There were more than 250,000 listings for drugs and toxic chemicals, Sessions said. Officials, including Attorney General Jeff Sessions, acting FBI Director Andrew McCabe and Europol Executive Director Robert Mark Wainwright, heralded the action Thursday morning as a message to criminals everywhere. In shutting down AlphaBay and arresting its alleged founder, Alexandre Cazes, the Justice Department also is going after the assets of Cazes, who is charged with running the sophisticated anonymous market and was worth upwards of $23 million, according to court documents. The operation was organized with international law enforcement
Accessing The Official Links
By presenting a task that is simple for a person to solve but difficult for a computer program, it acts as a gatekeeper, preventing automated systems from overwhelming a platform with malicious requests. Users must employ a combination of tools including the Tor browser, a reputable VPN, and robust anti-malware software to shield their identity and data. The only secure method is to independently verify the official address using its PGP key, which authenticates the Alphabay Tor URL and protects your security.
Ensuring Consistent Access
- "It is frankly frightening," one user wrote in response to news of the AlphaBay takedown.
- Interestingly, AlphaBay’s former moderator “Disc0” also chimed in, but using a lowercase “d” this time.
- The site became a hub for vendors and buyers alike, providing a secure environment that facilitated anonymous transactions through cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin.
- Regularly scanning your system can help identify any potentially harmful software that could compromise your security.
- Users will be safe to purchase from multiple markets all without the need of trusting any market with their cryptocurrency or registering for each one individually.
- For instance, in a purchase on the Alphabay market, the buyer’s payment is held in escrow until they receive the product and confirm that it meets their expectations.
Some of the best-known names include Abacus Market, Russian Market, and BriansClub, all with thousands of illegal items available.Despite closures by authorities or the typical “exit scams” (when a marketplace disappears with all the money), these sites continue to pop up. Check out our article on the 10 best browsers for surfing the dark web and find out which one is the safest, fastest, and most reliable for maintaining your privacy.These markets have come a long way since the days of Silk Road and AlphaBay, which were the first major pioneers of anonymous commerce on the darknet. Alright, let’s get into the meat of it—the darknet markets that are ruling 2025. Past takedowns have led to more market sites going permanently offline in a ripple effect, as they're overwhelmed by new users and unexpected visibility. He points to AlphaBay's unprecedented size for a darknet market, estimating that its nearly 300,000 listings of drugs, stolen credit cards, and other contraband brought in—as a conservative estimate—between $600,000 and $800,000 a day in revenue.
Monero (XMR): Darknet’s Currency
Regularly monitoring the top dark web markets gives your SOC team an insider’s view of the latest malware and phishing kit trends, plus real-time knowledge related to relevant compromised PII. Understanding what happens in these marketplaces is an important part of dark web monitoring. Based on our observations from analysis on dark web data using Lunar, we’ve identified the top 7 marketplaces on the dark web in 2025. In 2025, it hosts over 2.5 million active users daily, with markets facilitating billions in cryptocurrency transactions annually.
Quick Access
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Staying Safe Online
"With all of that said you decide for yourself whether you ride the wave with us to the top and beyond," he wrote in a message to users on the dark web market forum Dread. But all of the defensive wizardry that DeSnake describes—both AlphaGuard and the decentralization project—remain largely unproven talk, says Flashpoint analyst Ian Gray, who closely monitors dark web markets. But he sees it as a way to both make AlphaBay invulnerable to future law enforcement takedowns and to pay back the dark web's users for the millions they lost when the original AlphaBay server was seized. In that hyper-ambitious plan, open source programmers and server operators who independently run hundreds or thousands of servers would be paid a portion of profits for hosting markets that would form a vast dark web network with no single point of failure. If that AlphaGuard feature doesn't sound aspirational enough, DeSnake says he's also in the early stages of a long-term plan to implement a fully decentralized marketplace system, essentially a BitTorrent to the current dark web markets' Napster. "It is a system to ensure users can withdraw funds, settle disputes, and generally go without a cent lost if raids happen," DeSnake writes, "even if it happens on all servers at the same time. It is unstoppable."
The Biggest Dark Web Takedown Yet Sends Black Markets Reeling
The continuous operation is managed through automated systems that monitor link health in real-time, instantly rotating traffic to functional mirrors without requiring user intervention. These mirrors are redundant access points that serve as backups should any single point of failure occur, ensuring the marketplace remains reachable even if specific servers are targeted or experience downtime. A reliable resource for finding a current Alphabay market link is the official Alphabay directory, ensuring a more stable and secure connection to the marketplace. For those seeking alternative secure gateways, a resource like the secure darknet directory can provide verified access points, underscoring the ecosystem’s shared need for stability and security against volumetric attacks. Navigating the darknet to find a genuine Alphabay market link requires extreme caution due to the prevalence of phishing sites designed to steal user credentials.
Navigating The Marketplace
- AlphaBay is currently accepting only Monero as a payment option for it’s transactions and whole market is forcing the use of PGP which helps in the long run with the security.
