“I do not endorse sites and I do not take payment in exchange for anything. Many listings involve stolen personal information, including credit card data, Social Security details, and full identity profiles. This article reveals the top 10 dark web markets dominating in 2025, their unique characteristics, and the critical implications for enterprise cybersecurity. While not all are pictured above, in total, we found 16 vendors either selling or sourcing drug material from Abacus and purchasing production supplies from this China-based vendor.
The dark web is designed in such a manner that it hides the identities and locations of its visitors. This extra privacy makes it much harder for authorities to track down who runs these markets and where they are located. For these reasons, most of these stores naturally like the dark web due to its protection. So, what even is this dark web, and why are these marketplaces present there?
Law Enforcement Countermeasures
Since last year’s Crypto Crime Report, the top performing Russia-based DNMs have held steady, but Kraken DNM overtook Mega as the leading DNM by annual revenue in 2024. “Waste your resources on seizing petty websites because they know the use of darknet services is ever growing,” another user wrote. Taken together, those operations represent the most far-reaching collection of law enforcement actions against the dark web’s economy in at least two years. “You’re seeing the evolution of a coordinated law enforcement effort,” the director of Europol’s European Cybercrime Centre said. Just because the seller has good reviews does not mean you can trust them.
- While not all are pictured above, in total, we found 16 vendors either selling or sourcing drug material from Abacus and purchasing production supplies from this China-based vendor.
- In this way, we generated a rich underground marketplace opioid vocabulary of 311 opioid keywords with 13 categories.
- They sell these files for just a fraction of the original cost on the surface web or even share freely, which makes them tempting for people looking for shortcuts.
- “Many of these are young people, including young women, who are abused and have had fingers chopped off and bones broken. Because, like in the normal drug world, reputation is everything, and the big businesses cannot be seen to be taken advantage of.”
- Another limitation is pointed out in the paper that multiple online suppliers might belong to the same vendor.
BTC’s lone use fits Bohemia’s old-school vibe, with no word on XMR or other currencies by 2025—some users see this as a drawback in a privacy-hungry market. Its design is simple and practical, with basic filters, seller ratings at 4.4/5 from 30,000+ reviews, and a no-fuss layout that bets on reliability over looks. The design is a tech standout, built for scale and use with extras like multi-language support (English, Russian, Spanish), live seller stats (4.9/5 average from 100,000+ reviews), and a sharp search tool sorting by category, price, rating, and shipping source. Sellers like “AlphaChem” and “CyberLord” hit 99% ratings, delivering top drugs and digital goods with 96% shipping reliability. Alphabay’s size has downsides—load times can hit 5–10 seconds at peak (10 PM–2 AM UTC), and seller fees run 10–15% above smaller markets—but its 20% share and $20M monthly haul tower over rivals, securing its high rank. Alphabay’s payment system sets a high bar with a 99% success rate—the best we’ve seen—sorting 95% of disputes in 24 hours with a 50+ moderation team.
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It became the blueprint for other dark web marketplaces that tried to take its place. Later, in 2013, Silk Road caught the attention of law enforcement and policymakers like US Senator Charles Schumer, who publicly called for a federal crackdown. That push led to the arrest of Ross Ulbricht, the founder of Silk Road, after a long and intense investigation.
Abacus Market: Facilitating Illicit Drug Trade
Even people with little to no knowledge can buy ready-made ransomware and launch attacks on their victims. This expanded reach, combined with anonymity, only makes it easier for them to grow their operations without getting caught immediately. Want to get illegal drugs, fake passports, Trojan, or other cyber attack software?
You can find a lot of goods and services packed with stealth high-level encryption, no JavaScript, and anti-DDoS protection. With $50M+ in monthly trades across our top 10, the stakes are high—scams cost $1M+ yearly, and 30% of links are traps. These FAQs tackle these risks and more, offering practical advice to maximize safety and success in deep web markets. Whether you’re trading on Abacus or Vice City, these answers provide clarity for 2025’s darknet ecosystem. In 2025, BTC dominates at 60%+ across most markets, XMR rises to 40% for privacy, and USDT gains traction at 15% in ASAP, cutting fees by 20%.
According to the report, the platforms were behind more than 97% of the drug-related crypto activity on the Bitcoin and TRON networks. That translates to around $1.65 billion out of the $1.7 billion traced to drug trade on both blockchains last year. District Court Judge Amy Berman Jackson, to a charge of conspiracy to distribute more than 400 grams of fentanyl and 50 grams of methamphetamine, and to a charge of possessing a firearm in furtherance of a drug trafficking offense. Blair also pleaded guilty in the District of Columbia to a charge, originally filed in the Western District of Pennsylvania, of distributing 40 grams or more of fentanyl and 50 grams or more of methamphetamine. A global law enforcement operation has resulted in the seizure of $200 million in cash and digital assets and the arrest of 270 individuals across 10 countries, the U.S.
