skies, Black Death.
Contact Information/Forum Accounts:
Dread - /u/OzFreelancer
Reddit - /u/OzFreelancer
Twitter - @EileenOrmsby
The Hub - OzFreelancer
DNMAvengers - OzFreelancer
Wickr - Eiley
Hackers/DDoSers/Phishers/Pentesters/Developers
Clownsec
[ACTIVE]
Aliases: ClownSecurity
Biography: Clownsec is an accomplished pentester, having checked out the security on many markets and forums, including White House, Deep Sea and Torigon Cybersecurity Forum, and worked with Mr_White and Paris on numerous occasions.
Contact Information/Forum Accounts:
Dread - /u/Clownsec
HereuGo
[INACTIVE: UNKNOWN]
Aliases: hereugoagain
Biography: HereuGo was a prolific extortionist who specialized in distributed denial of service attacks, exploiting a flaw in the Tor network that allowed him to cheaply and easily down a number of sites for extended periods of time, most notably Dream, which shut down after six years of service due to his attacks.
Contact Information/Forum Accounts:
Dread - /u/hereugoagain
PhishKingz
(INACTIVE: UNKNOWN]
Biography: PhishKingz was the name of a person (or group) behind a number of hacking and scamming attempts, most famously the Trade Route hack, where after robbing the escrow systems and stealing data, PhishKingz extorted the Trade Route admins for weekly payments until they shut down the site and exit scammed.
SchwererGustav
[ACTIVE]
Aliases: Gustav
Biography: SchwererGustav is a prolific DDoSer and extortionist, having shown on many occasions their ability to cheaply and easily down large market sites, even Empire Market at their height, prompting weekly payments from the majority of large markets. SchwererGustav also worked as a DDoSer-for-hire, taking payments for markets to attack their rivals.
Contact Information/Forum Accounts:
Dread - /u/SchwererGustav
Markets/Commerce:
-- Agora
-- AlphaBay
-- Atlantis
-- Black Market Reloaded
-- CGMC
-- Dream
-- Evolution
-- Hansa
-- Hydra
-- OpenBazaar
-- Silk Road
-- Silk Road 2.0
-- Wall Street Market
Sites + Organizations
News/Information/Literature Sites:
-- Chronos
-- DarknetLive
-- DeepDotWeb
-- Distributed Denial of Secrets
-- DNStats
-- Erowid
-- HackTown
-- Hidden Wiki
-- Imperial Library of Trantor
-- PsychonautWiki
-- Tape
-- TheOnionWeb
Directories/Search Engines:
-- Ahmia
-- DarkDotFail
-- DarkIndex
-- DuckDuckGo
-- Grams
-- Kilos
-- Recon
Forums/Social Media/E mail Services
-- Bitcointalk
-- Bluelight
-- Cock.li
-- CryptBB
-- DarkNetMarkets Avengers
-- Dread
-- Elude
-- Envoy
-- Hidden Answers
-- Onionland
-- ProtonMail
-- Raddle
-- 1/DarkNetMarkets
-- SecMail
-- The Hub
-- The Majestic Garden
-- Tor Carding Forum
-- Torigon
-- Torum
Organizations:
-- Electronic Frontier Foundation
-- Energy Control
-- FreeRoss.org
-- [2P Team
-- The Tails Project
-- The Tor Project
-- TripSit
-- WEDINOS
-- WikiLeaks
Vendor Shop Services:
-- HugBunter shops
-- Imperiya
Hosting Services:
-- Daniel's Hosting
-- Freedom Hosting
-- Kaizushi's Little Onion Server
Cryptocurrency:
-- Bitcoin.org
-- GetMonero
-- MtGox
-- Thotbot's XMRGuide
-- XMR.to
Markets/Commerce
Agora
(INACTIVE: SHUT DOWN]
Biography: Agora Market was a popular general-sales market that launched in 2013 and ceased operations gracefully in 2015. During their lifespan, they gained a popular following after surviving the wake of Operation Onymous and the Evolution exit scam.
URL: agorahooawayyfoe.onion
Launched: 2013.
Shut down: August 2015.
AlphaBay
[INACTIVE: SEIZED]
Biography: AlphaBay was a hugely-popular DNM, administrated by AlphaO02 (Alexandre Cazes) and DeSnake (allegedly also Cazes, but unconfirmed). AlphaBay, or “AB” was popular for its attentive staff (including their unofficial ScamWatch team), attractive UI, and forum full of knowledgeable people, as well as its large fraud community. It was seized during Operation Bayonet, a multinational law enforcement operation targeting AlphaBay and similarly-sized Dutch market Hansa.
URL: pwoah7foa6au2pul.onion
Launched: 22" of December, 2014.
Shut down: 13" of July, 2017.
Atlantis
[INACTIVE: EXIT SCAM]
Biography: The third official DNM ever launched (following Silk Road and Black Market Reloaded), Atlantis grew in popularity quickly after launch due to their militant marketing campaigns, with strategies including an infamous video ad and poaching vendors and buyers from their competitors, as well as being the first market to accept Litecoin, a popular altcoin. Atlantis advanced in usage quickly, with the admin boasting that they made more than US$1 million in profit due to their marketing skills, but after a week following Operation Onymous, the administrators shut down the site. They had been active for seven months.
URL: atlantisrky4es5q.onion
Launched: March 2013.
Shut down: September 2013.
Black Market Reloaded
(INACTIVE: SHUT DOWN]
Biography: Black Market Reloaded, often referred to as “BMR”, was the second DNM launched and a competitor to Silk Road. Administrated by the user Backopy, BMR gained users’ respect after a hack of the site’s wallets and subsequent theft led to Backopy reimbursing every victim out of his own pocket.
Black Market Reloaded shut down in late 2013 after the falls of Silk Road and Sheep Marketplace prompted a flock of users to BMR that the site was unprepared to handle.
URL: rércmz6lga4i5vb4.onion
Launched: 30" of June, 2011.
Shut down: November, 2013.
CGMCG
[INACTIVE: SHUT DOWN]
Biography: Cannabis Growers’ and Merchants’ Cooperative, referred to as “CGMC”, was a weed-and-mushrooms-only market with a cult following of loyal users. CGMC was known for its high quality, selective vendor choices, and emphasis on the “quality over quantity” method of marketing, choosing to remain private and invite-only or semi-private over its long lifespan, rather than fully opening the gates. CGMC was shut down for fears of law enforcement retaliation soon after Dream closed its doors, but was unofficially reloaded and relaunched as CannaHome.
URL: joincgmcS5oplang.onion
Launched: June, 2016.
Shut down: May, 2019.
Dream
[INACTIVE: SHUT DOWN]
Biography: Dream Market was the longest-lived English-speaking DNM, with a lifespan of over six years. Administrated by the mysterious SpeedStepper, Dream was launched to little fanfare, but after the failures of rivals such as Evolution, Agora, AlphaBay and Hansa, Dream grew to become the most popular of its kind for many years, beating out its biggest rival, Wall Street Market, by a long shot.
Unfortunately, after a lengthy series of DDoS attacks, SpeedStepper made an announcement that they would be shutting down Dream until the ecosystem settled, publishing an onion address that would be used by the new and improved Dream Market “partner service” at some point in the future. Although many cash-grab scam markets were set up in the wake of their failure, that onion address has remained inactive.
URL: Itxocgh4nvwkofil onion
Partner URL: weroidjkazxqds21.onion
Launched: Mid-November, 2013.
Shut down: 30" of April, 2019.
Evolution
[INACTIVE: EXIT SCAMMED]
Biography: Evolution Market was a popular market founded by Verto, the administrator and creator of Tor Carding Forum, and his partner Kimble. The exponential growth of the market compared to others at the time is usually credited to its wide range of allowed products, its vibrant fraud community, and the fact it was mostly untouched by Operation Onymous. After just over a year of service, in which time it grew to become one of the two biggest markets at the time, Verto and Kimble abruptly shut down the market and disappeared with the users funds. While not the biggest exit scam in Darknet history, at the time it was considered a huge loss, with users losing a cumulative approximation of US$12 million stored in their escrow wallets.
URL: k5zq47j6wd3wdvjg.onion
Launched: 14” of January, 2014.
Shut down: March, 2015.
Hansa
[INACTIVE: SEIZED]
Biography: Hansa was a Europe-based Darknet market. Before it was seized in Operation Bayonet, Hansa was an immensely popular market, partially due to its usage of highly-secure multisig escrow.
On the 20" of June, 2017, the administrators were tracked down through law enforcement analysis of security leaks, discovery of old IRC logs, and Bitcoin tracing. Law enforcement officials took over the site and monitored it for the next month.
On the 4" of July, 2017, when AlphaBay was taken down, users flocked to Hansa, at which point the officials running it as a honeypot enacted the next phase of their plan. They modified the multisignature addresses to redirect funds to themselves, set the automatic metadata remover to sap as much information from uploaded pictures as possible, and published a malware-ridden Microsoft Excel file designed to deanonymize anybody who downloaded it in an insecure environment, before officially taking down the site and placing a seizure notice on it on the 19" of July.
Officials claimed to have recovered over 10,000 Hansa buyer addresses from these methods.
URL: hansamkt2rr6nfg3.onion
Launched: 2014.
Shut down: Seized 20" of June, 2017, officially shut down 19th/20th of July, 2017.
Hydra
[ACTIVE]
Biography: Launched in 2015, Hydra Market is a legendary Russian marketplace and one of the oldest in the Darknet, and believed to have over 3 million users. The only market to have widely accepted the use of the short-distance “Dead Drop” vending system, wherein a vendor places a package somewhere around the city and then reveals the location to the buyer to pick up themselves, Hydra is also at the forefront of many other innovations, including their Eternos project. Eternos is the first step by Hydra to monopolize the world of Darknet drug trade by global expansion of the Hydra base market, and is said to contain many never-before-seen features, including automated support AI, a totally new, decentralized network based on Tor, and a built-in coin exchange, among many other features.
Unfortunately, the administrators of Hydra have rescinded their previous launch deadline of the 1* of September, and announced the project has been suspended indefinitely, until they have the ability to restart it.
URL: hydraruzxpnew4af.onion
Launched: 2015.
OpenBazaar
[ACTIVE]
Biography: Created as a prototype named “DarkMarket” as programmer Amir Taaki’s submission to the Toronto 2014 Bitcoin Hackathon, the project was then taken over by a new group and rebranded OpenBazaar. The OpenBazaar project is an open-source attempt at a truly decentralized marketplace for all sorts of items, legal and illegal, and based on a hypothetical example of an improvement upon the Silk Road, which had been recently seized. Two years after the original prototype was created, the new developers came out with the first iteration of OpenBazaar in April, 2016, allowing users to buy and sell with Bitcoin.
URL: openbazaar.org
Launched: 4" of April, 2016 (prototype created April, 2014).
Silk Road
(INACTIVE: SEIZED]
Biography: While not the first official DNM, the Silk Road was the first to tie together the technologies of Bitcoin, Tor, and PGP, and to institute a simple and intuitive escrow and ratings system. Created by Ross Ulbricht, a man in his early 20s, as a way to sell magic mushrooms he grew himself, the market quickly gained a loyal following of buyers and vendors, helped in part by the likable and knowledgeable persona Ulbricht created at the recommendation of friend and mentor Variety Jones, who he had met over the site: the Dread Pirate Roberts.
With a glowing community that involved itself in the numerous sales, giveaways, and freebies that DPR encouraged, as well as a libertarian/anarchist book club where the free-thinkers of the Road got together to discuss whatever banned or difficult-to-find literature they were indulging in that week, the Silk Road seemed like a place free of troubles, although peeling back the curtain and looking into the past would allow you a glimpse into the many issues that DPR and his team of staff would handle every so often, such as the believed theft of money by Curtis Green (the money was actually stolen by his arresting officer, Shaun Bridges) and the subsequent hit DPR attempted on Green, to the extortion and trickery by Baltimore law enforcement official Carl Force under the monikers Nob, FrenchMaid, or DeathFromAbove. Others include the infamous exit of Tony76, to the number of DDoSers, doxxers, hackers and scammers that had to be dealt with every day, and the Silk Road was definitely not a utopia. However, the legacy of the Silk Road lives on even today, and can be seen in almost every DMM still in existence.
URL: silkroad6ownowfk.onion
Launched: February, 2011.
Shut down: October, 2013.
Silk Road 2.0
(INACTIVE: SEIZED]
Biography: Approximately a week after the fall of the original Silk Road, on 6" of November, 2013, former SR staff members Libertas (Gary Davis) and Inigo (Andrew Michael Jones), led by anew DPR called “DPR2” (Thomas White, StExo on the original SR), relaunched the market as Silk Road 2.0. A month later, on 20" of December, it was announced that Davis and Jones had been arrested using information gathered from Ulbricht’s laptop. A new administrator, Defcon (Blake Benthall) joined up on the site to return the site to working condition after DPR2 froze everything to contain the potential damage.
Exactly one year after launch, on 6" of November, 2014, authorities in Operation Onymous announced the arrest of Benthall the previous day. SR2.0 was shut down for good, and in 2019, they announced that during Onymous, they had also arrested Thomas White, but had chosen not to reveal that fact.
URL: silkroad7rm2puhj.onion
Launched: 6" of November, 2013.
Shut down: 6" of November, 2014.
Wall Street Market
(INACTIVE: EXIT SCAMMED]
Biography: After the shutdown of Dream Market, the second-largest market at the time, Wall Street, stepped in to fill the gap. After an exponential growth of the market following the influx of users, the administrators promptly exit scammed. A disgruntled community manager/PR under the username “Med3lin”, left out of the exit scam, leaked backend market information and administrator panel logins all over Dread in an attempt to extort users who didn’t encrypt market information. Law enforcement used the information in the admin panel, as well as failure by the thieving admins to properly anonymize their spoils, to arrest three administrators, a few techmins, and several other staff members, including Med3l1n and Nugacity, who were also revealed to have been staff on WSM’s sister site, Tochka Free Market/Point Market.
URL: wallstyizjhkrvmj.onion
Launched: Approximately 2017-2018.
Shut down: May, 2019.
News/Information/Literature Sites
Chronos [Site]
(INACTIVE: SHUT DOWN]
Biography: A news site launched by a user also under the name “Chronos”, this site also offered a vendor shop service and an XMR-BTC cryptocurrency exchange. Chronos was popular for its high-quality Chronos Opsec Guide series and a number of interviews with known vendors or market staff and admins. It was shut down by the administrator following a failed auction of the site.
URL: chronos75gkiuqqd.onion
DarkNetLive [Site]
[ACTIVE]
Biography: Launched by and named after anonymous journalist DarkNetLive, this site is not only the statistically most-popular news site on the Darknet, but also has a well-regarded onion directory, Community News section, and Arrests archive. It has also been a source of a number of popular news articles, including the infamous Mark DeCarlo/SpeedStepper allegations, collections of DNM terms-of-service posts, and market breakdowns and ratings.
Clearnet URL: darknetlive.com
Onion URL: darkzzx4avcsuofgfez5zq75cqc4mprjvfqy wo45dfcaxrwqg6qrifid.onion
DeepDotWeb
(INACTIVE: SEIZED]
Biography: The original and most well-known of the news sites, DeepDotWeb was a self-described “gateway to the Darknet”. Beyond the usual daily articles (or occasionally even two or three a day from the dedicated writing team and a rotating cast of freelance writers), DeepDotWeb also instituted the now-common trend of an onion directory, with it’s own built-in uptime checker and a visual chart ot easily show how often your favorite site was down.
The site was seized by law enforcement and administrators arrested after an obscure money-laundering law was dug up, allowing the privacy-minded journalists to be charged for their practice of putting market referral links in their directory, making money whenever a user signed up on that market with their provided link.
Clearnet URL: deepdotweb.com
Onion URL: deepdot35wvmeyd5.onion
Distributed Denial of Secrets
[ACTIVE]
Biography: A crew of freedom-bound individuals, Distributed Denial of Secrets has been involved in leaking information for the entirety of their lifetime. Often used as a source by organizations such as WikiLeaks, DDoSecrets, as they are commonly known, gained public notoriety with their publishing of the notorious BlueLeaks police data collection.
Clearnet URL: ddosecrets.com
Onion URL: ddosecretspzwfy7.onion
DNStats
[ACTIVE]
Biography: Once a popular site for market links and site uptime information, DNStats has drawn heavy criticism in recent years from other known figures, most publicly DarkNetLive, over accusations of phishing, outdated links, listing of untrustworthy markets, and more perceived “shady” behaviour.
Since then, the site has remained mostly silent, although still online.
URL: dnstats.net
Erowid
[ACTIVE]
Biography: Founded by the pseudonymous Fire Erowid and Earth Erowid, the Erowid Center is a vault of knowledge and information on dozens of types of mind-altering chemicals, compounds, and flora. It both compounds already-existing information and publishes new, including in-depth trip reports and factual articles from its widespread community of members. It also runs a comprehensive library of media related to the consumption of psychoactive compounds, and DrugsData.org (formerly Ecstasy Data.org), a testing service for street pills.
URL: erowid.org
HackTown
[ACTIVE]
Biography: Founded by cybersecurity enthusiast and CryptBB moderator Funshine, HackTown is a blog-style site that runs both paid and free hacking, fraud, pentesting and cybercrime courses and information articles. It has quickly gained a reputation as an incredibly useful site to both novice programmers and old hats wishing to sharpen their skills.