- It features a unique site design unlike any other market yet is still intuitive and easy to use.
- Vortex is one of those markets that aims to stand out by being user-friendly, secure, and anonymous.
- The email explained that the sender had been googling dark-web arrests, looking for a law enforcement contact.
- It is considered very secure thanks to strict user validations and transparent payment and vendor review procedures.
- Fraud offerings like accounts, bank logs, fullz, and credit cards are second to drugs in terms of number of listings.
Now, four years after his market's demise, DeSnake appears to be back online and has relaunched AlphaBay under his own singular leadership. Just over four years ago, the US Department of Justice announced the takedown of AlphaBay, the biggest dark web market bust in history. Incognito is one of the most famous and popular markets on the Darknet.
DarkOwl has assigned assets to monitoring and collecting data from the new AlphaBay Marketplace, leveraging our darknet intelligence capabilities, despite their increased crawler detection measures and ongoing server instability. Furthermore, darknet users rarely draw so much attention to themselves. After almost two months of operation, the market has a handful of vendors, with only a couple of hundred listings across drugs and fraud goods. The new AlphaBay market’s Tor service has been unstable since its launch, with frequent 503 errors, user registration issues, and login timeouts. In early August 2021, DeSnake resurfaced on Dread, the popular Reddit-like discussion forum on the darknet administrated and moderated by users, Hugbunter and Paris.
AlphaBay, The Largest Online ‘Dark Market,’ Shut Down
In the meantime, DeSnake wants to attract users with promises of a still-unproven system he calls AlphaGuard, designed to let users withdraw their funds even if authorities once again seize the servers that run AlphaBay's infrastructure. After all, law enforcement seized the laptops of Alexandre Cazes and Ross Ulbricht—the latter is serving a life sentence for running the original dark web drug market known as Silk Road–while they were open, running, and logged into administrator accounts on the dark web sites they oversaw. He says his work computers run an "amnesiac" operating system, like the security-focused Tails distribution of Linux, designed to store no data. AlphaBay's dark web site is now accessible not only via Tor, like the original AlphaBay, but also I2P, a less popular anonymity system that DeSnake encourages users to switch to. This market offers a variety of goods and services, including drugs, weapons, counterfeit documents, and other illegal goods. At the time of its takedown, AlphaBay dwarfed Silk Road, which had previously been the largest dark web marketplace.
Ultimately, maintaining operational security is a continuous process, not a one-time setup. For those conducting transactions, verifying the authenticity of any alphabay link through trusted community forums is a critical first step to avoid phishing traps. To maintain availability despite attempts to block access, the platform employs several technical solutions. The correct and safest method to find the official URL is by using its verified, unique PGP-signed address from a reputable darknet directory or forum. Accessing the Alphabay marketplace requires specialized software and knowledge due to its operation on the anonymous Tor network. This involves consulting reputable, independent dark web directories and link aggregators that are known for their diligence in updating their lists.
For an ambitious young prosecutor, the possibility was thrilling. But he figured that even dark-web dealers must sometimes make mistakes that could be caught through traditional buy-and-bust police work. So Rabenn immersed himself in dozens of hours of YouTube videos to understand this still new currency called Bitcoin, its mechanics, and how it seemed to be powering an anonymous underworld of online commerce. For the next few years, he and the local agents tackled fraud and extortion, child exploitation, corrupt cops, and, of course, drug trafficking—following illicit trails of money wherever they led. But he also found that he admired and envied the prosecutors on the other side of the table—the way they worked in the public interest and possessed a certain autonomy, choosing which cases they would pursue. Before Grant Rabenn became a federal prosecutor, his second job out of law school was at a boutique firm in Washington, DC, devoted to defending white-collar criminals.
If someone wants direct access to a server, a cPanel, or an email, this is the place to go.The market is in English and features a massive catalog with over 800,000 illegal products. The truth is that, despite the incident, the site is still active and constantly renewing its inventory.Thanks to its track record, loyal user base, and continuous flow of updated data, BriansClub remains a key player in the current landscape of dark web fraud. You won't find drugs here, but you will find tons of credentials, RDP access, CVVs, and records stolen using malware.The platform works with data collected by well-known malware such as Lumma, RedLine, Raccoon, Vidar, and Aurora.
Archetyp Market delivers 28,000+ listings and $3.5 million in monthly trades using BTC and XMR, securing a 6% market share. Just over a year later, however, AlphaBay has emerged as a top, if not the top, illicit marketplace. By October 2015, less than a year of operating, AlphaBay already had over 200,000 users. “The biggest reason I am returning is to make the AlphaBay name be remembered as more than the marketplace which got busted and the founder made out to have committed suicide,” DeSnake writes. “I found this site by accident, but I realized that it was fate, the Alphabay market allowed me to purchase all the necessary goods in the shortest possible time, and the delivery really pleased me, everything was fast and reliable”. Today’s version of AlphaBay experienced a relatively slow start, as vendors and buyers questioned the nature of this relaunch, wary of law enforcement involvement.