Torzon Market
Both defendants further admitted to distributing fentanyl-laced pills to two additional victims, both of whom suffered fatal drug overdoses shortly after they received the pills from Ta and Srinivasan. A single study can’t definitively prove whether the dark web offers a safer supply. But these results suggest that, while some substances were indeed less likely to be adulterated, purchasing there is not a silver-bullet harm reduction strategy—and that testing remains vital whatever the source. By paying close attention to where adulterated substances were purchased, local drug checking services can help participants make more informed decisions to protect their health. Asking the “right way,” according to Barratt, should yield enough information about the source of the substance to understand what type of risk it poses to the community if it turns out to be adulterated. This includes asking participants who say that their drugs are from “the internet” to provide more detail, if they feel comfortable doing so.
The 10 Biggest Dark Web Markets In 2025 – Updated List & Security Insights
Sales are hard to measure with certainty on darknet markets, but by checking customer feedback with specialist software it is possible to estimate trends. Several of the UK’s biggest online drug vendors have maintained positive feedback on around 1,000 to 2,000 sales monthly since January. There was an increase in larger-value orders, coronavirus-themed deals, and cut-price custom deals, normally given to valued offline resellers. Today’s action, taken pursuant to Executive Order (E.O.) 14059, which targets proliferators of narcotics and their means of production, underscores the United States’ commitment to combatting all means of supplying narcotics to the United States. Treasury remains focused on the risks posed by darknet marketplaces, as highlighted in previous designations of Genesis Market on April 5, 2023, and of Hydra Market on April 5, 2022.
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- Some marketplace operators first build trust by running a legitimate platform.
- First, an opioid trader, who intends to list the selling information and find potential customers, will first access the anonymous online marketplaces and forums, using an anonymous browsing tool such as a Tor client or a web-to-Tor proxy (step 1 in Figure 1) 5,6.
- The dark web is a hidden section of the internet that you cannot reach with common search engines like Bing or Google.
- While the US market is best characterized by its diverse product offerings, other countries offer regional specialties.
- According to court documents and statements made in court, Srinivasan and Ta used the “redlightlabs” darknet account to advertise and sell counterfeit M30 oxycodone pills containing fentanyl and other illicit drugs.
It brings in vendor reviews from other places and verifies them using PGP signatures, so buyers can feel a bit more confident about who they’re dealing with. And when it comes to paying, the site sticks to Bitcoin (BTC) and Monero (XMR) to keep transactions private. Now that you understand what the dark web is all about, you might wonder why other people do things on it. Darknet marketplaces like to exist on the dark web because it offers a service that the regular internet, or more accurately, the “surface web,” does not. From items like drugs, fake ID cards, and hacked bank accounts to more complex offerings like human trafficking, these sites carry all the illegal activities you can think of. Use trusted directories like dark.fail or The Hidden Wiki—30% of 2025 links are phishing scams costing $1M+ yearly.
Biggest Dark Web Marketplaces
Over 2020, technical innovation and new commercial partnerships between competitors have meant many darknet markets are emerging from the virus stronger than ever. This spring, multiple darknet markets united to end months of hacker attacks that started in January. This has led to record levels of uptime at Empire, which is now accessible for 95 percent of each day, compared to 70 percent in January, according to users. Essential darknet resources, such as community forums for vendor reviews or specialist search engines, have been rebuilt from the ground after police seized them. Today, these services allow users to search for any drug, sold by any vendor on any market, enabling trade to flow more freely.
But don’t expect the dark web’s downtime to last, says Roman Sannikov, an analyst at security firm Recorded Future. “My guess would be the lower-tier markets just grow in prominence again,” he says. But despite those wins, a years-long war of attrition seems to be exactly the pattern that the dark web’s booms and busts now follow, argues Carnegie Mellon computer scientist Nicolas Christin, a longtime dark web researcher.
Alphabay Scales To Record 60,000+ Listings
We also applied the MALLET topic modeling toolkit (package cc.mallet.topics MALLET’s class in JavaDoc API) on the same data set to predict the type of topic. The baseline model was applied directly to the labeled data (Table 3) and evaluated using 10-fold cross-validation. We used the metrics of precision and recall to compare the performance of different topic modeling methods. As shown in Table 4, our results indicate that our approach significantly outperforms MALLET and the baseline model in terms of both precision and average recall. Data set summary of marketplaces and forums that were collected for this study.
While most darknet markets require Tor and .onion addresses, Cipher stands out by operating on the clearnet, allowing access via standard browsers. This makes it one of the few darknet-style markets accessible without Tor, though buyers are still encouraged to use a VPN and anonymous browser for added privacy. So while the Department of Justice has used the indictment to highlight, in Matthew Galeotti’s words, its commitment “to protecting U.S. communities from the harms caused by fentanyl and darknet marketplaces,” there still remains an ongoing risk of such harms. A US grand jury has charged Iranian national Behrouz Parsarad for operating the Nemesis darknet marketplace, which between 2021 and 2024 facilitated the sale of illicit cyberservices and drugs. Cryptomarkets are part of an evolving trend where communities of PWUD adapt and develop technological systems to their ends.