URL: hacktownpagdenbb.onion
The Hidden Wiki
[ACTIVE]
Biography: Originally founded quite early on in the development of the Darknet ecosystem as an anyone-can-edit site for information and links, the Hidden Wiki project was quickly hijacked by imitators and trolls, and dozens of low-quality clones sprung up touting phishing links, CP, or scam sites such as hitmen or red rooms. Nowadays, all sites describing themselves as “Hidden Wiki” or similar sobriquets should be considered not only useless, but actively dangerous.
URL: Various.
Imperial Library of Trantor
[ACTIVE]
Biography: The Imperial Library of Trantor, often shortened to “Imperial Library” or simply “Trantor”, is an online book repository allowing anyone to upload or download books in epub or pdf file format, for free. It also allows books to be read on the site itself, for those wary of downloading anything. The owner, Las Zenow (also going by the title Chief Librarian) has stated numerous times his motivation for founding the Imperial Library is to allow people to “finally have universal access to the culture” that literature provides.
URL: xfmro77i3lixucja.onion
PsychonautWiki
[ACTIVE]
Biography: PsychonautWiki is self-described as a “community-driven online encyclopedia that aims to document the field of psychonautics (i.e. exploration of altered states) in a comprehensive and scientifically-grounded manner.” Based on Wikipedia’s convenient MediaWiki format, PsychonautWiki uses input from dozens of members to build a comprehensive one-stop shop for information related to every facet of mind-altering substances.
Clearnet URL: psychonautwiki.org
Onion URL: psychonaut3z5aoz.onion
Tape
[ACTIVE]
Biography: Launched by and formerly owned by the team behind the exit-scammed Avior, Next Generation, Cryptonite, and Apollo (note: NOT related to Cryptonia and Apollon Markets), the news site Tape is currently a highly-active source of news articles related to the Darknet, narcotics, cryptocurrency, and privacy. It also features an attached forum.
URL: tapeucwutvne7150.onion
TheOnionWeb
(INACTIVE: UNKNOWN]
Biography: Launched in the post-DeepDotWeb journalism boom, TheOnionWeb quickly became a fairly popular site, before retreating to the background as sites like DarkNetLive took their place. It apparently went offline after the unexplained disappearance of all the staff.
Clearnet URL: theonionweb.com
Onion URL: onionwsoiu53xre32jwve7euacadvhprq2jytfttbsshrbo3execodad.onion
Directories/Search Engines
Ahmia
[ACTIVE]
Biography: One of the more popular search engines in the Darknet, Ahmia has features to search both onion and i2p results, making it useful for people trying to find information quickly. It also has strict policies on banned content showing up on search results, and anything against their Terms of Service can be reported and quickly blacklisted from the service.
Clearnet URL: ahmia.fi
Onion URL: msydgstlz2kzerdg.onion
DarkDotFail
[ACTIVE]
Biography: The #1 source of links and uptime information since the seizure of DeepDotWeb, Dark.Fail (founded and owned by user DarkDotFail) and the listings there on are widely considered by many users to be what makes a site worth it. Originally started as a simple Empire Market link checker following their blacklisting from DeepDotWeb, Dark.Fail now utilizes an uptime checker for every site, automatic PGP verification tool, and upholds the Onion Mirror Guidelines for market safety.
Clearnet URL: dark.fail
Onion URL: darkfailllnkf4vf.onion
DarkIndex
[ACTIVE]
Biography: Launched and upheld by the team behind the CryptBB cybersecurity forum, DarkIndex is a self-described “an anti-phishing resource and also an anti-DDoS resource to serve for the safety and integrity of all applications hosted on the TOR network.” A link directory, uptime checker and automated link replacer, DarkIndex also has a fascinating feature that allows PGP-verified links to be automatically submitted by admins of services, instead of waiting for the administrators of the directory to update them themselves. This is supposed to counteract against phishing accusations toward the directory administrators, as a PGP-verified record of every URL addition is kept.
URL: darkindexSpin6jb.onion
DuckDuckGo
[ACTIVE]
Biography: Owned by DuckDuckGo Inc, the DDG search engine (the default clearnet engine for the Tor Browser) prides itself on defending users privacy with no trackers, generic search results and using absolutely no private information. Following user backlash against Google’s predatory information theft, the number of users switching to DuckDuckGo is rising.
Clearnet URL: duckduckgo.com
Onion URL: 3g2upl4pq6kufc4m.onion
Grams
[INACTIVE: SHUT DOWN]
Biography: Launched in 2014, Grams was a massively popular search engine and vendor directory, as well as containing the Helix cryptocurrency tumbler. It shut down unexpectedly in 2017.
URL: grams7enufi7jmdl.onion
Kilos
[ACTIVE]
Biography: A Darknet search engine, vendor directory, and spiritual successor to Grams, Kilos was launched by user “ugu” to fill the need for a central service to find vendors in the wake of a series of market exit scams. As well as their basic features, Kilos also hosts a Bitcoin mixer (humorously named “Krumble”), a library of banned books, a live chat, and a “faceless forum”, which doesn’t require accounts to post.
URL: dnmugu4755642434. onion
Recon
[ACTIVE]
Biography: Launched by the team behind the Dread forum, Recon is a Grams-like service that automatically imports vendor data from a number of markets, as well as drawing from older archives, to present a full profile of a vendor’s stats. Vendors and markets can be searched for via usernames, PGP fingerprint, or public keys.
URL: reconponydonugup.onion
Forums/Social Media/Email Services
Bitcoin Talk
[ACTIVE]
Biograpy: Originally created by Satoshi Nakamoto, the pseudonymous creator of Bitcoin, to discuss his new invention, the Bitcointalk forum quickly grew to a massive size and became the #1 spot for cryptocurrency enthusiasts.
URL: bitcointalk.org
Bluelight
[ACTIVE]
Biography: Bluelight is a discussion forum for harm reduction techniques and uncensored information regarding controlled substances and their effects on the body and mind. It was founded in 1997, making it one of the longest-lived sites of its kind. It has been cited in many official studies, and has a long-running partnership with the Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies (MAPS).
URL: bluelight.org
Cock.li
[ACTIVE]
Biography: One of the most popular privacy-oriented email/XMPP hosting sites, Cock.li is renowned for its refusal to directly cooperate or hand user data over to law enforcement, although they do accept reports of illegal activity on its network so they can disable said criminal accounts if they go against their terms of service. It is owned and operated by the same group behind Cockbox, a privacy-based VPS service.
URL: cock.li
CryptBB
[ACTIVE]
Biography: A semi-private cybersecurity and hacking forum, CryptBB enforces a strict introduction-and-challenge feature to test members’ knowledge before allowing them into the main sections. The challenges are usually based around showing your knowledge of cybersecurity, pentesting, programming, or similar subjects. It was founded in 2017 by two users bearing the names “LongPig” and “Power”, and has outlived the majority of other popular cyber forums created at the same time.
URL: cryptbb2gezhohku.onion
DarkNetMarkets Avengers
[ACTIVE]
Biography: With a history going back to Reddit days, DarkNetMarkets Avengers (also called “DNMAvengers” or simply “DNMA”) is the most popular onion-based harm-reduction and testing forum ever. Originally founded by user Eudaimonia, it was sold in 2019 to a new admin, Bellaamy Black. It was most well-known for its partnership with the Energy Control testing service, allowing hundreds of users the ability to test their drugs.
URL: avengersdutyk3xf.onion
Dread
[ACTIVE]
Biography: Launched in the aftermath of the sudden bout of Darknet-centric subreddit bans, the Reddit-style onion forum Dread is the most popular of its kind. Founded by pentester HugBunter and administrated by him and developer Paris, Dread reached almost 200,000 registered accounts in almost three years. Communities are divided into subdreads and moderated by members of the community, with the most popular subdreads, such as /d/DarkNetMarkets and /d/Xanax getting over a dozen posts a day.
URL: dreadytofatroptsdj6io713xptbet6onoyno2yv7jicoxknyazubrad.onion
Elude
[ACTIVE]
Biography: A combination email service and cryptocurrency exchange, Elude says their main focus is the privacy of their users.
Clearnet URL: elude.in
URL: eludemaillhgqfkh5.onion
Envoy
(INACTIVE: MAINTENANCE]
Biography: Founded by Witchman05 and Imperiya administrator FOrtuna, Envoy is a general-discussion onion forum. Originally based on SMF, it was changed to a new script made from scratch under the name Superior CMS, then shut down for maintenance following issues.
URL: envoysSappps3bin.onion
Hidden Answers
[ACTIVE]
Biography: A social media site in questions-and-answers format, Hidden Answers attracts many users posting polls, gathering opinions or simply making conversation.
URL: answerszuvs3gg2164e6hmnryud|S5zgrmwm3vh6Shzszdghblddvfiqd.onion
Onionland
[ACTIVE]
Biography: Founded by Doxbin co-administrator Star and administrated by Aediot, Onionland is a Simple Machines Forum-based discussion site for cybersecurity, Darknet Markets, and related conversation.
URL: onionlandbakyt3j.onion
ProtonMail
[ACTIVE]
Biography: Owned and operated by Swiss corporation Proton Technologies AG alnog with its sister service ProtonVPN, ProtonMail is an end-to-end encrypted email service. As well as a clearnet URL and hidden service mirror, it is also available as an Android and iOS app.
Clearnet URL: protonmail.com
Onion URL: protonirockerxow.onion
Raddle
[ACTIVE]
Biography: Describing itself as an anarchist alternative to Reddit, Raddle was founded by Daniel Unedo, author and political activist, under the screen name Ziq. It is based on the FOSS Postmill forum software made from scratch by user Emma.
Clearnet URL: raddle.me
Onion URL: lfbg75wjgi4nzdio.onion
r/DarkNetMarkets
(INACTIVE: BANNED BY REDDIT ADMINS]
Biography: One of the most popular subreddits for discussion of hidden services and DNMs, 1/DarkNetMarkets was the birthplace of a great many things, including the DNM Buyer’s and Vendor’s Bibles. Following the ban of the subreddit, many users migrated to the newly-launched onion forum Dread.
URL: reddit.com/r/DarkNetMarkets
SecMail
[ACTIVE]
Biography: Based on the SquirrelMail email software, SecMail is a popular email service for privacy-focused individuals.
Clearnet URL: secmail-pro
Onion URL: secmailw453j7piv.onion
The Hub
[ACTIVE]
Biography: One of the oldest onion forums still in existence, dating back to the SR days, the Hub was founded by user Alfred and based on the SMF software. It has strict rules against fraud and hacking, but most other types of conversation are welcome. It has a partnership with sister forum The Majestic Garden.
URL: thehub7xbw4dc5r2.onion
The Majestic Garden
[ACTIVE]
Biography: A semi-private forum for discussion of psychedelics and entactogens, as well as miscellaneous opsec topics, The Majestic Garden (often shortened to “TMG”) has a rather unusual take on user registration, keeping registration completely closed the majority of the time and only opening for short stretches of time every so often for users to submit applications for registration. If said applications don’t adhere to their famously high-class opsec standards, particularly relating to PGP, they are discarded.
URL: talismanrestz7mr.onion
Tor Carding Forum
(INACTIVE: SHUT DOWN]
Biography: Tor Carding Forum, launched by later Evolution founder and administrator Verto, was known as the premier place for fraudsters and carders, and was indeed the first stop for many interested parties. It charged a US$50 registration fee upon registration, a measure meant to deter low-quality posters and bots from signing up.
Torigon
[ACTIVE]
Biography: Founded by the eponymous user Torigon and ex-Torum member xData, Torigon is an English and Russian-speaking cybersecurity and hacking forum. Throughout its life, Torigon has included and removed features such as a repository for hacking literature and media and a personal site pastebin. It is now administrated by users Torigon, SLH and Criminal in the wake of Torum’s demise.
URL: torigonsn3d63cldhr76mkfdzo3tndnl2tftiek55i2vilscufer6ryd.onion
Torum
[INACTIVE: SHUT DOWN]
Biography: The most popular onion cybersecurity forum in its time, Torum apparently received over 100,000 registered accounts over its lifespan. Rumoured to be run by Se7en, the Head Moderator of the defunct Empire Market, the forum shut down soon before the market itself exit scammed.
URL: torum43tajnrxritn4iumy 75giwbSyfw6cjq2czjikhtcac67tfif2yd.onion
Organizations
Electronic Frontier Foundation
[ACTIVE]
Biography: A non-profit activist group that has been advocating for digital rights since 1990, the EFF was founded by cypherpunks John Gilmore, John Perry Barlow and Mitch Kapor, as well as famously receiving funding from Apple magnate Steve Wozniak. They are based in San Francisco, although they are active internationally. The Executive Director since 2015 is lawyer Cindy Cohn (who formerly served as the Legal Director of the organization), who took over from predecessor Shari Steele, who also worked as Executive Director of the Tor Project.
Website: eff.org
Energy Control
[ACTIVE]
Biography: Springing from the Silk Road forum’s famed DoctorX drug-safety thread by Spain-based family doctor, Dr Fernando Caudevilla, the Energy Control international drug-testing service is one of the most popular of its type. Discriminating substance users can send in samples to the EC lab in Spain to have them tested and the results posted, allowing everyone to know exactly what they paid for.
Website: energycontrol-international.org
FreeRoss.org
[ACTIVE]
Biography: A website set up to advertise a petition for clemency for Ross Ulbricht, the administrator of the Silk Road market, the FreeRoss movement collects signatures and donations from supporters and spreads awareness about the miscarriages of justice in the case against him.
Website: freeross.org
I2P Team
[ACTIVE]
Biography: A group of pseudonymous developers responsible for the creation and upkeep of the I2P network protocol the [2P Team has been working on the Invisible Internet Project since 2003.
Website: geti2p.net
The Tails Project
[ACTIVE]
Biography: The Tails Project is a group responsible for the creation and upkeep of the Tails operating system, and have been working on their software since 2009.
Website: tails. boum.org
The Tor Project
[ACTIVE]
Biography: A group that evolved out of the original developers of the Tor network for the military, the members of the Tor Project are now the official owners and developers of the Tor Browser Bundle and related software.
Website: torproject.org
TripSit
[ACTIVE]
Biography: A harm-reduction collective, TripSit contains a number of tools for safe drug use, including a volumetric dosing calculator, a cross-dose effect graph to gauge the danger of mixing different substances, two chat systems (one for immediate assistance, one for general discussion), and an informational wiki.
Website: tripsit-me
WEDINOS
[ACTIVE]
Biography: An acronym for the Welsh Emerging Drugs and Identification of Novel Substances Project, WEDINOS is a group dedicated to testing and verifying drugs for users.
Website: wedinos.org
WikiLeaks
[ACTIVE]
Biography: A journalistic effort by Julian Assange and current editor-in-chief Kristinn Hrafnsson, WikiLeaks is a non-profit dedicated to publishing news leaks and exposing government secrets and anonymous media.
Website: wikileaks.org
Vendor Shop Services
HugBunter Shops
(INACTIVE: DISCONTINUED]
Biography: A vendor shop CMS and hosting service provided by Dread administrator HugBunter, recently discontinued.
URL: [none]
Imperiya
[ACTIVE]
Biography: A vendor shop CMS service provided by FOrtuna, also the basis for the Invictus Market.
URL: imperiyakggyacaf.onion
Hosting Services
Daniel’s Hosting
(INACTIVE: SHUT DOWN]
Biography: Provided by German developer Daniel Winzen, creator of the Daniel’s Chat service (based on Lucky Eddie Chat V2.0, a PHP-based chat software reworked by Winzen himself), Daniel’s Hosting was a popular free hosting service. It was shut down following numerous attacks by hackers.
Clearnet URL: danwin1210.me
Onion URL: danielas3rtn54uwmofdo3x2bsdifr47huasnmbgqzfrecsubupvtpid.onion
Freedom Hosting
[ACTIVE: RELOADED]
Biography: Following the original being seized on suspicion of hosting illegal pornography, Freedom Hosting V2 was launched and quickly became the most popular free hosting service following the shutdown of Daniel’s Hosting.
URL: fhostingineiwjg6cppciac2bemu42nwsupwvisihncezinok362qfrqd.onion
Kaizushi’s Little Onion Server
[ACTIVE]
Biography: Owned by security researcher Kaizushi along with its sister email service, Infantile, KLOSHost (as it is colloquially known) is a highly-regarded paid VPS provider. Kaizushi claims that every VPS is based on a hardened Gentoo Linux machine and secured so as to be practically impenetrable. Many vendor shops are known to be hosted on this service.
URL: kaizushihSiec2mxohpvbt5uaapqdnbluaasa2cmsirjtwrbx46cnaid.onion
Cryptocurrency
Bitcoin.org
[ACTIVE]
Biography: The main site for the cryptocurrency Bitcoin, Bitcoin.org was set up by Satoshi Nakamoto (the crypto’s pseudonymous inventor) to host the white paper for the new software. It now handles the majority of Bitcoin-related topics.
URL: bitcoin.org
GetMonero
[ACTIVE]
Biography: The main host for information about the cryptocurrency Monero, GetMonero also contains the download for the CLI and GUI wallet software.
URL: getmonero.org
MtGox
(INACTIVE: SHUT DOWN]
Biography: Originally created as an online trading exchange for Magic: the Gathering trading cards, it quickly became a popular spot to trade Bitcoin. It was shut down after numerous hacks and the theft of a massive sum of users’ money (referred to as being “goxxed”), resulting in the owners being prosecuted.
URL: mtgox.com
Thotbot’s XMRGuide
[ACTIVE]
Biography: Set up by Monero guru and creator of the XMR Feather Wallet Thotbot, the XMRGuide is a statis site dedicated to teaching the inexperienced to install, set up, back up, and safely utilize Monero in a matter of scenarios.
URL: xmrguide42y34onq.onion
XMR.to
[ACTIVE]
Biography: One of the most popular Bitcoin-Monero exchanges, XMR.to features a cheap and easy-to-use exchange interface that includes a no-Javascript mode.
URL: xmr.to
Software
Operating Systems:
-- Qubes
-- Tails
-- Whonix
Chat Software:
-- BitMessage
-- Pidgin
-- Signal
-- Wickr
Cryptocurrency:
-- Bisq
-- Bitcoin
-- Electrum Bitcoin Wallet
-- Litecoin
-- Monero
Encryption:
-- PGP
-- TrueCrypt
-- VeraCrypt
Commerce:
-- Eckmar
Security:
-- Endgame
Operating Systems
Qubes
[ACTIVELY DEVELOPED]
Biography: Qubes is a compartmentalized operating system with a focus on using separate virtual machines (referred to as “qubes”) for the purposes of security. It is often used in conjunction with Whonix.
Website: qubes-os.org
Tails
[ACTIVELY DEVELOPED]
Biography: TAILS, an acronym for The Amnesiac Incognito Live System, is an operating system able to be booted from removable media such as a USB stick or an SD card. A core feature of Tails is its ammesiac properties, meaning that between shut down and restart, all data is wiped and nothing is left on your computer’s hard drive. A persistent volume is able to be set up on Tails, however, allowing you to store data after shutdown to access again upon relaunch.
Website: tails. boum.org
Whonix
[ACTIVELY DEVELOPED]
Biography: A fairly-complex Linux-based OS, often used in conjunction with Qubes, Whonix is made of two parts, the Workstation (whereupon the majority of activity is done) and the Gateway (which routes every connection through Tor). It is considered one of the most secure anonymity-based operating systems in existence if set up properly, and is often used by pentesters, hidden service admins, and market admins.
Website: whonix.org
Chat Software
BitMessage
[ACTIVELY DEVELOPED]
Biography: Created by software developer Jonathan Warren in 2012, BitMessage became popular after it was revealed that government agencies such as the NSA had no luck in cracking the encryption of the software to get access to users’ messages.
Website: bitmessage.org
Pidgin
[ACTIVELY DEVELOPED]
Biography: One of the most popular Jabber clients and the default messaging software in the Tails OS, Pidgin supports communication in a number of protocols, most famously IRC and XMPP.
Website: pidgin.im
Signal
[ACTIVELY DEVELOPED]
Biography: An encrypted messaging software accessible from Android, iOS and desktop apps, Signal is a FOSS alternative to many closed-source applications. It allows text messaging, voice and video calls, and file sharing with contacts, as well as many other features.
Website: signal.org
Wickr
[ACTIVELY DEVELOPED]
Biography: Wickr is a semi-closed source messaging application for iOS, Windows, Mac, Linux and Android operating systems, developed by the San Francisco-based company of the same name.
Messages are end-to-end ecrypted and can be set to self-delete after a set amount of time.
Website: wickr.com
Cryptocurrency
Bisq
[ACTIVELY DEVELOPED]
Biography: A decentralized desktop software for exchanging Bitcoin for altcoin, Bisq is a popular alternative to many centralized or public exchanges.
Website: bisq.network
Bitcoin
[ACTIVELY DEVELOPED]
Biography: First invented in 2009 following a 2008 white paper by a pseudonymous person or group under the name Satoshi Nakamoto, Bitcoin is a decentralized peer-to-peer electronic currency. It has been praised for its use in circumventing government control, but criticized for its volatility and numerous high-profile thefts from exchanges.
Website: bitcoin.org
Electrum Bitcoin Wallet
[ACTIVELY DEVELOPED]
Biography: The most popular Bitcoin wallet in existence, Electrum is the default wallet on the Tails OS due to its ease of use and security.
Website: electrum.org
Litecoin
[ACTIVELY DEVELOPED]
Biography: The first and one of the most popular altcoins, Litecoin is almost identical to Bitcoin in terms of software. It was first invented in 2011.
Website: litecoin.com
Monero
[ACTIVELY DEVELOPED]
Biography: A popular altcoin, Monero utilizes a private blockchain rather than a public one to obfuscate transactions and provide anonymity to users. It was first invented in 2014.
Website: getmonero.org
Monero Wallet
[ACTIVELY DEVELOPED]
Biography: The official XMR wallet, provided by the developers behind the cryptocurrency, comes in both CLI and GUI form.
Website: getmonero.org
Encryption
PGP
[ACTIVELY DEVELOPED]
Biography: First created by Phil Zimmermann in 1991, PGP (an acronym for Pretty Good Privacy) is an program used to encrypt, decrypt, sign and verify messages cryptographically. It supports creation of 1024, 2048, 3072, and 4096-bit keys on a regular computer.
Website: pgp.com
TrueCrypt
[DEFUNCT]
Biography: Originally based on E4M (Encryption For the Masses) software, TrueCrypt was created by an anonymous person or group called “The TrueCrypt Team”. Hacker and developer Paul Le Roux was alleged to be behind the creation of the software.
Website: truecrypt.org
VeraCrypt
[ACTIVELY DEVELOPED]
Biography: A fork of the defunct TrueCrypt project, VeraCrypt is an open-source program for encryption and securing of files and media.
Website: veracrypt.fr
Commerce
Eckmar
[PASSIVELY DEVELOPED]
Biography: Created by the European software developer of the same name, the Eckmar market script is the most popular preexisting codebase for DNMs at this time. It is officially sold for approximately US$599, although leaks and cracks do exist, although most are riddled with backdoors or malware.
Website: [none]
Security
Endgame
[ACTIVELY DEVELOPED]
Biography: Primarily developed by Dread administrator Paris and White House Market owner Mr_White, although with input from a variety of other sources, the Endgame DDoS shield is the Darknet’s answer to Cloudflare, and works hand-in-hand with a JS-less reCaptcha clone called “deCaptcha”.
Website: dreadytofatroptsdj6io713xptbet6onoyno2yv7jicoxknyazubrad.onion/d/Endgame
Dictionary of Terminology
NOTE: This is a basic glossary, and may be incomplete. It will be expanded in future editions.
A
Alprazolam (Alp) - A benzodiazepine sold under the brand name Xanax.
Alt - Alternate account, the term for when a user has two or more active accounts on a site.
Altcoin - Any cryptocurrency alternative to Bitcoin.
Amnesiac - "Forgetful" software that doesn't save data, such as Tails OS.
Amphetamines - A type of stimulant drug.
B
Bars - A form of drug shape, usually long and thin. Most often used for benzodiazepines.
Bartard - A derogatory term for someone whose mental state is negatively affected by benzodiazepines.
Bayonet, Operation - A law enforcement operation resulting in the concurrent takedowns of AlphaBay and Hansa Market.
Benzodiazepine (Benzo) - A type of depressant drug, often used to treat anxiety or panic attacks.
Bitcoin (BTC) - The most popular cryptocurrency.
Blockchain - A public or private ledger of cryptocurrency transactions.
Bootable - A software or operating system able to be launched from removable media such as a USB stick or SD card.
Bunk - Slang term for fake narcotics with no effect.
Busted - Arrested or compromised.
C
Caps - A popular form of drug shape made by putting powder or small bits of narcotic into a small container.
Carding - A type of fraud based around the use of credit cards.
Cocaine (Coke) - A stimulant drug, one of the most popular in the world.
Controlled Delivery (CD) - A law enforcement tactic involving monitoring buyer's receival of a seized package.
Cryptocurrency - A type of decentralized electronic currency.
Cryptography - The study of encryption.
D
Darknet Market (DNM) - A Tor-based commerce site, usually allowing the sale of illegal narcotics.
Dash - A popular form of altcoin.
DDoS - Distributed Denial of Service, in which an attacker forces a site offline with an unblockable amount of rapid connections.
Dealer - A salesman, usually of drugs.
Decoy - An innocuous item placed in a package to distract law enforcement and obscure illegal contents.
Decrypt - To reverse an encryption method and reveal the message to read easily.
Deep Web - Any site, file, directory or anything else not indexed by search engines. Often erroneously confused with "Darknet”.
Dimethyltryptamine (DMT) - A popular psychedelic and the most powerful on earth.
Direct Deal (DD) - To conduct business with a vendor directly, rather than through a market with escrow.
Dox - To leak or publicly post personally identifying information of a person, including name, address, or description.
Drop Ship - A vending tactic involving the vendor passing the buyer's address on to another vendor to ship to, eliminating any need for the middleman (dropshipper) to handle anything illegal in person.
E
Electrum - The most popular type of Bitcoin wallet.
Encrypt - To use an encryption program or method to render a message unreadable to all those without the means to decrypt.
Entactogen - A type of drug often associated with stimulants, named after their ability to enhance user's emotions.
Escrow - A form of buyer and vendor protection in which a third party (aside from the vendor and buyer) holds money in place until the buyer receives their product.
Exit Scam - A type of scam in which a vendor or market convinces users to release as much money as possible into their control, before disappearing with the funds.
F
Fake ID - Any form of fraudulent identification.
Fentanyl! (Fent) - A dangerous and highly-potent opiate.
Finalise Early (FE) - To release money from escrow before receiving a product.
Forum - A form of social media site where users can discuss a range of subjects.
Fraud - A method of using deception or unlawful methods to gain money.
Free Open-Source Software (FOSS) - Software with the source code freely posted on the Internet for anyone to use, replicate, and add to.
FUD - Fear, Uncertainty and Doubt; basically unverifiable or false rumours meant to make people lose trust in a site, service, person or group.
H
Hitmen - A myth based around the urban legend of being able to contract murderers-for-hire on the Darknet.
Honeypot - A fake site run by law enforcement to gather information or money on criminal users.
Hotspot - When a product has “hot spots" and "cold spots", it means it is more or less potent in different areas of the pill, cap, bar, crystal, tab, or other form of consumption.
I
I2P - A type of anonymity network similar to Tor, based on the Invisible Internet Project protocol.
J
Jabber - A type of communication method.
L
Linux - A brand of operating systems, usually FOSS. Many are based around different usages, including security, anonymity, pentesting, convenience or web hosting.
Litecoin - The first and possibly most popular altcoin.
Love Letter (LL) - An official notice from law enforcement to a buyer informing them of a seized illegal package.
Low-Hanging Fruit - A forum of buyer, vendor, or other user that is incredibly gullible or insecure.
LSD - Lysergic acid diethylamide, a popular form of psychedelic drug.
M
Magic Mushrooms - A family of psychedelic fungi containing psilocybin.
Mariana's Web - A fictional "deeper layer" of the Darknet.
MDMA - Methylene Dioxymethamphetamine, a popular entactogen, stimulant and party drug.
Metadata - User and device information saved in a photo, screenshot, or similar type of file media. Usually removed by the security-minded before being shared.
Meth - Methamphetamine, a popular stimulant.
Microdose - The practice of taking a small dose of a narcotic, below the dosage at which it usually shows effects, for perceived nootropic or cognitive effects.
Monero - A popular privacy-based altcoin.
Multisig - The practice of two or three out of three people in a transaction (Buyer, Vendor, and Market) hold keys to an escrow wallet, meaning the money can only be released by the appropriate number of people using their keys.
Murder Homeless People - A popular joke term used as a euphemism for dealing drugs in real life.
O
Onion - The TLD for all websites based on the Tor network, described as "hidden services”. It is referred to as that because of the "layered" approach to relays on the Tor Browser.
Onymous, Operation - A law enforcement operation resulting in the takedown of a number of hidden services, including Silk Road 2, Doxbin, and Cloud 9.
Opsec - Operation Security, the practice of remaining secure and anonymous on the Darknet.
Overdose - The effect of taking more than a safe amount of a particular narcotic relative to the user's physical condition and tolerance. An overdose can result in physical or mental harm, or even death.
P
P2P - Peer To Peer Networking, a form of networking in software in which every participant (or "peer") is equally privileged and shares tasks equally.
PGP - Pretty Good Privacy, a popular encryption program.
Persistent - The opposite of Amnesiac, a persistent software or OS stores data upon shutdown to be used the next time it is launched.
Pharma - Pharmaceutical-grade narcotics, made in an official laboratory.
Phishing - A method of fraud involving the creation of fake login pages for websites to steal user data.
Pidgin - A software used for communication with others using IRC, XMPP, or similar protocols.
PIHKAL - Phenethylamines I Have Known and Loved, a well-known book by Alexander and Ann Shulgin.
Pills - A form of drug similar to a bar, but usually smaller.
Private Key - One part of an encryption keypair, a private key is used to sign or encrypt messages by one party, and should NEVER be shared.
Psychonaut - A term for someone who frequently uses psychedelics.
Psyops - Psychological Operations, a type of psychological warfare.
Public Key - One part of an encryption keypair, a public key is shared with other people to allow them to encrypt messages to you or verify messages you have signed with that key.
Purity - The measure of how clean or potent a drug is.
Q
Qubes - A form of compartmentalized and security-focused operating system based on Linux.
R
Reagent - A chemical added to another chemical to cause a reaction. This method is often used in test kits to verify the makeup of an unknown narcotic.
Red Rooms - A type of urban legend based around the myth of finding live-streamed torture and murder videos on the Darknet.
Research Chemical (RC) - A type of designer drug, often sufficiently new as to have no official legislature against the use of them.
Re-Up - Slang term for a street dealer or vendor buying a new batch of a product to refill their stocks.
Review - A public form of feedback on a vendor's shipping ability, communication, and product quality.
S
Scam - When one vendor, buyer, or other user steals money from another.
Seized - A package is seized if it is discovered by law enforcement and taken.
Selective Scam - A form of scam in which a vendor sends the majority of products, but scams every once ina while.
Serotonin Syndrome - A type of medical effect that happens after the careless use of entactogen, stimulant, or similar drugs.
Sheet - A page of tabs/blotters, usually up to 200 or so.
Shill - A user giving good or bad feedback on someone else with the intention of changing public opinion, while secretly benefitting from doing so.
Sockss - A popular type of proxy software.
Subdread - A subforum based on popular Darknet social media site Dread.
Subreddit - A subforum based on popular clearnet social media site Reddit.
SWIM - Someone Who Isn't Me, a saying on illegalist forums and sites to distance a user from illegal activity (e.g.: "SWIM would like to order drugs on the Darknet").
T
Tab - A form of drug consumption media created by absorbing dissolved or liquid narcotic substance into a piece of perforated or unperforated paper. Also known as a "blotter".
Tails - An amnesiac, bootable operating system with a focus on anonymity.
Telegram - A popular type of messaging software.
Test Kit - An apparatus used for finding out the active ingredient in an unknown narcotic.
TIHKAL - Tryptamines I Have Known and Loved, a popular book by Alexander and Ann Shulgin and the sequel to PIHKAL.
Tor - A type of anonymity network accessed via the Tor Browser.
Tor 2 Door (T2D) - The time it takes between a vendor accepting an order and it arriving at the buyer's address.
Tripping - The act of being under the influence of a mind-altering, usually psychedelic substance.
Tripsitter - A sober person employed by a person under the effects of a psychedelic substance to watch out for their wellbeing.
TrueCrypt - A now-defunct software for encrypting and securing files.
Tweaker - A derogatory term for someone negatively mentally impaired by stimulants, usually amphetamines or methamphetamine.
V
V2 - A type of onion address comprised of 16 characters, widely considered less secure and DDoS-proof than the alternative, v3 addresses.
V3 - A type of onion address comprised of 56 characters, ostensibly more secure and impervious to DDoS than v2 addresses.
Vendor - A person who sells narcotics or other goods or services on a Darknet Market.
Veracrypt - The successor to TrueCrypt, a software available for file encryption and security.
VPN - Virtual Private Network, a type of proxifying anonymity software.
VPS - Virtual Private Server, a virtual machine used as a hosting server for a website.
W
Whonix - An anonymity-focused and Linux-based operating system, often used with Qubes. It is mostly catered to experienced Linux users with a higher risk profile than Tails users.
Wickr - A popular type of communication software.
X
XMPP - A type of communication protocol, compatible with numerous software, including Pidgin.
2
2C-B - A psychedelic party drug, often sold in powder or pill form.
Written by BadMedicine
A resource for researchers
Version 1.0.1, 4/22/2021
DISCLAIMER
This guidebook is for informational purposes only, and does not directly condone or encourage contact with anybody listed here, especially those involved in illegal businesses. For the purposes of this guidebook, “Darknet figures” is defined as not only those who directly took part in the ecosystem of the Tor network of onion addresses and the economies therein, but also those who may have played a part in it (authors, journalists, sites, other notable fixtures).
Also, great care has been taken to keep this book as factual and up-to-date as possible, although by the very nature of the Internet, there will always be a little bit of knowledge rot.
This is not only a dictionary of still-active figures. Many of them have been added or left in, despite retirement, arrest, death or otherwise inactivity, in the interests of keeping them alive in our memories for their actions while they were still active, or simply for archival reasons. Inactive characters will be marked with an [INACTIVE] tag, along with a reason.
Finally, due to the nature of pseudonyms and pen-names on the Internet (and exacerbated by the anonymous nature of Tor and the Darknet) most-common names have been placed in alphabetical order as best as possible, and popularly-known aliases stated next to them for neatness. Sites where the administrator and site both have the same name (ex: DarkNetLive, DarkDotFail, etc) have been tagged with [Person] and [Site] labels on their titles to differentiate the entries.
ABOUT
The Darknet Phone Book is the fruit of my effort to create an all-in-one resource for anyone looking to learn more about the Darknet, misunderstood and mysterious as it is to the layman. Originally starting as a glossary and timeline for my own personal use during my research, it quickly grew to encompass a set of biographies, then site entries, then finally became as big as it is today. Plus, it will be constantly updated with new info, bigger entries, and more features, meaning there ’Il always be something new to learn.
Thank you for reading the Darknet Phone Book.
Table of Contents
1: Timeline
2: People
2.1: Vendors
2.2: Market Admins/Staff
2.3: Service/Forum Admins/Staff
2.4: Journalists/Writers/Researchers/Authors
2.5: Hackers/DDoSers/Phishers/Pentesters/Developers
3: Sites
3.1: Markets/Commerce
3.2: News/Information/Literature
3.3: Directories/Search Engines
3.4: Forum/Social Media/Email
3.5: Organizations
3.6: Vendor Shop Services
3.7: Hosting Services
3.8: Cryptocurrency
4: Software's
4.1: Operating Systems
4.2: Chat Software
4.3: Cryptocurrency
4.4: Encryption
4.5: Commerce
4.6: Security
5: Dictionary of Terminology
Timeline
NOTE: Information for this timeline was gathered from multiple sources. Credit goes to Dread user /u/YosemiteGhostWrite’s timeline site Reason at axo6wll7qszvnySuksdmq6x6r2i7gfkbmc3vhxbgopor4fwlh3btqfyd.onion/, the Silk Road Tales and Archives site hosted at antilop.cc/sr/ by researcher LaMoustache, and gwern.net, hosted by Gwern Branwen, among many others. Quotes taken directly from any of the above sites will be marked with a {YGW}, {La_M}, or {Gw}, respectively. Other sources will be credited individually.
This timeline is incomplete, and will be added to in future revisions.
1970s: Students at Stanford and MIT used what was then called the ARPANET to coordinate the purchase of cannabis. {YGW}
1980s: By the end of the 1980s, newsgroups like alt.drugs would become online centres of drug discussion and information; however, any related deals were arranged entirely off-site directly between
individuals. {YGW}
1990s: One of the better-known web-based drug forums, The Hive, launched in 1997, serving as an information sharing forum for practical drug synthesis and legal discussion. The Hive was featured in a Dateline NBC special called The "X" Files in 2001, bringing the subject into public discourse. {YGW}
2000s: From 2003, the "Research Chemical Mailing List" (RCML) would discuss sourcing "Research Chemicals" from legal and grey sources as an alternative to forums such as alt.drugs.psychedelics.
However Operation Web Tryp led to a series of website shut downs and arrests in this area.
Since the year 2000, some of the emerging cyber-arms industry operates online, including the Eastern European "Cyber-arms Bazaar", trafficking in the most powerful crimeware and hacking tools.
In the 2000s, early cybercrime and carding forums such as ShadowCrew experimented with drug wholesaling on a limited scale. (YGW}
2006: The Farmer's Market was launched in 2006.
3" January, 2009: Satoshi Nakamoto, the anonymous creator of Bitcoin, mines the “genesis block” of the BTC blockchain.
2010: The Farmer’s Market moves to Tor.
February, 2011: Ross Ulbricht founds the Silk Road, the first Tor-based market (later referred to as
“Darknet Markets” or “DNMs”) with Bitcoin escrow under the usernames “admin” and “silkroad”.
June, 2011: Journalist Adrian Chen publishes the now-infamous Gawker article about Silk Road, “The Underground Website Where You Can Buy Any Drug Imaginable”. This causes Silk Road’s user numbers to increase dramatically.
2012: The Farmer’s Market was shut down and several operators arrested during Operation Adam Bomb, a two-year DEA operation. Officials are believed to have traced the payments made using PayPal and Western Union (the main payment methods used on the site) to track them down.
October, 2013: Silk Road is shut down by US law enforcement officials. Ross Ulbricht, the founder and administrator of the site, is arrested. Information on his seized laptop leads to the arrest of several other SR staff members, including SameSameButDifferent, Libertas, Inigo, and Roger “Variety Jones” Clark, Ulbricht’s mentor and “hidden admin”.
6™ November, 2013: Silk Road 2.0 launches, administrated by former SR member StExo, under the username “DPR2”, and moderated by a number of staff from the original SR.
November-December, 2013: Launch of Dream Market.
2014: Bitcointalk user thankful_for_today releases a fork of Bitcoin called “BitMonero”. After criticism from the community over several issues and the disappearance from development of thankful_for_today, a user called “Johnny Mnemonic” and his team took over development and renamed BitMonero to simply Monero.
14” January, 2014: Evolution Marketplace founded by Verto (also founder of Tor Carding Forum) and Kimble.
February, 2014: Utopia Market, a market modeled after the popular Black Market Reloaded, is launched. It is seized by police eight days later.
April, 2014: Launch of Grams, a Darknet search engine and vendor database.
June, 2014: The people behind Grams launch a new service called Helix, a bitcoin tumbler.
November, 2014: Operation Onymous, a law enforcement operation between agencies in several countries attacked and shut down ostensibly 400 sites (later proven to be a false claim by law enforcement and amended to “upwards of 50”), including Doxbin, Cloud9, and Silk Road 2.0. Other markets, such as Agora and Evolution, were untouched, and in fact enjoyed a surge in users from refugees of other markets. Blake Benthall (Defcon) and Thomas White (StExo/DPR2) were both arrested in the wake of Onymous, although White’s arrest was kept secret until 2019.
18" March, 2015: Evolution Marketplace freezes user fund withdrawal and steals money from escrow wallets, exit scamming. It is believed they got away with over US$12 million.
July, 2017: Operation Bayonet, a coordinated attack by law enforcement, shuts down AlphaBay and Hansa Markets in conjunction, arresting several vendors and market staff. AlphaO2, real name Alexandre Cazes, the administrator of AlphaBay, was also arrested, and committed suicide by hanging himself with a towel in his cell in Thailand a few days later.
October, 2017: Trade Route Market, which gained massive popularity in the months after Operation Bayonet, exit scammed with users’ coins after a lengthy extortionn period by a group called PhishKingz, following said group hacking and robbing their escrow wallets.
December, 2017: On the 9" of December, the admin of Grams posted in their personal subreddit, 1/Grams, that they would be suspending all services, including Grams and Helix, within seven days.
February-March, 2018: Public launch of the Reddit-style Darknet forum Dread in the wake of a crackdown of Darknet and crime-oriented subreddits, most notoriously r/DarkNetMarkets. Dread was launched by previously-known pentester HugBunter and his team.
May, 2019: After a record-breaking six years of activity and growing to become the largest existing market at the time, spurred by the fall of rivals such as Trade Route, AlphaBay, Hansa, and SR2.0, Dream Market announces after a several-months-log period of unstoppable distributed denial of service attacks by an unknown adversary using the Dread username “hereugoagain” (originally “hereugo”), they would be shutting down. The DDoSer had been using an unpatched flaw in the Tor network to cheaply, easily and effectively down market sites. Dream also announced in its shutdown post they would be returning with a new market, posting the onion address they would be using. At the time of writing, this onion address has remained inactive, although two (main) unofficial markets, Dream Alt and Samsara, were launched by individuals unrelated to the original Dream. Both ended up quickly exit scamming.
September, 2019: Popular Darknet news site and directory DeepDotWeb seized and shutdown, and admins arrested.
2! March, 2020: HugBunter and Paris, the admins of Dread, launch Recon, a vendor database and search engine, as a spiritual successor to the popular but defunct Grams.
August, 2020: The Torum cybersecurity and hacking forum shuts down. A few days later, Empire Market, believed to be run by the same people, pulls a large-scale exit scam, and head moderator Se7en reveals the admins had been paying weekly bounties for several months to infamous DDoSer SchwererGustav.
People
Vendors:
-- AlpraKing (Quantik)
-- DutchMasters
-- Gammagoblin
-- HeinekenExpress
-- NSWGreat (Cody Ronald Ward, Bliss)
-- OpiateConnect
-- OxyMonster (Gal Vallerius)
-- PharmaK 1ng1
-- Psycellium
-- SamSpade2
-- TheWhiteLight
-- Tony76
-- Trust-In-Us (TeamTrust)
-- 2happytimes2
Market Admins/Staff
-- AlphaO2 (Alexandre Cazes)
-- Backopy
-- Chronicpain (Curtis Green, Flush)
-- Defcon (Blake Benthall)
-- DeSnake
-- Dread Pirate Roberts (Ross Ulbricht, Frosty, Altoid, silkroad)
-- Kimble
-- Libertas (Gary Davis)
-- Penissmith (Bryan Connor Herrell, Botah)
-- SpeedStepper
-- StExo (Thomas White, DPR2, Cthulhu)
-- Variety Jones (Roger Thomas Clark, Plural of Mongoose, Cimon)
-- Verto
Service/Forum Admins/Staff
-- Chronos
-- DarkDotFail
-- DarknetLive
-- DeepDotWeb
-- FOrtuna
-- HugBunter
-- Kaizushi
-- Karpeles, Mark
-- Paris
-- Syntax
-- Winzen, Daniel
-- Witchman05
Journalists/Writers/Authors/Researchers
-- Bilton, Nick
-- Branwen, Gwem
-- Caudevilla, Fernando (DoctorX)
-- Chen, Adrian
-- LaMoustache
-- Monteiro, Chris (Deku_shrub)
-- Nakamoto, Satoshi
-- Ormsby, Eileen (OzFreelancer)
Hackers/DDoSers/Phishers/Pentesters/Developers
-- Clownsec
-- hereugo (hereugoagain)
-- PhishKingz
-- SchwererGustav
Vendors
AlpraKing
(INACTIVE: RETIRED]
Aliases: Quantik.
Biography: AlpraKing was a large-scale alprazolam manufacturer who pressed thousands of Xanax bars daily. He was known for his showmanship-like demeanour, regularly boasting on Reddit about his perceived wealth, power and skill, and for the numerous memes spawning around him and his customers, such as the famed “AlpraCream” video, the picture of a man alleged to be him with a snake on his head, and the infamous video of two of his employees watching bars pour out of the pill press and shouting “dollar dollar dollar 50 cents 50 cents 50 cents”. He also wrote the AlpraKing Kingpin Handbook, a basic guide to “kingpinry” that still makes the rounds on Reddit to this day, inconsistencies and all.
Contact Information/Forum Accounts:
Reddit - AV/AlpraKing {Account Suspended}
Market Accounts:
Dream - AlpraKing
AlphaBay - AlpraKing
DutchMasters
[ACTIVE]
Biography: DutchMasters is a large-scale bulk-only vendor with several resellers, the largest of which being HighGradeMasters, BelvedereDrugs, and CottageIndustry. He also owns the DutchMastersHQ personal forum, and his own private site.
Contact Information/Forum Accounts:
Dread - /u/DutchMasters
DMHQ - DutchMasters
TorBox - mastersofdutch
Tox - 6212C0376A5EC99F2B91346EF4CDC5C?21897DCEB98910D671140A9EA5D8EE936BA1B2D08E5 OF
Market Accounts:
OpenBazaar - DutchMasters
Personal Onion - DutchMasters
Subdread: /d/DutchMasters
GammaGoblin
[ACTIVE]
Biography: GammaGoblin is the longest-lived and most-popular LSD vendor in existence in the Darknet, with consistently-dosed product and over seven years of LSD synthesis and vending experience, as well as local resellers in almost every continent in the world. Due to the high demand for his product, GammaGoblin himself sells only in bulk, and only on very selective platforms, currently only on The Majestic Garden and his own personal onion, known as PushingTaboo.
Contact Information/Forum Accounts:
The Majestic Garden - GammaGoblin
Dread - /u/gammagoblin_official
Market Accounts:
Personal Onion (PushingTaboo) - GammaGoblin
Subdread: /d/GammaGoblin.
HeinekenExpress
[ACTIVE]
Aliases: HE, HExpress
Biography: HeinekenExpress is a large-scale vendor for a wide range of products, notably amphetamines and ketamine, and fill both bulk and personal orders. They have been vending for over 5 years, at the time of writing, on the majority of major markets, as well as their own personal vendor shop.
Contact Information/Forum Accounts:
Dread - /u/HeinekenExpress
Market Accounts:
Wall Street - HeinekenExpress
Dream - HeinekenExpress
Berlusconi - HeinekenExpress
Rapture - HeinekenExpress
Olympus - HeinekenExpress
Nightmare - HeinekenExpress.
White House - HeinekenExpress
Monopoly - HeinekenExpress
Dark - HeinekenExpress
Personal Onion - HeinekenExpress
Subdread: /d/HeinekenExpress
NSWGreat
(INACTIVE: ARRESTED]
Aliases: Cody Ronald Ward, Bliss.
Biography: NSWGreat, real name Cody Ronald Ward, was an Australian vendor of opiates, MDMA, amphetamines and LSD and former member of staff on Evolution Market. At the time of his arrest in 2019, Ward, aged 26, was estimated to have over AUD$17 million tied up in his drug ring. Running his organization of more than 10,000 completed transactions since 2015 from the comfort of his seaside home and working with his partners in crime, Shanese and Patricia Koullias, Ward was known for his abrasive and narcissistic personality, frequently showing off photos of expensive cars and fancy houses on his social media profiles.
Market Accounts:
AlphaBay - NSWGreat
Abraxas - NSWGreat
Agora - NSWGreat
Dream - nswgreat
OpiateConnect
[ACTIVE]
Aliases: OpiateConnect369, OC
Biography: A long-term vendor of opiates and benzodiazepines, OpiateConnect is a controversial figure for his unreliable shipping times in the past and history of oddly-manufactured bars, although his following of loyal customers insists that these issues have all been fixed and everyone who missed out has been reimbursed for their trouble. Despite the rumours, OpiateConnect still maintains a healthy presence on Darknet forums and their own market profiles, frequently referring to all his customers as “my friend”.
Contact Information/Forum Accounts:
Dread - /u/OpiateConnect369
Jabber - [email protected]
Market Accounts:
Apollon - opiateconnect
Empire - opiateconnect
White House - opiateconnect369
Dark - opiateconnect369
Personal Onion - OpiateConnect
Subdread: /d/OpiateConnect
OxyMonster
(INACTIVE: ARRESTED]
Aliases: Gal Vallerius.
Biography: OxyMonster, a vendor of Ritalin, OxyContin, and similar substances as well as a member of Dream Market staff, was arrested in 2017 and revealed to be Gal Vallerius, 38-year-old French-Israeli man who had flown from his home in France to get to the World Beard and Moustache Championship in Austin, Texas, in which he was a contestant. Upon his flight touching down in Atlanta International Airport, however, he was apprehended by authorities who had tracked down his real identity through Bitcoin transactions from his vendor shop’s “tip jar’, which went directly to a LocalBitcoins account under his real name, as well as stylometric analysis of his posts leading to social media accounts. Upon his arrest, law enforcement officials broke into his laptop, finding incriminating evidence and his personal encryption keys in a file labeled “OxyMonster”. He was not only charged with offenses related to his own business, but also due to his role in staffing Dream.
His unbelievable arrest (apprehended on his way to a beard convention), however, has raised suspicion for some, most notably a user under the alias “Shittyk1dz”, who wrote an article on DarknetLive alleging that Vallerius had travelled to Atlanta to meet up with a man named Mark DeCarlo, who he believed to be Dream administrator SpeedStepper. Evidence is tenuous, however, and the article was removed shortly after, although not before being shared among users of Darknet forums.
Market Accounts:
AlphaBay - OxyMonster
Abraxas - OxyMonster
Evolution - OxyMonster
Nucleus - OxyMonster
Dream - OxyMonster
PharmaK1ng1
[ACTIVE]
Aliases: therealpk1, PharmaKing, PerfectXanax, PharmaKing1
Biography: One of the longest-running still-active benzodiazepine vendors, Pharmak1ng1 has been around for years and was one of AlpraKing’s biggest rivals. He is also believed to have supplied the majority of other Xanax vendors at several points in production.
As is usual with Xanax vendors, he has had issues with supply at many points of his history, but if current reviews are to be believed, he is reliable at the time of writing, selling well-pressed flualprazolam bars.
Contact Information/Forum Accounts:
Dread - /u/therealpk1
Auto-reply email - [email protected]
Personal email - [email protected]
Market Accounts:
Agora - PharmaK Ing
AlphaBay - PharmaK1ng1
Abraxas - PharmaK Ing
Middle Earth - pharmaking
Valhalla - pharmaking1
Dream - pharmak1ng
Empire - pharmaking1
White House - pharmakIng
CanadaHQ - pharmak1ng
Personal Onion - pharmaking1
Wall Street - perfectxanax
Dream - perfectxanax
Empire - Perfectxanax
Psycellium
[ACTIVE]
Biography: As a well-regarded vendor who has inhabited most major markets in recent years, Psycellium is also one of the most popular and widely-used GammaGoblin resellers and a Shining Star vendor on The Majestic Garden, selling product in both bulk and personal amounts at good quality.
Contact Information/Forum Accounts:
Dread - /u/Psycellium
The Majestic Garden - Psycellium.
Market Accounts:
Wall Street - Psycellium
Empire - Psycellium
Olympus - Psycellium
Dream - Psycellium
Nightmare - Psycellium
SamSpade2
[ACTIVE]
Aliases: Sam Spade, SamSpade
Biography: Similar to Psycellium, SamSpade2 is a popular, long-term LSD vendor and GG reseller, as well as a verified vendor on The Majestic Garden. He is a favorite among his customers for his decent shipping times, good quality product, and fast communications.
Contact Information/Forum Accounts:
Dread: /u/SamSpade2
BitMessage: BM-2cXqV4cjFy 1u2QSHjV Xp5JQnm5uxtNSoBp
The Majestic Garden: SamSpade2
Market Accounts:
AlphaBay - SamSpade2
Empire - SamSpade2
White House - samspade2
Subdread: /d/SamSpade2
TheWhiteLight
[ACTIVE]
Biography: As one of the Darknet’s premier LSD producers and salesmen, TheWhiteLight has enjoyed a distinguished career, with much praise dedicated to his habit of offering sales and giveaways on one of the many markets he’s patronized over the years, as well as The Majestic Garden.
Contact Information/Forum Accounts:
Dread - /u/TheWhiteLight
The Majestic Garden - TheWhiteLight
Email - [email protected]
Market Accounts:
Wall Street - TheWhiteLight
Dream - TheWhiteLight
White House - thewhitelight
Empire - TheWhiteLightL
Subdread: /d/TheWhiteLight
Tony76
(INACTIVE: ALLEGEDLY ARRESTED]
Alleged Aliases: LucyDrop, Marijuanaismymuse, Redandwhite
Biography: The story of Tony76 is muddled and it’s unlikely to ever be sorted out cleanly. What we do know, however, is that on the original Silk Road, there was a vendor called Tony76 who was popular for his one-stop shop for the majority of products. When the Dread Pirate Roberts, administrator of the market, announced a huge sale with benefits for buyers and vendors market-wide for the 20" of April (4/20, a reference to cannabis, hence the title “4/20 Sale”), Tony76 ran a huge sale with discounts for all his loyal customers. A few days later, Tony76 announced that a rival vendor had contacted him and threatened to tank his business with thousands of fake reviews, and that he wasn’t willing to keep so much money in the Silk Road escrow system at any one time. To counter this, he asked all his buyers to release the money from escrow before they received their products. When they did, Tony76 disappeared with all the drugs and all the money.
It is believed he came back later to extort, scam and threaten more money out of DPR and the Silk Roaders under the names LucyDrop, Marijuanaismymuse, and Redandwhite, famously pretending under the last one to be a member of the Hell’s Angels biker gang, promising to murder an alleged dox of Tony 76 (fake, obviously) in exchange for money.
A group believed to be related to Tony76 was arrested, and the story is still being told.
Market Accounts:
Silk Road - Tony76.
Silk Road - Marijuanaismymuse (allegedly)
Silk Road - LucyDrop (allegedly)
Trust-In-Us (Team Trust)
[ACTIVE]
Biography: TeamTrust, led by the vendor Trust-In-Us, is a legendary LSD/psychedelics syndicate, responsible for a number of famous original blotter art. Very selective in their choices, they vend specifically on The Majestic Garden, in bulk only.
Contact Information/Forum Accounts:
The Majestic Garden - Trust-In-Us.
Zhappytimes2
(INACTIVE: ARRESTED]
Biography: A popular vendor with a focus on selling moonshine (illegally-distilled alcohol), 2happytimes2 was also an administrator on the original Dread Forum, alongside the founder, HugBunter. 2happytimes2 is believed to have collaborated with Olympus Market to take down Dread, before being arrested in Operation Dark Gold. In fact, many people believe he was arrested previously and that the law enforcement officials alleged to operate his account in this time took down Dread, before using Operation Dark Gold as a scapegoat.
Contact Information/Forum Accounts:
Reddit - /u/2happytimes2
Dread - /u/2happytimes2
Market Accounts:
Berlusconi - 2happytimes2
Trade Route - 2happytimes2
Dream - 2happytimes2
Hansa - 2happytimes2
Market Admins/Staff
Alpha02
[INACTIVE: COMMITTED SUICIDE IN PRISON]
Aliases: Alexandre Cazes, (allegedly) DeSnake
Biography: A Canadian citizen, Alexandre Cazes founded and ran AlphaBay Market, one of the most culturally-important Darknet markets in existence, while in his early 20s. Before the seizure of AlphaBay and Cazes’ arrest and subsequent suspected suicide in his Thai jail cell in the wake of Operation Bayonet (a tongue-in-cheek reference to them taking down the “Bay” [AlphaBay] of the “Net” [the Darknet]), AlphaBay had made him a rich man, worth over US$23 million.
Cazes, a short, rotund man with an early balding hairstyle and a penchant for posting frequent diatribes on the “pickup artists’ forum” RooshV, considered himself the king of the streets, something federal officers must have picked up when his Hotmail address, “pimp_alex_91”, surfaced in the AlphaBay server. Days after his arrest, Cazes committed suicide, which many people found strange. His lawyer had described Cazes as a happy person, confident in his own chances of escaping a heavy sentence, yet, only a few short hours before his lawyer arrived at this dingy prison in Thailand to discuss strategy, Alpha02, the most-wanted man in the Darknet at the time, had hanged himself with an errant towel from a doorknob.
Backopy
(INACTIVE: RETIRED]
Biography: Backopy was the administrator of Black Market Reloaded, one of the most highly-regarded markets in the Darknet. He was remembered to have run his market honestly and fairly, and many people who spoke to him said he valued his ideals, which motivated him to form BMR, more than money, as shown in the famous case of BMR getting their escrow wallets hacked and robbed, and Backopy paying back every single user out of his own pocket, at huge personal cost to his own retirement fund.
Backopy is the only known, recorded market administrator to have shut down their market (Black Market Reloaded) without drama, rogue moderators and administrators, or relaunching as a cash-grab scheme.
Chronicpain
(INACTIVE: ARRESTED + RETIRED]
Aliases: Curtis Green, Flush
Biography: Curtis “Chronicpain” Green was a highly-active poster on the Silk Road forums, before being asked to join the staff team officially as a moderator. Following a sting operation where a group of federal agents (including Carl Force and Shaun Bridges) delivered cocaine to his doorstep and arrested him, he became an informant. After Bridges stole a large sum of money from Silk Road using Green’s account, Dread Pirate Roberts, at the urging of Variety Jones, sent someone to assassinate Green; unfortunately, the assassin that he had contracted, a supposed South American cocaine smuggler for the cartels under the username “Nob”, was actually Carl Force himself in his undercover persona.
Force used a can of Campbell’s soup to fake a picture of an asphyxiated and deceased Green. Green later publicly voiced criticism of DPR/Ross Ulbricht’s draconian sentencing.
Defcon
[INACTIVE: ARRESTED]
Aliases: Blake Benthall
Biography: Defcon was a member of the moderation team of Silk Road 2.0. After his arrest, he publicly became an informant for the federal government and surrendered all the data he had on his fellow staff members and vendors.
DeSnake
(INACTIVE: UNKNOWN]
Aliases: (Allegedly) Alpha02.
Biography: DeSnake was the secondary administrator of AlphaBay, and a former carder/fraudster.
Many people believe he was Alpha02/Alexandre Cazes, but others believe he was a different person who still remains at large.
Dread Pirate Roberts
[INACTIVE: ARRESTED]
Aliases: Ross William Ulbricht, Frosty, Altoid, silkroad
Biography: Ross Ulbricht was the creator and administrator of the original Silk Road. The first person to combine using the technologies of Tor, Bitcoin, and PGP, and adding the now-commonplace features of escrow and rating systems, Ulbricht built the multimillionaire business of the Silk Road from the ground up, along with his team of staff, dealing with issues arising from hackers, denial-of-service attacks, extortionists, and law enforcement. After his arrest, he was sentenced to a double life sentence plus 40 years, which he is serving as USP Tucson, Arizona. He was barely in his thirties at the time of incarceration.
Kimble
(INACTIVE: EXIT SCAMMED]
Biography: Kimble, along with her partner Verto, was one of the two founders and administrators of Evolution Market. In March, 2015, both she and Verto disappeared with the site’s funds in an exit
scam.
Libertas
[INACTIVE: ARRESTED]
Aliases: Gary Davis
Biography: Gary Davis, AKA Libertas, was a citizen of Ireland and senior staff on both Silk Road and Silk Road 2.0. Upon his arrest, his lawyers used the excuse that he joined Silk Road as a way to connect with people due to him suffering from Asperger’s syndrome, and that he shouldn’t be incarcerated.
Penissmith
[INACTIVE: ARRESTED]
Aliases: Bryan Connor Herrell, Botah
Biography: Penissmith was a popular forum user, fraud vendor, carder, and AlphaBay senior staff member of their ScamWatch team. He also wrote the infamous “Penissmith’s State of the Darknet” post on DeepDotWeb, in which he put forth his opinion that Darknet markets, the fraud world, and the Darknet community in general were “dead”, and that it was impossible for markets to survive without a strong circle of trust and community.
He was arrested and imprisoned for his work on AlphaBay and his massive history of fraud and carding.
SpeedStepper
(INACTIVE: RETIRED]
Biography: SpeedStepper is the person (or alleged group of people) responsible for the foundation and administration of Dream. He is incredibly popular for his perceived skill at administrating the longest-
running and most popular market in the Western Darknet, as well as his opsec abilities. He was notorious for the sheer number of red herrings he put into the Dream code to waste the time of hackers and law enforcement, although he did have several failings, including the fact that once Dream had made him rich and popular enough, he began to stop caring and simply hired dozens of moderators who hadn’t been vetted or approved, meaning that unprofessional and rogue moderators ran rampant. After Dream shut down in 2019 following a sustained period of unstoppable denial-of-service attacks, he signed a message promising to relaunch at a later date and published the onion address they would use for their rebranding; although many unofficial scam markets popped up claiming to be the official Dream partner market, that URL was never made active, and people began to suspect it was simply another of SpeedStepper’s famous red herrings to allow him to slip away safely.
There have been many suspects as to who was really behind the SpeedStepper name, from Mark DeCarlo, to Brian Armstrong, to Mark Karpeles, and some people even believe the same person or group who invented Bitcoin under the alias “Satoshi Nakamoto” also ran the SpeedStepper name. A fun theory to believe, but unfortunately, no hard evidence has been shown for any of these theories.
StExo
[INACTIVE: ARRESTED]
Aliases: Thomas White, Cthulhu, DPR2
Biography: Thomas White was a teenage crypto-investor and technology enthusiast. Under the name StExo, he was known for his grandiose speeches on the Silk Road forums and his sale of products such as drug-testing kits, MDMA, and laundering services. He also made several backups of markets and forums in case of shutdown, and it was one of these backups that allowed him to create Silk Road 2.0 soon after the original was shut down.
After his arrest (which was kept secret for several years before being publicized), he was charged with money laundering and child pornography offenses.
Variety Jones
(INACTIVE: ARRESTED]
Aliases: Roger Thomas Clark, Plural of Mongoose, Cimon
Biography: The hidden administrator and mentor to Ross Ulbricht, Variety Jones was an experienced criminal, teaching the young DPR all he knew about opsec, cryptocurrency, securing his market, and running his empire with an iron fist. He also gave Ulbricht financial advice and told him to plan for the future to avoid arrest, as well as being the one to suggest the murder of Curtis Green, which ultimately did not take place. After Ulbricht’s arrest, Jones was revealed to be Roger Clark, a Canadian seller of cannabis seeds living in Thailand and frequent poster on the Overgrow marijuana forums under the username “Plural of Mongoose”.
Verto
[INACTIVE: EXIT SCAMMED]
Biography: Verto was a prominent carder in the fraudster community, as well as the founder and administrator of Tor Carding Forum, the #1 spot for budding and professional carders. His most famous achievement, however, was founding Evolution Market with his partner, Kimble, before exit scamming in 2015.
Service/Forum Admins/Staff
Chronos [Person]
(INACTIVE: SHUT DOWN]
Biography: Chronos was the admin of an eponymous news site and vendor shop service for the Darknet. They also wrote the Chronos Opsec Guide and several more high-quality posts and interviews of several market staff.
DarkDotFail [Person]
[ACTIVE]
Biography: DarkDotFail is the owner of the Dark.Fail link directory and Darknet gateway.
Contact Information/Forum Accounts:
Dread - /u/DarkDotFail
Mastodon: @DarkDotFail
Twitter: @DarkDotFail
Email: [email protected]
Jabber: [email protected]
DarkNetLive [Person]
[ACTIVE]
Biography: DarkNetLive is a journalist and owner of the news site and community information archive named after him. As well as posting original news articles, they also allow submissions of articles, community news, and archival of posts from elsewhere. On top of that, they also host copies of the DNM Bibles and a categorized link directory.
Contact Information/Forum Accounts:
Dread - /u/DarknetLive
Twitter - @Darknetlive
Email - [email protected]
Email 2 - [email protected]
Jabber - Upon request by owner.
DeepDotWeb [Person]
(INACTIVE: ARRESTED]
Biography: DeepDotWeb was the pseudonymous admin of the popular news site and link directory/uptime checker, and most people’s first introduction to the Darknet. He was arrested in 2019 for accepting profit from markets by listing affiliate links in their directory, and the site was shut down.
Contact Information/Forum Accounts:
Dread - /u/DeepDotWeb
Fortuna
[ACTIVE]
Biography: Fortuna is the co-administrator and techmin of Envoy Forum and related projects, and the administrator of the Imperiya vendor shop system (and its related Invictus Marketplace). Also a former vendor on the CrimeNetWork sites.
Contact Information/Forum Accounts
Dread - /u/FOrtuna
Envoy - FOrtuna
HugBunter
[ACTIVE]
Biography: HugBunter is a known pentester and the creator/administrator of the popular Darknet forum Dread, a free-speech forum styled after Reddit and launched in the wake of a number of crime-oriented subreddits, including r/DarkNetMarkets, being mass-banned. He and his team also launched a spiritual successor to the Grams vendor search engine called Recon.
Contact Information/Forum Accounts:
Dread - /u/HugBunter
Jabber - [email protected]
Kaizushi
[ACTIVE]
Biography: Kaizushi is the owner and administrator of KLOSHost (Kaizushi’s Little Onion Server), a security-focused hosting service for professionals. They also offer an email service called Infantile.
Contact Information/Forum Accounts
Dread - /u/Kaizushi
Jabber - [email protected]
General Email - [email protected]
Personal Email 1 - [email protected]
Personal Email 2 - [email protected]
Personal Email 3 - [email protected]
Karpeles, Mark
(INACTIVE: RETIRED]
Aliases: MagicalTux
Biography: Mark Karpeles is the former CEO of defunct clearnet Bitcoin exchange, MtGox (Magic the Gathering Online eXchange). Following the failure of MtGox, the loss of his users’ coins, and his filing for bankruptcy, he moved to Japan.
Paris
[ACTIVE]
Biography: Paris is the co-admin and head of staff of Dread forum. He is also an experienced pentester and programmer, co-creating the Endgame DDoS protection and the deCaptcha.
Contact Information/Forum Accounts:
Dread - /u/Paris
Jabber - [email protected]
Syntax
[ACTIVE]
Biography: Syntax is the lead designer of the Dread team, having created the UI and looks for Dread, Recon, the vendor shops, and the Endgame protection service. Unlike HugBunter and Paris, she seems to prefer staying out of the spotlight, and is mostly inactive on Dread.
Contact Information/Forum Accounts:
Dread - /u/Syntax
Winzen, Daniel
[INACTIVE: RETIRED]
Biography: Daniel Winzen was the owner and administrator of Daniel’s Hosting and its related services, such as Daniel’s Chat. He was a frequent user of the chat and the Galaxy series of social media sites. He shut down all his services in 2019 after a series of hacks and data losses stemming from hackers’ beliefs that he was involved in the dissemination and hosting of child pornography.
Witchman05
[ACTIVE]
Aliases: BadMedicine
Biography: Witchman05 is a former member of staff of Dread Forum, as well as Intel Cutout and Onionland. He is also a journalist, having written several dozen articles, and the administrator of Envoy Forum and related projects. He also wrote the Darknet Phone Book (this book).
Journalists/Writers/Authors/Researchers
Bilton, Nick
[ACTIVE]
Biography: Nick Bilton is a British-American journalist and the author of the book American Kingpin, detailing the story of Ross Ulbricht, the Silk Road, and the law enforcement agents who took him down. He currently works at Vanity Fair.
Branwen, Gwern
[ACTIVE]
Biography: Gwerm Branwen is a researcher and writer who writes about and archives data pertaining to DNMs and a number of other subjects.
Contact Information/Forum Accounts
Reddit - /u/Gwermn
Reddit - r/Gwem
Personal Site - gwern.net
Email - [email protected]
Caudevilla, Dr Fernando
[ACTIVE]
Aliases: DoctorX
Biography: A family doctor based in Spain, Dr Fernando Caudevilla hosted a majorly popular thread on the original Silk Road forums to give medical and harm reduction advice to drug users, and is now the founder and main man aboard Energy Control, the #1 drug-testing service in the world, based near his home in Spain. Currently, he is mostly inactive on most forms of social media while he works on a book detailing his time in the Darknet, titled: “The Incredible Adventures of DoctorX in the Deep Web”.
Contact Information/Forum Accounts:
Dread - /u/DoctorX
Twitter - @EC_es
Facebook - /energycontrol
Reddit - /u/EC-International
Email - [email protected]
Chen, Adrian
[ACTIVE]
Biography: Adrian Chen is a New York-based journalist and writer known for his correspondences and interviews with shadier characters, such as the members of Anonymous, and for his infamous Gawker article about the Silk Road, “The Underground Website Where You Can Buy Any Drug Imaginable”.
Contact Information/Forum Accounts:
Twitter - @adrianchen
Email - [email protected]
LaMoustache
[ACTIVE]
Biography: LaMoustache is the pseudonym of a researcher and the owner of the Silk Road Tales and Archives site at antilop.cc/sr.
Contact Information/Forum Accounts:
Email/XMPP- [email protected]
Twitter - @lamoustache
Reddit - /u/lamoustache
Monteiro, Chris
[ACTIVE]
Aliases: Deku_shrub
Biography: Chris Monteiro is a journalist, researcher, moderator of several Darknet-themed subreddits, owner of the news blog pirate.london, and frequent target for hitman attacks. He’s also fairly well-known for writing the majority of Wikipedia articles about Darknet subjects, and for collaborating with other researchers.
Contact Information/Forum Accounts:
Twitter - @deku_shrub
Personal site - pirate.london
Medium - @deku_shrub
Nakamoto, Satoshi
[INACTIVE: UNKNOWN]
Biography: Satoshi Nakamoto is the pseudonym of a person or group credited with creating Bitcoin, mining the genesis block of the BTC blockchain, and creating the forum Bitcointalk.
Contact Information/Forum Accounts:
Bitcointalk - satoshi
Ormsby, Eileen
[ACTIVE]
Aliases: OzFreelancer, Eiley
Biography: Eileen Ormsby is an Australian journalist, blogger and author. As well as owning the true-crime/Darknet blog “All Things Vice”, she has also been present at the trial of Ross Ulbricht and interviewed Roger Clark in prison. She is the author of several non-fiction crime books, The Darkest Web, Psycho.com, Little Girls Lost, Silk Road, Murder on the Dark Web, Stalkers, and Blue Skies, Black Death.
Contact Information/Forum Accounts:
Dread - /u/OzFreelancer
Reddit - /u/OzFreelancer
Twitter - @EileenOrmsby
The Hub - OzFreelancer
DNMAvengers - OzFreelancer
Wickr - Eiley
Hackers/DDoSers/Phishers/Pentesters/Developers
Clownsec
[ACTIVE]
Aliases: ClownSecurity
Biography: Clownsec is an accomplished pentester, having checked out the security on many markets and forums, including White House, Deep Sea and Torigon Cybersecurity Forum, and worked with Mr_White and Paris on numerous occasions.
Contact Information/Forum Accounts:
Dread - /u/Clownsec
HereuGo
[INACTIVE: UNKNOWN]
Aliases: hereugoagain
Biography: HereuGo was a prolific extortionist who specialized in distributed denial of service attacks, exploiting a flaw in the Tor network that allowed him to cheaply and easily down a number of sites for extended periods of time, most notably Dream, which shut down after six years of service due to his attacks.
Contact Information/Forum Accounts:
Dread - /u/hereugoagain
PhishKingz
(INACTIVE: UNKNOWN]
Biography: PhishKingz was the name of a person (or group) behind a number of hacking and scamming attempts, most famously the Trade Route hack, where after robbing the escrow systems and stealing data, PhishKingz extorted the Trade Route admins for weekly payments until they shut down the site and exit scammed.
SchwererGustav
[ACTIVE]
Aliases: Gustav
Biography: SchwererGustav is a prolific DDoSer and extortionist, having shown on many occasions their ability to cheaply and easily down large market sites, even Empire Market at their height, prompting weekly payments from the majority of large markets. SchwererGustav also worked as a DDoSer-for-hire, taking payments for markets to attack their rivals.
Contact Information/Forum Accounts:
Dread - /u/SchwererGustav
Markets/Commerce:
-- Agora
-- AlphaBay
-- Atlantis
-- Black Market Reloaded
-- CGMC
-- Dream
-- Evolution
-- Hansa
-- Hydra
-- OpenBazaar
-- Silk Road
-- Silk Road 2.0
-- Wall Street Market
Sites + Organizations
News/Information/Literature Sites:
-- Chronos
-- DarknetLive
-- DeepDotWeb
-- Distributed Denial of Secrets
-- DNStats
-- Erowid
-- HackTown
-- Hidden Wiki
-- Imperial Library of Trantor
-- PsychonautWiki
-- Tape
-- TheOnionWeb
Directories/Search Engines:
-- Ahmia
-- DarkDotFail
-- DarkIndex
-- DuckDuckGo
-- Grams
-- Kilos
-- Recon
Forums/Social Media/E mail Services
-- Bitcointalk
-- Bluelight
-- Cock.li
-- CryptBB
-- DarkNetMarkets Avengers
-- Dread
-- Elude
-- Envoy
-- Hidden Answers
-- Onionland
-- ProtonMail
-- Raddle
-- 1/DarkNetMarkets
-- SecMail
-- The Hub
-- The Majestic Garden
-- Tor Carding Forum
-- Torigon
-- Torum
Organizations:
-- Electronic Frontier Foundation
-- Energy Control
-- FreeRoss.org
-- [2P Team
-- The Tails Project
-- The Tor Project
-- TripSit
-- WEDINOS
-- WikiLeaks
Vendor Shop Services:
-- HugBunter shops
-- Imperiya
Hosting Services:
-- Daniel's Hosting
-- Freedom Hosting
-- Kaizushi's Little Onion Server
Cryptocurrency:
-- Bitcoin.org
-- GetMonero
-- MtGox
-- Thotbot's XMRGuide
-- XMR.to
Markets/Commerce
Agora
(INACTIVE: SHUT DOWN]
Biography: Agora Market was a popular general-sales market that launched in 2013 and ceased operations gracefully in 2015. During their lifespan, they gained a popular following after surviving the wake of Operation Onymous and the Evolution exit scam.
URL: agorahooawayyfoe.onion
Launched: 2013.
Shut down: August 2015.
AlphaBay
[INACTIVE: SEIZED]
Biography: AlphaBay was a hugely-popular DNM, administrated by AlphaO02 (Alexandre Cazes) and DeSnake (allegedly also Cazes, but unconfirmed). AlphaBay, or “AB” was popular for its attentive staff (including their unofficial ScamWatch team), attractive UI, and forum full of knowledgeable people, as well as its large fraud community. It was seized during Operation Bayonet, a multinational law enforcement operation targeting AlphaBay and similarly-sized Dutch market Hansa.
URL: pwoah7foa6au2pul.onion
Launched: 22" of December, 2014.
Shut down: 13" of July, 2017.
Atlantis
[INACTIVE: EXIT SCAM]
Biography: The third official DNM ever launched (following Silk Road and Black Market Reloaded), Atlantis grew in popularity quickly after launch due to their militant marketing campaigns, with strategies including an infamous video ad and poaching vendors and buyers from their competitors, as well as being the first market to accept Litecoin, a popular altcoin. Atlantis advanced in usage quickly, with the admin boasting that they made more than US$1 million in profit due to their marketing skills, but after a week following Operation Onymous, the administrators shut down the site. They had been active for seven months.
URL: atlantisrky4es5q.onion
Launched: March 2013.
Shut down: September 2013.
Black Market Reloaded
(INACTIVE: SHUT DOWN]
Biography: Black Market Reloaded, often referred to as “BMR”, was the second DNM launched and a competitor to Silk Road. Administrated by the user Backopy, BMR gained users’ respect after a hack of the site’s wallets and subsequent theft led to Backopy reimbursing every victim out of his own pocket.
Black Market Reloaded shut down in late 2013 after the falls of Silk Road and Sheep Marketplace prompted a flock of users to BMR that the site was unprepared to handle.
URL: rércmz6lga4i5vb4.onion
Launched: 30" of June, 2011.
Shut down: November, 2013.
CGMCG
[INACTIVE: SHUT DOWN]
Biography: Cannabis Growers’ and Merchants’ Cooperative, referred to as “CGMC”, was a weed-and-mushrooms-only market with a cult following of loyal users. CGMC was known for its high quality, selective vendor choices, and emphasis on the “quality over quantity” method of marketing, choosing to remain private and invite-only or semi-private over its long lifespan, rather than fully opening the gates. CGMC was shut down for fears of law enforcement retaliation soon after Dream closed its doors, but was unofficially reloaded and relaunched as CannaHome.
URL: joincgmcS5oplang.onion
Launched: June, 2016.
Shut down: May, 2019.
Dream
[INACTIVE: SHUT DOWN]
Biography: Dream Market was the longest-lived English-speaking DNM, with a lifespan of over six years. Administrated by the mysterious SpeedStepper, Dream was launched to little fanfare, but after the failures of rivals such as Evolution, Agora, AlphaBay and Hansa, Dream grew to become the most popular of its kind for many years, beating out its biggest rival, Wall Street Market, by a long shot.
Unfortunately, after a lengthy series of DDoS attacks, SpeedStepper made an announcement that they would be shutting down Dream until the ecosystem settled, publishing an onion address that would be used by the new and improved Dream Market “partner service” at some point in the future. Although many cash-grab scam markets were set up in the wake of their failure, that onion address has remained inactive.
URL: Itxocgh4nvwkofil onion
Partner URL: weroidjkazxqds21.onion
Launched: Mid-November, 2013.
Shut down: 30" of April, 2019.
Evolution
[INACTIVE: EXIT SCAMMED]
Biography: Evolution Market was a popular market founded by Verto, the administrator and creator of Tor Carding Forum, and his partner Kimble. The exponential growth of the market compared to others at the time is usually credited to its wide range of allowed products, its vibrant fraud community, and the fact it was mostly untouched by Operation Onymous. After just over a year of service, in which time it grew to become one of the two biggest markets at the time, Verto and Kimble abruptly shut down the market and disappeared with the users funds. While not the biggest exit scam in Darknet history, at the time it was considered a huge loss, with users losing a cumulative approximation of US$12 million stored in their escrow wallets.
URL: k5zq47j6wd3wdvjg.onion
Launched: 14” of January, 2014.
Shut down: March, 2015.
Hansa
[INACTIVE: SEIZED]
Biography: Hansa was a Europe-based Darknet market. Before it was seized in Operation Bayonet, Hansa was an immensely popular market, partially due to its usage of highly-secure multisig escrow.
On the 20" of June, 2017, the administrators were tracked down through law enforcement analysis of security leaks, discovery of old IRC logs, and Bitcoin tracing. Law enforcement officials took over the site and monitored it for the next month.
On the 4" of July, 2017, when AlphaBay was taken down, users flocked to Hansa, at which point the officials running it as a honeypot enacted the next phase of their plan. They modified the multisignature addresses to redirect funds to themselves, set the automatic metadata remover to sap as much information from uploaded pictures as possible, and published a malware-ridden Microsoft Excel file designed to deanonymize anybody who downloaded it in an insecure environment, before officially taking down the site and placing a seizure notice on it on the 19" of July.
Officials claimed to have recovered over 10,000 Hansa buyer addresses from these methods.
URL: hansamkt2rr6nfg3.onion
Launched: 2014.
Shut down: Seized 20" of June, 2017, officially shut down 19th/20th of July, 2017.
Hydra
[ACTIVE]
Biography: Launched in 2015, Hydra Market is a legendary Russian marketplace and one of the oldest in the Darknet, and believed to have over 3 million users. The only market to have widely accepted the use of the short-distance “Dead Drop” vending system, wherein a vendor places a package somewhere around the city and then reveals the location to the buyer to pick up themselves, Hydra is also at the forefront of many other innovations, including their Eternos project. Eternos is the first step by Hydra to monopolize the world of Darknet drug trade by global expansion of the Hydra base market, and is said to contain many never-before-seen features, including automated support AI, a totally new, decentralized network based on Tor, and a built-in coin exchange, among many other features.
Unfortunately, the administrators of Hydra have rescinded their previous launch deadline of the 1* of September, and announced the project has been suspended indefinitely, until they have the ability to restart it.
URL: hydraruzxpnew4af.onion
Launched: 2015.
OpenBazaar
[ACTIVE]
Biography: Created as a prototype named “DarkMarket” as programmer Amir Taaki’s submission to the Toronto 2014 Bitcoin Hackathon, the project was then taken over by a new group and rebranded OpenBazaar. The OpenBazaar project is an open-source attempt at a truly decentralized marketplace for all sorts of items, legal and illegal, and based on a hypothetical example of an improvement upon the Silk Road, which had been recently seized. Two years after the original prototype was created, the new developers came out with the first iteration of OpenBazaar in April, 2016, allowing users to buy and sell with Bitcoin.
URL: openbazaar.org
Launched: 4" of April, 2016 (prototype created April, 2014).
Silk Road
(INACTIVE: SEIZED]
Biography: While not the first official DNM, the Silk Road was the first to tie together the technologies of Bitcoin, Tor, and PGP, and to institute a simple and intuitive escrow and ratings system. Created by Ross Ulbricht, a man in his early 20s, as a way to sell magic mushrooms he grew himself, the market quickly gained a loyal following of buyers and vendors, helped in part by the likable and knowledgeable persona Ulbricht created at the recommendation of friend and mentor Variety Jones, who he had met over the site: the Dread Pirate Roberts.
With a glowing community that involved itself in the numerous sales, giveaways, and freebies that DPR encouraged, as well as a libertarian/anarchist book club where the free-thinkers of the Road got together to discuss whatever banned or difficult-to-find literature they were indulging in that week, the Silk Road seemed like a place free of troubles, although peeling back the curtain and looking into the past would allow you a glimpse into the many issues that DPR and his team of staff would handle every so often, such as the believed theft of money by Curtis Green (the money was actually stolen by his arresting officer, Shaun Bridges) and the subsequent hit DPR attempted on Green, to the extortion and trickery by Baltimore law enforcement official Carl Force under the monikers Nob, FrenchMaid, or DeathFromAbove. Others include the infamous exit of Tony76, to the number of DDoSers, doxxers, hackers and scammers that had to be dealt with every day, and the Silk Road was definitely not a utopia. However, the legacy of the Silk Road lives on even today, and can be seen in almost every DMM still in existence.
URL: silkroad6ownowfk.onion
Launched: February, 2011.
Shut down: October, 2013.
Silk Road 2.0
(INACTIVE: SEIZED]
Biography: Approximately a week after the fall of the original Silk Road, on 6" of November, 2013, former SR staff members Libertas (Gary Davis) and Inigo (Andrew Michael Jones), led by anew DPR called “DPR2” (Thomas White, StExo on the original SR), relaunched the market as Silk Road 2.0. A month later, on 20" of December, it was announced that Davis and Jones had been arrested using information gathered from Ulbricht’s laptop. A new administrator, Defcon (Blake Benthall) joined up on the site to return the site to working condition after DPR2 froze everything to contain the potential damage.
Exactly one year after launch, on 6" of November, 2014, authorities in Operation Onymous announced the arrest of Benthall the previous day. SR2.0 was shut down for good, and in 2019, they announced that during Onymous, they had also arrested Thomas White, but had chosen not to reveal that fact.
URL: silkroad7rm2puhj.onion
Launched: 6" of November, 2013.
Shut down: 6" of November, 2014.
Wall Street Market
(INACTIVE: EXIT SCAMMED]
Biography: After the shutdown of Dream Market, the second-largest market at the time, Wall Street, stepped in to fill the gap. After an exponential growth of the market following the influx of users, the administrators promptly exit scammed. A disgruntled community manager/PR under the username “Med3lin”, left out of the exit scam, leaked backend market information and administrator panel logins all over Dread in an attempt to extort users who didn’t encrypt market information. Law enforcement used the information in the admin panel, as well as failure by the thieving admins to properly anonymize their spoils, to arrest three administrators, a few techmins, and several other staff members, including Med3l1n and Nugacity, who were also revealed to have been staff on WSM’s sister site, Tochka Free Market/Point Market.
URL: wallstyizjhkrvmj.onion
Launched: Approximately 2017-2018.
Shut down: May, 2019.
News/Information/Literature Sites
Chronos [Site]
(INACTIVE: SHUT DOWN]
Biography: A news site launched by a user also under the name “Chronos”, this site also offered a vendor shop service and an XMR-BTC cryptocurrency exchange. Chronos was popular for its high-quality Chronos Opsec Guide series and a number of interviews with known vendors or market staff and admins. It was shut down by the administrator following a failed auction of the site.
URL: chronos75gkiuqqd.onion
DarkNetLive [Site]
[ACTIVE]
Biography: Launched by and named after anonymous journalist DarkNetLive, this site is not only the statistically most-popular news site on the Darknet, but also has a well-regarded onion directory, Community News section, and Arrests archive. It has also been a source of a number of popular news articles, including the infamous Mark DeCarlo/SpeedStepper allegations, collections of DNM terms-of-service posts, and market breakdowns and ratings.
Clearnet URL: darknetlive.com
Onion URL: darkzzx4avcsuofgfez5zq75cqc4mprjvfqy wo45dfcaxrwqg6qrifid.onion
DeepDotWeb
(INACTIVE: SEIZED]
Biography: The original and most well-known of the news sites, DeepDotWeb was a self-described “gateway to the Darknet”. Beyond the usual daily articles (or occasionally even two or three a day from the dedicated writing team and a rotating cast of freelance writers), DeepDotWeb also instituted the now-common trend of an onion directory, with it’s own built-in uptime checker and a visual chart ot easily show how often your favorite site was down.
The site was seized by law enforcement and administrators arrested after an obscure money-laundering law was dug up, allowing the privacy-minded journalists to be charged for their practice of putting market referral links in their directory, making money whenever a user signed up on that market with their provided link.
Clearnet URL: deepdotweb.com
Onion URL: deepdot35wvmeyd5.onion
Distributed Denial of Secrets
[ACTIVE]
Biography: A crew of freedom-bound individuals, Distributed Denial of Secrets has been involved in leaking information for the entirety of their lifetime. Often used as a source by organizations such as WikiLeaks, DDoSecrets, as they are commonly known, gained public notoriety with their publishing of the notorious BlueLeaks police data collection.
Clearnet URL: ddosecrets.com
Onion URL: ddosecretspzwfy7.onion
DNStats
[ACTIVE]
Biography: Once a popular site for market links and site uptime information, DNStats has drawn heavy criticism in recent years from other known figures, most publicly DarkNetLive, over accusations of phishing, outdated links, listing of untrustworthy markets, and more perceived “shady” behaviour.
Since then, the site has remained mostly silent, although still online.
URL: dnstats.net
Erowid
[ACTIVE]
Biography: Founded by the pseudonymous Fire Erowid and Earth Erowid, the Erowid Center is a vault of knowledge and information on dozens of types of mind-altering chemicals, compounds, and flora. It both compounds already-existing information and publishes new, including in-depth trip reports and factual articles from its widespread community of members. It also runs a comprehensive library of media related to the consumption of psychoactive compounds, and DrugsData.org (formerly Ecstasy Data.org), a testing service for street pills.
URL: erowid.org
HackTown
[ACTIVE]
Biography: Founded by cybersecurity enthusiast and CryptBB moderator Funshine, HackTown is a blog-style site that runs both paid and free hacking, fraud, pentesting and cybercrime courses and information articles. It has quickly gained a reputation as an incredibly useful site to both novice programmers and old hats wishing to sharpen their skills.
URL: hacktownpagdenbb.onion
The Hidden Wiki
[ACTIVE]
Biography: Originally founded quite early on in the development of the Darknet ecosystem as an anyone-can-edit site for information and links, the Hidden Wiki project was quickly hijacked by imitators and trolls, and dozens of low-quality clones sprung up touting phishing links, CP, or scam sites such as hitmen or red rooms. Nowadays, all sites describing themselves as “Hidden Wiki” or similar sobriquets should be considered not only useless, but actively dangerous.
URL: Various.
Imperial Library of Trantor
[ACTIVE]
Biography: The Imperial Library of Trantor, often shortened to “Imperial Library” or simply “Trantor”, is an online book repository allowing anyone to upload or download books in epub or pdf file format, for free. It also allows books to be read on the site itself, for those wary of downloading anything. The owner, Las Zenow (also going by the title Chief Librarian) has stated numerous times his motivation for founding the Imperial Library is to allow people to “finally have universal access to the culture” that literature provides.
URL: xfmro77i3lixucja.onion
PsychonautWiki
[ACTIVE]
Biography: PsychonautWiki is self-described as a “community-driven online encyclopedia that aims to document the field of psychonautics (i.e. exploration of altered states) in a comprehensive and scientifically-grounded manner.” Based on Wikipedia’s convenient MediaWiki format, PsychonautWiki uses input from dozens of members to build a comprehensive one-stop shop for information related to every facet of mind-altering substances.
Clearnet URL: psychonautwiki.org
Onion URL: psychonaut3z5aoz.onion
Tape
[ACTIVE]
Biography: Launched by and formerly owned by the team behind the exit-scammed Avior, Next Generation, Cryptonite, and Apollo (note: NOT related to Cryptonia and Apollon Markets), the news site Tape is currently a highly-active source of news articles related to the Darknet, narcotics, cryptocurrency, and privacy. It also features an attached forum.
URL: tapeucwutvne7150.onion
TheOnionWeb
(INACTIVE: UNKNOWN]
Biography: Launched in the post-DeepDotWeb journalism boom, TheOnionWeb quickly became a fairly popular site, before retreating to the background as sites like DarkNetLive took their place. It apparently went offline after the unexplained disappearance of all the staff.
Clearnet URL: theonionweb.com
Onion URL: onionwsoiu53xre32jwve7euacadvhprq2jytfttbsshrbo3execodad.onion
Directories/Search Engines
Ahmia
[ACTIVE]
Biography: One of the more popular search engines in the Darknet, Ahmia has features to search both onion and i2p results, making it useful for people trying to find information quickly. It also has strict policies on banned content showing up on search results, and anything against their Terms of Service can be reported and quickly blacklisted from the service.
Clearnet URL: ahmia.fi
Onion URL: msydgstlz2kzerdg.onion
DarkDotFail
[ACTIVE]
Biography: The #1 source of links and uptime information since the seizure of DeepDotWeb, Dark.Fail (founded and owned by user DarkDotFail) and the listings there on are widely considered by many users to be what makes a site worth it. Originally started as a simple Empire Market link checker following their blacklisting from DeepDotWeb, Dark.Fail now utilizes an uptime checker for every site, automatic PGP verification tool, and upholds the Onion Mirror Guidelines for market safety.
Clearnet URL: dark.fail
Onion URL: darkfailllnkf4vf.onion
DarkIndex
[ACTIVE]
Biography: Launched and upheld by the team behind the CryptBB cybersecurity forum, DarkIndex is a self-described “an anti-phishing resource and also an anti-DDoS resource to serve for the safety and integrity of all applications hosted on the TOR network.” A link directory, uptime checker and automated link replacer, DarkIndex also has a fascinating feature that allows PGP-verified links to be automatically submitted by admins of services, instead of waiting for the administrators of the directory to update them themselves. This is supposed to counteract against phishing accusations toward the directory administrators, as a PGP-verified record of every URL addition is kept.
URL: darkindexSpin6jb.onion
DuckDuckGo
[ACTIVE]
Biography: Owned by DuckDuckGo Inc, the DDG search engine (the default clearnet engine for the Tor Browser) prides itself on defending users privacy with no trackers, generic search results and using absolutely no private information. Following user backlash against Google’s predatory information theft, the number of users switching to DuckDuckGo is rising.
Clearnet URL: duckduckgo.com
Onion URL: 3g2upl4pq6kufc4m.onion
Grams
[INACTIVE: SHUT DOWN]
Biography: Launched in 2014, Grams was a massively popular search engine and vendor directory, as well as containing the Helix cryptocurrency tumbler. It shut down unexpectedly in 2017.
URL: grams7enufi7jmdl.onion
Kilos
[ACTIVE]
Biography: A Darknet search engine, vendor directory, and spiritual successor to Grams, Kilos was launched by user “ugu” to fill the need for a central service to find vendors in the wake of a series of market exit scams. As well as their basic features, Kilos also hosts a Bitcoin mixer (humorously named “Krumble”), a library of banned books, a live chat, and a “faceless forum”, which doesn’t require accounts to post.
URL: dnmugu4755642434. onion
Recon
[ACTIVE]
Biography: Launched by the team behind the Dread forum, Recon is a Grams-like service that automatically imports vendor data from a number of markets, as well as drawing from older archives, to present a full profile of a vendor’s stats. Vendors and markets can be searched for via usernames, PGP fingerprint, or public keys.
URL: reconponydonugup.onion
Forums/Social Media/Email Services
Bitcoin Talk
[ACTIVE]
Biograpy: Originally created by Satoshi Nakamoto, the pseudonymous creator of Bitcoin, to discuss his new invention, the Bitcointalk forum quickly grew to a massive size and became the #1 spot for cryptocurrency enthusiasts.
URL: bitcointalk.org
Bluelight
[ACTIVE]
Biography: Bluelight is a discussion forum for harm reduction techniques and uncensored information regarding controlled substances and their effects on the body and mind. It was founded in 1997, making it one of the longest-lived sites of its kind. It has been cited in many official studies, and has a long-running partnership with the Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies (MAPS).
URL: bluelight.org
Cock.li
[ACTIVE]
Biography: One of the most popular privacy-oriented email/XMPP hosting sites, Cock.li is renowned for its refusal to directly cooperate or hand user data over to law enforcement, although they do accept reports of illegal activity on its network so they can disable said criminal accounts if they go against their terms of service. It is owned and operated by the same group behind Cockbox, a privacy-based VPS service.
URL: cock.li
CryptBB
[ACTIVE]
Biography: A semi-private cybersecurity and hacking forum, CryptBB enforces a strict introduction-and-challenge feature to test members’ knowledge before allowing them into the main sections. The challenges are usually based around showing your knowledge of cybersecurity, pentesting, programming, or similar subjects. It was founded in 2017 by two users bearing the names “LongPig” and “Power”, and has outlived the majority of other popular cyber forums created at the same time.
URL: cryptbb2gezhohku.onion
DarkNetMarkets Avengers
[ACTIVE]
Biography: With a history going back to Reddit days, DarkNetMarkets Avengers (also called “DNMAvengers” or simply “DNMA”) is the most popular onion-based harm-reduction and testing forum ever. Originally founded by user Eudaimonia, it was sold in 2019 to a new admin, Bellaamy Black. It was most well-known for its partnership with the Energy Control testing service, allowing hundreds of users the ability to test their drugs.
URL: avengersdutyk3xf.onion
Dread
[ACTIVE]
Biography: Launched in the aftermath of the sudden bout of Darknet-centric subreddit bans, the Reddit-style onion forum Dread is the most popular of its kind. Founded by pentester HugBunter and administrated by him and developer Paris, Dread reached almost 200,000 registered accounts in almost three years. Communities are divided into subdreads and moderated by members of the community, with the most popular subdreads, such as /d/DarkNetMarkets and /d/Xanax getting over a dozen posts a day.
URL: dreadytofatroptsdj6io713xptbet6onoyno2yv7jicoxknyazubrad.onion
Elude
[ACTIVE]
Biography: A combination email service and cryptocurrency exchange, Elude says their main focus is the privacy of their users.
Clearnet URL: elude.in
URL: eludemaillhgqfkh5.onion
Envoy
(INACTIVE: MAINTENANCE]
Biography: Founded by Witchman05 and Imperiya administrator FOrtuna, Envoy is a general-discussion onion forum. Originally based on SMF, it was changed to a new script made from scratch under the name Superior CMS, then shut down for maintenance following issues.
URL: envoysSappps3bin.onion
Hidden Answers
[ACTIVE]
Biography: A social media site in questions-and-answers format, Hidden Answers attracts many users posting polls, gathering opinions or simply making conversation.
URL: answerszuvs3gg2164e6hmnryud|S5zgrmwm3vh6Shzszdghblddvfiqd.onion
Onionland
[ACTIVE]
Biography: Founded by Doxbin co-administrator Star and administrated by Aediot, Onionland is a Simple Machines Forum-based discussion site for cybersecurity, Darknet Markets, and related conversation.
URL: onionlandbakyt3j.onion
ProtonMail
[ACTIVE]
Biography: Owned and operated by Swiss corporation Proton Technologies AG alnog with its sister service ProtonVPN, ProtonMail is an end-to-end encrypted email service. As well as a clearnet URL and hidden service mirror, it is also available as an Android and iOS app.
Clearnet URL: protonmail.com
Onion URL: protonirockerxow.onion
Raddle
[ACTIVE]
Biography: Describing itself as an anarchist alternative to Reddit, Raddle was founded by Daniel Unedo, author and political activist, under the screen name Ziq. It is based on the FOSS Postmill forum software made from scratch by user Emma.
Clearnet URL: raddle.me
Onion URL: lfbg75wjgi4nzdio.onion
r/DarkNetMarkets
(INACTIVE: BANNED BY REDDIT ADMINS]
Biography: One of the most popular subreddits for discussion of hidden services and DNMs, 1/DarkNetMarkets was the birthplace of a great many things, including the DNM Buyer’s and Vendor’s Bibles. Following the ban of the subreddit, many users migrated to the newly-launched onion forum Dread.
URL: reddit.com/r/DarkNetMarkets
SecMail
[ACTIVE]
Biography: Based on the SquirrelMail email software, SecMail is a popular email service for privacy-focused individuals.
Clearnet URL: secmail-pro
Onion URL: secmailw453j7piv.onion
The Hub
[ACTIVE]
Biography: One of the oldest onion forums still in existence, dating back to the SR days, the Hub was founded by user Alfred and based on the SMF software. It has strict rules against fraud and hacking, but most other types of conversation are welcome. It has a partnership with sister forum The Majestic Garden.
URL: thehub7xbw4dc5r2.onion
The Majestic Garden
[ACTIVE]
Biography: A semi-private forum for discussion of psychedelics and entactogens, as well as miscellaneous opsec topics, The Majestic Garden (often shortened to “TMG”) has a rather unusual take on user registration, keeping registration completely closed the majority of the time and only opening for short stretches of time every so often for users to submit applications for registration. If said applications don’t adhere to their famously high-class opsec standards, particularly relating to PGP, they are discarded.
URL: talismanrestz7mr.onion
Tor Carding Forum
(INACTIVE: SHUT DOWN]
Biography: Tor Carding Forum, launched by later Evolution founder and administrator Verto, was known as the premier place for fraudsters and carders, and was indeed the first stop for many interested parties. It charged a US$50 registration fee upon registration, a measure meant to deter low-quality posters and bots from signing up.
Torigon
[ACTIVE]
Biography: Founded by the eponymous user Torigon and ex-Torum member xData, Torigon is an English and Russian-speaking cybersecurity and hacking forum. Throughout its life, Torigon has included and removed features such as a repository for hacking literature and media and a personal site pastebin. It is now administrated by users Torigon, SLH and Criminal in the wake of Torum’s demise.
URL: torigonsn3d63cldhr76mkfdzo3tndnl2tftiek55i2vilscufer6ryd.onion
Torum
[INACTIVE: SHUT DOWN]
Biography: The most popular onion cybersecurity forum in its time, Torum apparently received over 100,000 registered accounts over its lifespan. Rumoured to be run by Se7en, the Head Moderator of the defunct Empire Market, the forum shut down soon before the market itself exit scammed.
URL: torum43tajnrxritn4iumy 75giwbSyfw6cjq2czjikhtcac67tfif2yd.onion
Organizations
Electronic Frontier Foundation
[ACTIVE]
Biography: A non-profit activist group that has been advocating for digital rights since 1990, the EFF was founded by cypherpunks John Gilmore, John Perry Barlow and Mitch Kapor, as well as famously receiving funding from Apple magnate Steve Wozniak. They are based in San Francisco, although they are active internationally. The Executive Director since 2015 is lawyer Cindy Cohn (who formerly served as the Legal Director of the organization), who took over from predecessor Shari Steele, who also worked as Executive Director of the Tor Project.
Website: eff.org
Energy Control
[ACTIVE]
Biography: Springing from the Silk Road forum’s famed DoctorX drug-safety thread by Spain-based family doctor, Dr Fernando Caudevilla, the Energy Control international drug-testing service is one of the most popular of its type. Discriminating substance users can send in samples to the EC lab in Spain to have them tested and the results posted, allowing everyone to know exactly what they paid for.
Website: energycontrol-international.org
FreeRoss.org
[ACTIVE]
Biography: A website set up to advertise a petition for clemency for Ross Ulbricht, the administrator of the Silk Road market, the FreeRoss movement collects signatures and donations from supporters and spreads awareness about the miscarriages of justice in the case against him.
Website: freeross.org
I2P Team
[ACTIVE]
Biography: A group of pseudonymous developers responsible for the creation and upkeep of the I2P network protocol the [2P Team has been working on the Invisible Internet Project since 2003.
Website: geti2p.net
The Tails Project
[ACTIVE]
Biography: The Tails Project is a group responsible for the creation and upkeep of the Tails operating system, and have been working on their software since 2009.
Website: tails. boum.org
The Tor Project
[ACTIVE]
Biography: A group that evolved out of the original developers of the Tor network for the military, the members of the Tor Project are now the official owners and developers of the Tor Browser Bundle and related software.
Website: torproject.org
TripSit
[ACTIVE]
Biography: A harm-reduction collective, TripSit contains a number of tools for safe drug use, including a volumetric dosing calculator, a cross-dose effect graph to gauge the danger of mixing different substances, two chat systems (one for immediate assistance, one for general discussion), and an informational wiki.
Website: tripsit-me
WEDINOS
[ACTIVE]
Biography: An acronym for the Welsh Emerging Drugs and Identification of Novel Substances Project, WEDINOS is a group dedicated to testing and verifying drugs for users.
Website: wedinos.org
WikiLeaks
[ACTIVE]
Biography: A journalistic effort by Julian Assange and current editor-in-chief Kristinn Hrafnsson, WikiLeaks is a non-profit dedicated to publishing news leaks and exposing government secrets and anonymous media.
Website: wikileaks.org
Vendor Shop Services
HugBunter Shops
(INACTIVE: DISCONTINUED]
Biography: A vendor shop CMS and hosting service provided by Dread administrator HugBunter, recently discontinued.
URL: [none]
Imperiya
[ACTIVE]
Biography: A vendor shop CMS service provided by FOrtuna, also the basis for the Invictus Market.
URL: imperiyakggyacaf.onion
Hosting Services
Daniel’s Hosting
(INACTIVE: SHUT DOWN]
Biography: Provided by German developer Daniel Winzen, creator of the Daniel’s Chat service (based on Lucky Eddie Chat V2.0, a PHP-based chat software reworked by Winzen himself), Daniel’s Hosting was a popular free hosting service. It was shut down following numerous attacks by hackers.
Clearnet URL: danwin1210.me
Onion URL: danielas3rtn54uwmofdo3x2bsdifr47huasnmbgqzfrecsubupvtpid.onion
Freedom Hosting
[ACTIVE: RELOADED]
Biography: Following the original being seized on suspicion of hosting illegal pornography, Freedom Hosting V2 was launched and quickly became the most popular free hosting service following the shutdown of Daniel’s Hosting.
URL: fhostingineiwjg6cppciac2bemu42nwsupwvisihncezinok362qfrqd.onion
Kaizushi’s Little Onion Server
[ACTIVE]
Biography: Owned by security researcher Kaizushi along with its sister email service, Infantile, KLOSHost (as it is colloquially known) is a highly-regarded paid VPS provider. Kaizushi claims that every VPS is based on a hardened Gentoo Linux machine and secured so as to be practically impenetrable. Many vendor shops are known to be hosted on this service.
URL: kaizushihSiec2mxohpvbt5uaapqdnbluaasa2cmsirjtwrbx46cnaid.onion
Cryptocurrency
Bitcoin.org
[ACTIVE]
Biography: The main site for the cryptocurrency Bitcoin, Bitcoin.org was set up by Satoshi Nakamoto (the crypto’s pseudonymous inventor) to host the white paper for the new software. It now handles the majority of Bitcoin-related topics.
URL: bitcoin.org
GetMonero
[ACTIVE]
Biography: The main host for information about the cryptocurrency Monero, GetMonero also contains the download for the CLI and GUI wallet software.
URL: getmonero.org
MtGox
(INACTIVE: SHUT DOWN]
Biography: Originally created as an online trading exchange for Magic: the Gathering trading cards, it quickly became a popular spot to trade Bitcoin. It was shut down after numerous hacks and the theft of a massive sum of users’ money (referred to as being “goxxed”), resulting in the owners being prosecuted.
URL: mtgox.com
Thotbot’s XMRGuide
[ACTIVE]
Biography: Set up by Monero guru and creator of the XMR Feather Wallet Thotbot, the XMRGuide is a statis site dedicated to teaching the inexperienced to install, set up, back up, and safely utilize Monero in a matter of scenarios.
URL: xmrguide42y34onq.onion
XMR.to
[ACTIVE]
Biography: One of the most popular Bitcoin-Monero exchanges, XMR.to features a cheap and easy-to-use exchange interface that includes a no-Javascript mode.
URL: xmr.to
Software
Operating Systems:
-- Qubes
-- Tails
-- Whonix
Chat Software:
-- BitMessage
-- Pidgin
-- Signal
-- Wickr
Cryptocurrency:
-- Bisq
-- Bitcoin
-- Electrum Bitcoin Wallet
-- Litecoin
-- Monero
Encryption:
-- PGP
-- TrueCrypt
-- VeraCrypt
Commerce:
-- Eckmar
Security:
-- Endgame
Operating Systems
Qubes
[ACTIVELY DEVELOPED]
Biography: Qubes is a compartmentalized operating system with a focus on using separate virtual machines (referred to as “qubes”) for the purposes of security. It is often used in conjunction with Whonix.
Website: qubes-os.org
Tails
[ACTIVELY DEVELOPED]
Biography: TAILS, an acronym for The Amnesiac Incognito Live System, is an operating system able to be booted from removable media such as a USB stick or an SD card. A core feature of Tails is its ammesiac properties, meaning that between shut down and restart, all data is wiped and nothing is left on your computer’s hard drive. A persistent volume is able to be set up on Tails, however, allowing you to store data after shutdown to access again upon relaunch.
Website: tails. boum.org
Whonix
[ACTIVELY DEVELOPED]
Biography: A fairly-complex Linux-based OS, often used in conjunction with Qubes, Whonix is made of two parts, the Workstation (whereupon the majority of activity is done) and the Gateway (which routes every connection through Tor). It is considered one of the most secure anonymity-based operating systems in existence if set up properly, and is often used by pentesters, hidden service admins, and market admins.
Website: whonix.org
Chat Software
BitMessage
[ACTIVELY DEVELOPED]
Biography: Created by software developer Jonathan Warren in 2012, BitMessage became popular after it was revealed that government agencies such as the NSA had no luck in cracking the encryption of the software to get access to users’ messages.
Website: bitmessage.org
Pidgin
[ACTIVELY DEVELOPED]
Biography: One of the most popular Jabber clients and the default messaging software in the Tails OS, Pidgin supports communication in a number of protocols, most famously IRC and XMPP.
Website: pidgin.im
Signal
[ACTIVELY DEVELOPED]
Biography: An encrypted messaging software accessible from Android, iOS and desktop apps, Signal is a FOSS alternative to many closed-source applications. It allows text messaging, voice and video calls, and file sharing with contacts, as well as many other features.
Website: signal.org
Wickr
[ACTIVELY DEVELOPED]
Biography: Wickr is a semi-closed source messaging application for iOS, Windows, Mac, Linux and Android operating systems, developed by the San Francisco-based company of the same name.
Messages are end-to-end ecrypted and can be set to self-delete after a set amount of time.
Website: wickr.com
Cryptocurrency
Bisq
[ACTIVELY DEVELOPED]
Biography: A decentralized desktop software for exchanging Bitcoin for altcoin, Bisq is a popular alternative to many centralized or public exchanges.
Website: bisq.network
Bitcoin
[ACTIVELY DEVELOPED]
Biography: First invented in 2009 following a 2008 white paper by a pseudonymous person or group under the name Satoshi Nakamoto, Bitcoin is a decentralized peer-to-peer electronic currency. It has been praised for its use in circumventing government control, but criticized for its volatility and numerous high-profile thefts from exchanges.
Website: bitcoin.org
Electrum Bitcoin Wallet
[ACTIVELY DEVELOPED]
Biography: The most popular Bitcoin wallet in existence, Electrum is the default wallet on the Tails OS due to its ease of use and security.
Website: electrum.org
Litecoin
[ACTIVELY DEVELOPED]
Biography: The first and one of the most popular altcoins, Litecoin is almost identical to Bitcoin in terms of software. It was first invented in 2011.
Website: litecoin.com
Monero
[ACTIVELY DEVELOPED]
Biography: A popular altcoin, Monero utilizes a private blockchain rather than a public one to obfuscate transactions and provide anonymity to users. It was first invented in 2014.
Website: getmonero.org
Monero Wallet
[ACTIVELY DEVELOPED]
Biography: The official XMR wallet, provided by the developers behind the cryptocurrency, comes in both CLI and GUI form.
Website: getmonero.org
Encryption
PGP
[ACTIVELY DEVELOPED]
Biography: First created by Phil Zimmermann in 1991, PGP (an acronym for Pretty Good Privacy) is an program used to encrypt, decrypt, sign and verify messages cryptographically. It supports creation of 1024, 2048, 3072, and 4096-bit keys on a regular computer.
Website: pgp.com
TrueCrypt
[DEFUNCT]
Biography: Originally based on E4M (Encryption For the Masses) software, TrueCrypt was created by an anonymous person or group called “The TrueCrypt Team”. Hacker and developer Paul Le Roux was alleged to be behind the creation of the software.
Website: truecrypt.org
VeraCrypt
[ACTIVELY DEVELOPED]
Biography: A fork of the defunct TrueCrypt project, VeraCrypt is an open-source program for encryption and securing of files and media.
Website: veracrypt.fr
Commerce
Eckmar
[PASSIVELY DEVELOPED]
Biography: Created by the European software developer of the same name, the Eckmar market script is the most popular preexisting codebase for DNMs at this time. It is officially sold for approximately US$599, although leaks and cracks do exist, although most are riddled with backdoors or malware.
Website: [none]
Security
Endgame
[ACTIVELY DEVELOPED]
Biography: Primarily developed by Dread administrator Paris and White House Market owner Mr_White, although with input from a variety of other sources, the Endgame DDoS shield is the Darknet’s answer to Cloudflare, and works hand-in-hand with a JS-less reCaptcha clone called “deCaptcha”.
Website: dreadytofatroptsdj6io713xptbet6onoyno2yv7jicoxknyazubrad.onion/d/Endgame
Dictionary of Terminology
NOTE: This is a basic glossary, and may be incomplete. It will be expanded in future editions.
A
Alprazolam (Alp) - A benzodiazepine sold under the brand name Xanax.
Alt - Alternate account, the term for when a user has two or more active accounts on a site.
Altcoin - Any cryptocurrency alternative to Bitcoin.
Amnesiac - "Forgetful" software that doesn't save data, such as Tails OS.
Amphetamines - A type of stimulant drug.
B
Bars - A form of drug shape, usually long and thin. Most often used for benzodiazepines.
Bartard - A derogatory term for someone whose mental state is negatively affected by benzodiazepines.
Bayonet, Operation - A law enforcement operation resulting in the concurrent takedowns of AlphaBay and Hansa Market.
Benzodiazepine (Benzo) - A type of depressant drug, often used to treat anxiety or panic attacks.
Bitcoin (BTC) - The most popular cryptocurrency.
Blockchain - A public or private ledger of cryptocurrency transactions.
Bootable - A software or operating system able to be launched from removable media such as a USB stick or SD card.
Bunk - Slang term for fake narcotics with no effect.
Busted - Arrested or compromised.
C
Caps - A popular form of drug shape made by putting powder or small bits of narcotic into a small container.
Carding - A type of fraud based around the use of credit cards.
Cocaine (Coke) - A stimulant drug, one of the most popular in the world.
Controlled Delivery (CD) - A law enforcement tactic involving monitoring buyer's receival of a seized package.
Cryptocurrency - A type of decentralized electronic currency.
Cryptography - The study of encryption.
D
Darknet Market (DNM) - A Tor-based commerce site, usually allowing the sale of illegal narcotics.
Dash - A popular form of altcoin.
DDoS - Distributed Denial of Service, in which an attacker forces a site offline with an unblockable amount of rapid connections.
Dealer - A salesman, usually of drugs.
Decoy - An innocuous item placed in a package to distract law enforcement and obscure illegal contents.
Decrypt - To reverse an encryption method and reveal the message to read easily.
Deep Web - Any site, file, directory or anything else not indexed by search engines. Often erroneously confused with "Darknet”.
Dimethyltryptamine (DMT) - A popular psychedelic and the most powerful on earth.
Direct Deal (DD) - To conduct business with a vendor directly, rather than through a market with escrow.
Dox - To leak or publicly post personally identifying information of a person, including name, address, or description.
Drop Ship - A vending tactic involving the vendor passing the buyer's address on to another vendor to ship to, eliminating any need for the middleman (dropshipper) to handle anything illegal in person.
E
Electrum - The most popular type of Bitcoin wallet.
Encrypt - To use an encryption program or method to render a message unreadable to all those without the means to decrypt.
Entactogen - A type of drug often associated with stimulants, named after their ability to enhance user's emotions.
Escrow - A form of buyer and vendor protection in which a third party (aside from the vendor and buyer) holds money in place until the buyer receives their product.
Exit Scam - A type of scam in which a vendor or market convinces users to release as much money as possible into their control, before disappearing with the funds.
F
Fake ID - Any form of fraudulent identification.
Fentanyl! (Fent) - A dangerous and highly-potent opiate.
Finalise Early (FE) - To release money from escrow before receiving a product.
Forum - A form of social media site where users can discuss a range of subjects.
Fraud - A method of using deception or unlawful methods to gain money.
Free Open-Source Software (FOSS) - Software with the source code freely posted on the Internet for anyone to use, replicate, and add to.
FUD - Fear, Uncertainty and Doubt; basically unverifiable or false rumours meant to make people lose trust in a site, service, person or group.
H
Hitmen - A myth based around the urban legend of being able to contract murderers-for-hire on the Darknet.
Honeypot - A fake site run by law enforcement to gather information or money on criminal users.
Hotspot - When a product has “hot spots" and "cold spots", it means it is more or less potent in different areas of the pill, cap, bar, crystal, tab, or other form of consumption.
I
I2P - A type of anonymity network similar to Tor, based on the Invisible Internet Project protocol.
J
Jabber - A type of communication method.
L
Linux - A brand of operating systems, usually FOSS. Many are based around different usages, including security, anonymity, pentesting, convenience or web hosting.
Litecoin - The first and possibly most popular altcoin.
Love Letter (LL) - An official notice from law enforcement to a buyer informing them of a seized illegal package.
Low-Hanging Fruit - A forum of buyer, vendor, or other user that is incredibly gullible or insecure.
LSD - Lysergic acid diethylamide, a popular form of psychedelic drug.
M
Magic Mushrooms - A family of psychedelic fungi containing psilocybin.
Mariana's Web - A fictional "deeper layer" of the Darknet.
MDMA - Methylene Dioxymethamphetamine, a popular entactogen, stimulant and party drug.
Metadata - User and device information saved in a photo, screenshot, or similar type of file media. Usually removed by the security-minded before being shared.
Meth - Methamphetamine, a popular stimulant.
Microdose - The practice of taking a small dose of a narcotic, below the dosage at which it usually shows effects, for perceived nootropic or cognitive effects.
Monero - A popular privacy-based altcoin.
Multisig - The practice of two or three out of three people in a transaction (Buyer, Vendor, and Market) hold keys to an escrow wallet, meaning the money can only be released by the appropriate number of people using their keys.
Murder Homeless People - A popular joke term used as a euphemism for dealing drugs in real life.
O
Onion - The TLD for all websites based on the Tor network, described as "hidden services”. It is referred to as that because of the "layered" approach to relays on the Tor Browser.
Onymous, Operation - A law enforcement operation resulting in the takedown of a number of hidden services, including Silk Road 2, Doxbin, and Cloud 9.
Opsec - Operation Security, the practice of remaining secure and anonymous on the Darknet.
Overdose - The effect of taking more than a safe amount of a particular narcotic relative to the user's physical condition and tolerance. An overdose can result in physical or mental harm, or even death.
P
P2P - Peer To Peer Networking, a form of networking in software in which every participant (or "peer") is equally privileged and shares tasks equally.
PGP - Pretty Good Privacy, a popular encryption program.
Persistent - The opposite of Amnesiac, a persistent software or OS stores data upon shutdown to be used the next time it is launched.
Pharma - Pharmaceutical-grade narcotics, made in an official laboratory.
Phishing - A method of fraud involving the creation of fake login pages for websites to steal user data.
Pidgin - A software used for communication with others using IRC, XMPP, or similar protocols.
PIHKAL - Phenethylamines I Have Known and Loved, a well-known book by Alexander and Ann Shulgin.
Pills - A form of drug similar to a bar, but usually smaller.
Private Key - One part of an encryption keypair, a private key is used to sign or encrypt messages by one party, and should NEVER be shared.
Psychonaut - A term for someone who frequently uses psychedelics.
Psyops - Psychological Operations, a type of psychological warfare.
Public Key - One part of an encryption keypair, a public key is shared with other people to allow them to encrypt messages to you or verify messages you have signed with that key.
Purity - The measure of how clean or potent a drug is.
Q
Qubes - A form of compartmentalized and security-focused operating system based on Linux.
R
Reagent - A chemical added to another chemical to cause a reaction. This method is often used in test kits to verify the makeup of an unknown narcotic.
Red Rooms - A type of urban legend based around the myth of finding live-streamed torture and murder videos on the Darknet.
Research Chemical (RC) - A type of designer drug, often sufficiently new as to have no official legislature against the use of them.
Re-Up - Slang term for a street dealer or vendor buying a new batch of a product to refill their stocks.
Review - A public form of feedback on a vendor's shipping ability, communication, and product quality.
S
Scam - When one vendor, buyer, or other user steals money from another.
Seized - A package is seized if it is discovered by law enforcement and taken.
Selective Scam - A form of scam in which a vendor sends the majority of products, but scams every once ina while.
Serotonin Syndrome - A type of medical effect that happens after the careless use of entactogen, stimulant, or similar drugs.
Sheet - A page of tabs/blotters, usually up to 200 or so.
Shill - A user giving good or bad feedback on someone else with the intention of changing public opinion, while secretly benefitting from doing so.
Sockss - A popular type of proxy software.
Subdread - A subforum based on popular Darknet social media site Dread.
Subreddit - A subforum based on popular clearnet social media site Reddit.
SWIM - Someone Who Isn't Me, a saying on illegalist forums and sites to distance a user from illegal activity (e.g.: "SWIM would like to order drugs on the Darknet").
T
Tab - A form of drug consumption media created by absorbing dissolved or liquid narcotic substance into a piece of perforated or unperforated paper. Also known as a "blotter".
Tails - An amnesiac, bootable operating system with a focus on anonymity.
Telegram - A popular type of messaging software.
Test Kit - An apparatus used for finding out the active ingredient in an unknown narcotic.
TIHKAL - Tryptamines I Have Known and Loved, a popular book by Alexander and Ann Shulgin and the sequel to PIHKAL.
Tor - A type of anonymity network accessed via the Tor Browser.
Tor 2 Door (T2D) - The time it takes between a vendor accepting an order and it arriving at the buyer's address.
Tripping - The act of being under the influence of a mind-altering, usually psychedelic substance.
Tripsitter - A sober person employed by a person under the effects of a psychedelic substance to watch out for their wellbeing.
TrueCrypt - A now-defunct software for encrypting and securing files.
Tweaker - A derogatory term for someone negatively mentally impaired by stimulants, usually amphetamines or methamphetamine.
V
V2 - A type of onion address comprised of 16 characters, widely considered less secure and DDoS-proof than the alternative, v3 addresses.
V3 - A type of onion address comprised of 56 characters, ostensibly more secure and impervious to DDoS than v2 addresses.
Vendor - A person who sells narcotics or other goods or services on a Darknet Market.
Veracrypt - The successor to TrueCrypt, a software available for file encryption and security.
VPN - Virtual Private Network, a type of proxifying anonymity software.
VPS - Virtual Private Server, a virtual machine used as a hosting server for a website.
W
Whonix - An anonymity-focused and Linux-based operating system, often used with Qubes. It is mostly catered to experienced Linux users with a higher risk profile than Tails users.
Wickr - A popular type of communication software.
X
XMPP - A type of communication protocol, compatible with numerous software, including Pidgin.
2
2C-B - A psychedelic party drug, often sold in powder or pill form.
Written by BadMedicine
Last edited:
