We all visit websites every day because anytime you're on the internet, you have to go to a website. And when it comes to websites, not all are created equally. And no, I'm not talking about Reddit. I'm talking about illegal websites. Websites that have either been banned or have law enforcement attached to them. Websites that are criminal. Now, before I get any further into this video, I just want to say that I'm not condoning any illegal activity at all. Obviously, this is just pretty fun to learn about. It's like a documentary. This is informative, educational, and interesting. So, I'm not condoning anything illegal or criminal, but I wanted to learn about some more illegal websites. So, I researched some and I came to this iceberg I made. So, yeah, let's just uh get into this. But if you want to know a really good not illegal website, it is the uh the poy YouTube channel subscribe button. So, go ahead and subscribe if you want. Follow my Instagram and join my discord as well if you want. And let's get into this layer one. This top layer covers the big names everyone's heard of. These sites aren't very hidden and they represent the first time that ordinary internet users realized the web could be a place for genuinely legal activity. The Pirate Bay is the perfect example. Founded in Sweden in 2003, it quickly became the most notorious torrent index in the world, hosting magnet links for movies, music, software, and more. By the way, really quick, it's worth quickly explaining what a torrent is before we go any further. So, a torrent isn't a single file you download from one place. It's a system for sharing files between users directly. Instead of a central server hosting a movie or a game you want to download, everyone who's already downloaded it helps upload pieces of it to others at the same time. It's kind of confusing, but basically when someone uses a torrent site like the pirate bay, they're not downloading from the website itself. The site just lists where those files are being shared and then the real transfer happens between users computers using a torrent client. And that's what makes these sites so hard to kill off. There's no secret server to shut down. There's just millions of people passing files around. Okay. Anyway, let's get back into the pirate bay. Its founders got freedom, Peter Sunde, and Friedrich Nege were eventually tried and convicted, but the site refused to die. Over the years, the pirate bay has been raided multiple times, had its domain seized, and its servers moved between countries and even the cloud-based virtual hosts. But it's still online today. Like, still, it's kind of crazy. Next up is Kickass Torrance or K A T which briefly overtook the Pirate Bay as the biggest torrent site on Earth. It ran from 2008 until 2016 when its alleged founder Artum Volen was arrested in Poland. KAT felt more polished than the Pirate Bay. Customizable category, slick design, curated content, and that professional look made its downfall even bigger news. When it vanished, millions of users migrated to mirrors and clones that popped up almost instantly. And by the way, I'm going through these early entries really quickly just because they're ones that people already know about, so then the deeper stuff will be more interesting and more detailed. Next up is Mega Upload, founded by Kim.com in 2005. Unlike torrent sites, Mega Upload wasn't just a link aggregator. It was a full-blown file hosting service that made it easy to share massive pirated files directly. It was used by everyone from casual users to professional uploaders who made money off premium downloads. In 2012, the US government staged a dramatic raid on.com's mansion in New Zealand, seizing servers worldwide. Also, I don't know if his real name. Um, he I don't know. It probably changed it because whenever I Googled it, it said that he's also known as Kim Tim Jim Veester, which also sounds like a fake name. So, I don't know what the this guy's real name is. Um, but is a fire name. Anyway, this whole case became a global debate about copyright jurisdiction and whether hosting content counts as enabling privacy. And the sheer scale of that bust, worth hundreds of millions in alleged losses, was unlike anything the internet had ever seen before. Omega Omegle started as something totally different from the dark, unsafe reputation it eventually earned. Launched in 2009 by a developer named Leaf K. Brooks. It was a simple idea. Connect two random strangers in a text or video chat. No accounts, no names, just you and Stranger. At first, it was weird but innocent fun. teenagers, bored college kids, and random internet users would hop on to talk, joke around, or meet random people. But anonymity cuts both ways. That same no rules, no identity setup made Omega a magnet for predators, harassment, and illegal activity. Over the years, it got flooded with explicit behavior, bots, and people using it for exploitation or blackmail. The site tried to fight back, adding moderation, interest tags, and a monitored chat mode, but it never really worked. The volume of abuse reports kept growing and watch dog groups began linking Omega to grooming cases and serious crimes. By the early 2020s, Omega's reputation was beyond saving. What started as a quirky social experiment had turned into a global safety concern. In November 2023, following a major lawsuit that accused the platform of enabling child exploitation, Brooks announced that Omega was shutting down permanently. And in his farewell message, he admitted the site could no longer exist safely in the modern internet climate. And then finally, the last one in this first layer was the Silk Road. Silk Road changed the conversation entirely by showing that illegal activity didn't just mean pirating movies. It could mean running a literal entire underground economy. Created by Ross Ulbert or Dread Pirate Roberts in 2011. Silk Road was a tour hidden marketplace where people could buy drugs, forged IDs, and other contraband using Bitcoin. It felt revolutionary and terrifying at the same time. a libertarian experiment in free trade that also unleashed a new form of organized online crime. When the FBI shut it down in 2013 and arrested, it sent shock waves through both law enforcement and the tech world. It proved anonymity networks could host fully functional black markets and it inspired an entire wave of other darknet markets that we're going to talk about in these deeper layers of the iceberg. So, that was layer 1. Let's get into layer 2, guys. Starting with Alphab Bay. Alphab Bay was the biggest darknet market in the world. Basically, an online black market that lived on the tour network, which is a system designed to keep users anonymous. Tour stands for the onion router, and it works by bouncing your internet traffic through several encrypted layers, kind of like passing a message through multiple sealed envelopes. Each relay only knows the one before and after it, so nobody sees the full route from sender to receiver. That anonymity is what made tour the go-to place for buying and selling illegal things online. drugs, stolen data, counterfeit money, hacking tools, you name it. Just like Silk Road, Alphab Bay launched in 2014, right after the original Silk Road was taken down, and it quickly became the dominant marketplace. Its creator went by the name Alpha O2, later revealed to be a Canadian man named Alexandra Cays. And he wasn't some mysterious hacker in a basement. He was living in Thailand, married, driving luxury cars, and running his empire from a laptop. What made Alphabase so successful was how professional it looked compared to earlier markets. It had a clean interface, decent customer support, escro systems to hold buyer funds until delivery. It even supported multiple cryptocurrencies, not just Bitcoin, which made transactions even harder to trace. After a few years, Alphab Bay was the heart of the darknet economy. At its peak, it had over 200,000 users and tens of thousands of vendors. Everything from narcotics to stolen credit card data to fake IDs was sold there daily. It was so big that law enforcement agencies around the world started pulling resources to take it down. In 2017, that operation finally came together. A joint effort by the FBI, DEA, Europole, and Thai authorities. Kay was arrested in Bangkok and Alphabase servers were seized from multiple countries at once in a coordinated raid. After his arrest, Kay was found dead in his cell just days later. Officially ruled a super. The takedown of Alphab Bay was announced publicly soon after, and it sent shock waves through the darknet world. For a while, users thought it might have been an exit scam where admins steal all of the sites funds and disappear because that kind of thing did happen a lot back then. But once the FBI released proof of the seizure, it became clear it was a real like law enforcement hit. Handsome market. Hans was one of those darknet markets that flew under the radar for a while. Steady, quiet, not flashy. It started in 2015 and ran on the tour network just like Alphab Bay and Silk Road. On the surface, it looked like any other dark market. Listings for drugs, stolen data, weapons, and fake documents. It wasn't the biggest, but it had a decent reputation because it actually worked. Vendors were reliable. Transactions usually went smoothly, and the admins kept it fairly clean compared to some sketchier markets out there. But in 2017, Hansa became the centerpiece of one of the most brilliant Sting operations in darknet history. While everyone was focused on Alphab Bay, law enforcement, especially the Dutch National Police working with Europole and the FBI, secretly took control of Hansa. Not shut it down, took it over. They'd already managed to seize its servers quietly a month before Alphabet was raided. Instead of announcing the bust, they kept Hansa running, acting like nothing had changed. When Alphabet was taken offline that July, hundreds of thousands of panicked users fled the shutdown and looked for a new home. And many of them ended up right on Hansa, which at that point was literally being operated by cops. That's the genius of it. Every message, every transaction, every attempted login was being logged by law enforcement in real time. They collected mountains of data on buyers, sellers, Bitcoin wallets, shipping addresses, even the specific ways vendors try to cover their tracks. After a few weeks of this covert monitoring, Europole finally pulled the plug. They announced the coordinated Alpha Bay Hansa operation together, showing just how far global cyber crime enforcement had come. And for the darknet community, it was a gut punch. Nobody knew who to trust anymore because if one of the biggest markets could secretly be run by police, any of them could. And it actually made a lot of people like disappear for a while or switch to private invite only setups. So yeah, pretty cool. But guys, don't don't order anything illegal or do anything illegal online, okay? It's bad. It's a bad thing to do. Don't do it, please. Dream Market. Dream Market was kind of the old reliable of the darknet world. It launched around 2013, just after the chaos following Silk Roads shutdown, and it managed to stick around for years while almost every other major market got raided, scammed, or just vanished overnight. It ran on tour, of course, same onion address structure, same basic setup. But Dream Market had a reputation for being steady and relatively dramaree. vendors sold the same usual lineup along with digital services like malware kits or fulls which are complete identity data like packs of people you could buy someone's whole identity. What made Dream stand out was its longevity. It lasted over 5 years which in darknet terms is ancient. Most markets barely make it to their second birthday. The admins were quiet, disciplined, and clearly cautious about security. But by early 2019, things started to go sideways. Dream Market began suffering massive DOS attacks. Basically, floods of junk or fake scam traffic meant to overwhelm and crash the servers. The site was constantly down or lagging. Vendors were getting paranoid and rumors started spreading fast. Some said the site had been compromised by law enforcement. Others thought it was being extorted by hackers demanding a protection money. And some believe the admins themselves were pulling an exit scam. A classic move again where it means that they just take all the escro cryptocurrency and vanish. In March 2019, the admin known as Speedstepper announced that Dream would shut down voluntarily and move to a partner service. That partner never materialized. Within weeks, the market went offline completely, taking its users funds with it. Whether it was seized, sold out, or self-destructed is still unclear. No big arrests followed, and no one never fully confirmed what happened. evolution market. Evolution was one of those darknet markets that kind of felt too good to be true. And in the end, it was. It launched around early 2014, right after Silk Road 2.0 started falling apart and quickly became the go-to site for thousands of users. So, it was doing great, but then in March 2015, everything fell apart overnight. Users woke up to find that all withdrawals were frozen. No one could move their Bitcoin out of escrow, and the site staff suddenly stopped responding. Within hours, the entire market vanished. The domain went dead. Forums were silent. And the millions of dollars in cryptocurrency were just gone. The admins known as Verto and Kimble had pulled an exit scam. At the time, it was one of the biggest betrayals in darknet history. According to reports, including coverage from Wired and the Guardian, the pair likely made off with somewhere between 10 million and 12 million in Bitcoin, though exact numbers are impossible to verify. The entire event became a wake-up call for the community. Like even if a market looks legitimate, you shouldn't always completely trust it. And that was layer two, guys. Let's get into layer three. Starting with carding forums and shops. Carding is the ugly, boring backbone of a lot of online theft. It's the trade and stolen payment credentials and the marketplaces that sell them on these forums and shop style sites. People sell and buy things like CVV lists, which are card numbers plus security code plus expiration, dumps, which are raw magnetic strip data grabbed from skimmers or breaches, and fulls, which again are full identity packages with a name, social security number, email, phone, address, sometimes even date of birth. Sellers will list what they've got, the country and bank the card is from, balances or limits, and a price. And the better or more the info, the higher the price. These places aren't just Craigslist for stolen cards. They're structured. There are threads with tutorials, low-level vendor shops, escrow systems, and reputation scores so buyers can avoid obvious scams. Vendors build reputation the same way that sellers do anywhere. Reliable product, fast delivery, good support. Except here, delivery means providing a working card data or access to a breached database. Many marketplaces mix forum style discussion with shop frontend. So vendors can show past feedback and buyers can file disputes when something's fake. It's kind of weird how much like honor and respect these criminals have. The ecosystem also includes a whole service stack. You see people offering skimmer hardware malware that harvests online checkout details. Carding tutorials, mostly recycled garbage and traps for newbies and services to convert stolen data into cash. cash out operations, mule recruitment, reshipping schemes, fake merchant accounts, and gift card laundering. There's a logistics layer where stolen goods get turned into spendable value. That's where real organized groups make the most money, not the one-off card seller. Law enforcement has repeatedly targeted these hubs because they're so profitable and traceable when people slip up. Big data breaches and card dumps get traced. Vendors get doxed after OPSEC failures. And major shops have been taken down in coordinated operations. Still, the market persists because stolen data is generated constantly. New breaches, skimmers at gas stations, fishing campaigns, and there's always demand from fraudsters who want quick cash or easy goods. Also, really quick, I just want to note right here again, I'm explaining how the ecosystem works, but I'm not explaining how to do any of it. Any operational details or how-to stuff is illegal, and I am not helping with that. Next up, exploit/malware bizars. Bazers. I've never known how to pronounce this word. But I've always seen it written out. Let's find out once and for all. I'm going to Google it, guys. Right here. Bizaars. Okay. Bizaars. So, these are basically black market classified sites where people advertise and sell digital weapons. Exploits, which are ways to break into softwares or systems, malware, which is software that does bad stuff like steals data, locks files, or spies on people, and services to run attacks for you. Some are open enough that any buyer can browse listings. The highest value places are invite only and heavily vetted. They pick who gets in because the goods are expensive and the sellers want fewer heat risks. Now, a zero day is a special kind of exploit. It targets a security bug nobody's publicly fixed yet. Zero day means the vendor or developer has zero days to patch it before it can be used. So, it's fresh and valuable. Buyers pay big money for zero days because they let attackers get into systems before anyone knows how to stop them. There are also one day or inday exploits, which are bugs that have been disclosed but not patched everywhere, and those sell too, but for less money. On here, you'll also see ads for malware as a service, meaning someone rents out software that does the dirty work. Botn nets, which are networks of hijacked computers you can command, ransomware, which locks files and demands money. RATs, which stands for remote access Trojans, and these are programs that give a remote attacker control of a machine. and C2 services, which stands for command and control, and these are the back-end systems that send instructions to infected machines. Sellers often offer support or updates to make the tools look more reliable. And yeah, it's that organized. Prices, escrow, and trust systems matter a lot on these sites. High-end exploit brokers and malware sellers will demand escrow, which is a third party that holds payment until buyer confirms delivery, or they'll use multi-IG crypto wallets to avoid rugpulls. They post proof of concept demos, screenshots, or videos to prove their product works. But that proof can be faked so buyers still vet sellers hard. That's why invite only communities exist. Reputation is currency. People with good track records can charge way more. But who buys this stuff and why? State actors and private spy groups sometimes buy zero days for targeted surveillance. Criminal gangs buy botn nets, ransomware kits, and credential harvesting tools to steal money, extort victims, or run large fraud operations. Even script kitties, which are inexperienced attackers, can rent ready-made tools instead of writing the code themselves, which broadens the pool of potential attackers. Law enforcement cares about these bizaars because they're a single place where a lot of criminal activity can be traced or at least disrupted. Investigations target sellers, the infrastructure of their C2 servers, and middlemen who launder payments. Sometimes undercover agents get invited into these groups, and sometimes vendors slip up and expose real identities. And that's how many busts happen. I'm describing how the market works, not how to use it. Any operational details or instructions would cross into illegal territory, and I'm not doing that. Sorry guys, I just got to keep repeating that so the YouTube uh overlords don't uh like kill me or whatever. They wouldn't actually kill me, but you know what I mean. Nulled/cracking communities. Nul and cracking are just two words for the same shady corner of the internet where people trade pirated software, stolen license keys, and the tools to bypass copy protection. A crack is a patch or tool that breaks a program's copyright protection so it runs without an official license. A key gen is a program that spits out fake serial numbers so the app thinks it's been legitimately activated. Wares is the old school name for pirated software packages sometimes wrapped up by people who repack installers to make them easy to run. So basically you get a software like a game or any kind of paid software. But if you don't want to pay for it, you can go online to these and get a crack which I am not condoning you do. This is just a hypothetical for sake of explanation. So these cracks are the same software but without requiring any sort of key or account to get in. For example, people do this a lot with Adobe software like Photoshop. Now, on the surface, this looks like your average pirate scene. Downloads, uploaders, and a rep section where people swap releases. But the ugly part is how often these files are weaponized. Many cracking sites and repack installers are malware laden, meaning the installer contains things like Trojans, back doors, or crypto miners that slip onto your computer while you think you're just installing Photoshop for free. The attacker's goal isn't just to give you a free program. It's to get persistence on your machine, steal credentials, join it to a botn net, or harvest payment data. So yeah, what looks like a bargain can quickly become a nightmare. These communities show up in a few ways. Forum hubs where threads list new cracks and cereals, file hosting links on public clouds, or invite only Telegram or Discord channels where repackers sell clean copies. There's also a commercial side. Some actors sell builds with claimed malware removed or offer custom crack services. Reputation matters here a lot. Vendors with a long history charge more, but trust is dangerous. A vendor with a perfect rep today can push an update tomorrow than plant spyware. From a law and harm angle, nled communities also fuel bigger crimes. Repacked software is a common vector for supply chain infections. You install what you think is a normal app and then suddenly an attacker controls the machine. Leaked license servers or cracked activation servers can be used at scale to distribute illegal copies across businesses. And the people who make and sell these tools are often part of wider cyber criminal ecosystems. So basically, there's usually no such thing as a free software, at least when it's one that's usually paid for. Grahams/ dark web search engines. Back when darknet markets were exploding, someone tried to make the dark web feel a little less like a scavenger hunt and a little more like Google. That's basically what Grahams and a handful of other dark web search tools were. indexes that scrolled onion pages and pulled listings into one searchable place. Instead of bouncing between five different markets to find what you wanted, you could hit a search box and see results across several marketplaces at once. Pretty useful and pretty tempting for anyone who wanted to monetize traffic or manipulate buyers. A couple quick terms here while we're on this. Indexing means automatically scanning pages and storing the content so you can search it later. A crawler or spider is the bot that does the scanning. And a honeypot is when a site pretends to be a normal service but is actually a trap set up to catch people or collect intel. More on why that matters in a sec. Those search engines made buying and comparing stuff easier. But they came with obvious problems. First, they relied on scraping other people's content. That content changes fast. Vendors move. Markets die. So, search results were often stale or wrong. Second, they became targets for manipulation. Vendors could pay for visibility. Fake listings could be promoted. and malicious actors could inject links that led to fishing pages or scam markets. Third, and this is huge, some search engines were basically affiliate farms or outright shady operations. They'd redirect traffic through affiliate links, skim crypto, or hand users off to compromised or coprun markets that turned a convenience into a risk real quick. Blackbook. Blackbook, also known as the Facebook of tour, was a dark web hidden social media service that appeared on tour in 2011. Structured very similarly to Facebook, users could make profiles, send friend requests, create groups, send messages, and share pictures. In 2013, it gained modest traction with privacy focused users in some illicit communities, but remained much smaller than dark web markets, but as a noteworthy social space and community rather than just for like elicit commerce or file sharing. By 2017, Blackbook was one of several tour social projects along with tour book clones. It's noted by researchers that its existence is mainly curiosity compared to mainstream dark web markets. But in 2018, reports started to surface that Blackbook had been hacked several times. The breaches disabled the site and caused loss of trust among users. And after repeated compromises, the site failed to recover and eventually went offline. Some users did genuinely use the site as a sort of private version of Facebook, keeping all their information and posts about themselves as personal as possible. The Hub Forum. The hub forum was a dark web forum site infamous for discussions of contract killings, extreme pornography, and doxing services. Think of it kind of like Reddit for the dark web. People used it to review vendors and markets, share tutorials on anonymization, encryption, and operational security and recruit or advertise for illicit services. Silk Roads takedown caused other dark web marketplaces to boom, ones not as well documented or reviewed yet. The site launched in 2015 as a generalpurpose dark webb forum, but the hub made itself a place to discuss vendors, markets, and security. It gained attention quickly because it offered centralized discussion at a time when marketplaces were so fragmented. By early 2017, the hub was frequently offline and its trust eroded. Some users speculated that admins either abandoned it or they just cashed out in an exit scam. And that's the end of layer three. So, let's get into layer four now. Starting with Black Market Reloaded/BMR. Black Market Reloaded was one of the early big dark web bazaars that actually started shaping what later markets looked like. It showed up around the tail end of the 2000s and into the early 2010s and quickly became a hub where dozens then hundreds of vendors sold everything from pills to powders to forged documents and digital goods. What made BMR important wasn't that it was the flashiest or the best. It's that it helped normalize a bunch of features that people on the dark web take for granted now. Cleanly organized vendor storefronts, public feedback and reputation threads, basic escrow for transactions, and integrated forums where buyers and sellers could argue disputes or post guides. People trusted it more than random forum sales because you could check a vendor's feedback history and see dispute threads. Small trust signals that matter a lot when everyone's anonymous. That trust encouraged more professional vendors to consolidate across markets. Sell in one shop but maintain a presence everywhere which in turn made the whole ecosystem feel more like a real marketplace instead of a sketchy bizaar. BMR also exposed the weak points shipping risk vendor exit scams and the basic problem that anonymous markets always face. Someone somewhere eventually screws up. Agora Valhalla Abrais and other short-lived markets. After Silk Road and Black Market Reloaded were taken down. A whole wave of copycat markets popped up trying to fill the gap. Agora was the biggest and most stable of that bunch. It launched in 2013 and quickly became the main marketplace for the next couple of years. It worked like the others. Anonymous vendors, Bitcoin payments, escrow, but it stood out for how careful its admins were. They were obsessed with security, constantly moving servers, rotating addresses, and avoiding publicity. That paranoia actually kept them safe for a while. Agora wasn't taken down by police. It shut itself down in 2015 after detecting what looked like a major security flaw in tour. The admins said they didn't want to risk user data being exposed. So, they voluntarily closed. That made Agora one of the few dark web markets to walk away clean instead of being busted or scamming its users. Then you have Valhalla, sometimes called Silkitty, which was more popular in Northern Europe, especially Finland. It started around 2013, too, and stuck around until 2019 when Finnish police secretly took control of it and ran it for months to gather information before announcing the bust. It's basically a smaller regional example of what happened with Hansa. Law enforcement quietly operating a live market from the inside. A Braxis came a bit later in 2015 and looked like it might replace Agora after it closed. It grew super fast, but vanished less than a year later in a classic exit scam, taking user funds and disappearing without warning. No one was arrested and it reminded everyone that even trusted markets can flip on you overnight. That pattern, sites rising fast, operating for a year or two and then imploding is just the natural rhythm of the darknet. Markets constantly appear, shut down, rebrand or get seized. Users migrate in circles chasing the next safe place. But every time one falls, a new name pops up to replace it. Hidden wiki variants and onion directories. The hidden wiki started as a simple idea, a single page that lists useful. Onunion sites, forums, market services, so people don't have to guess addresses. A lot of that convenience is why clones and forex spread like weeds. When people talk about hidden wiki variants, they mean dozens, maybe hundreds of copycat directories that look at a glance like a helpful index of the dark web. In practice, these pages are just link lists, categories, short descriptions, and onion addresses. the weird strings that end an in onion. That's it. Simple, searchable, feels helpful. But here's the catch. A directory is only as trustworthy as whoever runs it. Many of these forks are benign or just messy mirrors, but a surprising number are actively malicious. Some are affiliate forms that replace the legit market link with one that credits the directory owner for any purchases. That owner skims a cut. Others are fishing pages that mimic a real market's name and send users to lookalike sites designed to steal login details or crypto. And then you get full-on honeypotss pages set up by cops or vigilantes to gather info on people who click or by criminals trying to root traffic scam markets. So a single click on a directory link can redirect you into a trap or at least a place you didn't mean to be. Exit scam marketplaces. After evolution pulled its massive rug in 2015, exit scam basically became a running joke and a constant fear in the darknet world. The pattern is always the same. A market builds trust over time. users start depositing larger amounts of crypto into escrow and then suddenly everything stops. Everything freezes and within a few days the entire site disappears. The admins walk off with the funds leaving nothing but a splash page or a dead link. These scams are so common because of how darknet economies work. There's no real oversight, no regulator, and no way to sue anonymous admins. Markets live and die on reputation. But the longer a site runs, the more money sits in escrow, and the bigger the temptation is just to take it. Some admins plan their exit from day one. Others genuinely run things until paranoia or greed kicks in. It's easy to stage, too. Doss aside a few times to create panic, announce maintenance, and then vanish with millions in Bitcoin. After evolution, dozens of smaller markets followed that same blueprint. Arais, Outlaw, Dark Ode, Olympus, and others. Each promising to be safer, each eventually disappearing. Users started joking that every market had two possible endings, a raid or a ripoff. It also forced buyers and vendors to adapt, switching to multi- signature escrow, where both sides and a third party key have to approve withdrawals or direct deal with vendors they personally trust. But the threat never really goes away. Serial Killers Inc., do you want to buy authentic true crime collectibles for your serial killer collection? Serial Killers Inc. has got you covered. From things like paintings signed by John Wayne Gayy to inmate ID badges of some of the former Manson family. They have pages upon pages of listings of murder abilia. Now I'm trying to make light of this, but this is this is this is disturbing. I'm not trying to make light of it. I mean like I'm trying to make use humor so it's not as disturbing. I'm not trying to make light of it. I misspoke there. My fault, guys. I this is horrible and it's disturbing. I I'm sorry. I'm sorry. Most of the items on this site are sold at very high prices, such as a postcard signed by Charles Manson going for $500 USD, and that's on the lower end. But it did come from the Charles Manson, after all. The site was created in 2008 by a man named Eric Holler after eBay banned the sale of true crime memorabilia, and it quickly became the most popular true crime collectible company worldwide. Holler got the idea in the mid 90s when he began writing to inmates and collecting their artwork and crafts. Encouraged by a friend, he started trying to sell these items on eBay until murder memorabilia was banned on the site in 2001. In 2006, he resumed writing to inmates under the pin name Eric Gynne as a nod to the infamous serial killer Edgy, corresponding with them to prepare for building a devoted platform. The website officially launched on December 1st, 2008 and by 2009 and February, it was complete and redesigned to include a fullyfledged online store selling inmade artwork, letters, hair, clothing, and other items. It was featured in National Geographics TV series Taboo season 9 titled Living with the Dead, which aired in 2012. And despite the legal challenges, Serial Killers, Inc. operated until April 10th, 2024. That's the end of layer four. Let's get into layer 5. Cannibal Cafe. The Cannibal Cafe was one of the first notorious examples of how far internet forums could go when left unmodderated. It was a small website based in Canada where users shared cannibalism related fantasies, writing stories, posting roleplays, and talking openly about their desires. The content was mostly textbased, but it was disturbing enough to attract global attention when investigators realized that a few realworld crimes had been connected to people who met through forums like it. The most famous case linked to this kind of site was that of Armen Miwis, the German man who was famous for having uh ended and ate a willing participant he met online in 2001. He didn't specifically use Cannibal Cafe, but he used a similar form inspired by it. And his case is what made the world realize that these weren't just urban legends. People were actually meeting through these communities centered on extreme themes. After that, the Cannibal Cafe was shut down, and similar sites either went underground or were banned by hosts. The site itself technically wasn't illegal on day one. It operated under the banner of free speech and fantasy expression, but it quickly became infamous for how quickly fantasy blurred into real world violence. Best gore. Best gore was one of the most infamous shock sites of the modern internet, a place where people uploaded and watched real footage of death, accidents, and violent crimes. It was created by a Slovak Canadian man named Mark Merik who said the goal was to quote show the reality the media hides. In practice though, it became known as one of the darkest corners of the web, a site where raw unfiltered violence was treated as casual entertainment and the website that all your friends in like middle school were going to prank you with. The content was real, not movie gore or staged horror. And that's what made it both infamous and disturbing. Users submitted clips of car crashes, war zones, cartel kills, and even crime related scene photos. And actually, I want to point out that this was not a dark web site either. Best gore was a clearnet site, meaning you could reach it without any special browsers. For a while, it spread fast on Reddit and 4chan because people would link shocking videos just to freak each other out. So, yeah, over time, that kind of exposure built a cult following, but also attracted a lot of moral outrage. Things escalated in 2012 when the site was tied to the Luke Magnota case, a Canadian murderer who uploaded his crime video online and whose footage appeared briefly on Best Gore before being removed and reported. That single connection made headlines worldwide and brought police to the site's door. Merrick was later charged with corrupting immorals, a rare Canadian law, and Best Gore became a legal lightning rod for the question of whether showing reality is journalism or exploitation. It slowly declined after that and it was eventually taken offline in 2019 partly due to legal pressure and partly because the culture that supported it moved to other platforms. Next up we have welcome to video. This entry refers to one of the biggest and most disturbing law enforcement busts ever carried out against a hidden service network and it was about distributing child material. Welcome to video was a dark website that operated for several years before being dismantled in a coordinated international investigation around 2019. The operation involved agencies from the US, South Korea, the UK, and several other countries. Investigators trace cryptocurrency transactions that have been used to pay for access, followed those money trails back through exchanges, and then use that data to identify both the site's operator and thousands of users worldwide. Thank God. Authorities rescued many victims and secured hundreds of arrests. This one I don't want to spend too much time here, but god damn. I god damn. This is This is the true the truly evil that happens in the dark web. That's the end of layer five. So, let's get into layer six. Unverifiable scriptkitty onion services. These are the tiny, often trashy. Onunion sites you hear about in Reddit threads. the download this free database or run this cheat tool pages that promise easy wins and never deliver. The people behind them are usually inexperienced hackers or scammers. The insult for that crowd is script kitties. Because these sites are small, short-lived, and barely maintained, they're almost impossible to verify. One minute they're up with a flashy promise and then the next they're gone or replaced with a blank page. And these services are dangerous because they're loweffort scams and traps that prey on curiosity. Newbies click the links thinking they'll get free tools or data and instead they just get their device infected, their login credentials harvested, or their crypto wallets drained. Even worse, some of these sites deliberately log IPs or ask for verification that reveals identifying info, which can lead to doxing or law enforcement attention. Because the operators are sloppy, traces often lead back to real people, but not reliably enough for anyone to trust the site. Mythic undead markets. These are the ghost stories of the darknet. Market names that refuse to die. Every few years, a long deadad marketplace suddenly comes back, usually under the same name and logo, claiming to be the original team returning after years underground. Almost always, though, it's fake. What's actually happening is something called domain squatting. Scammers grabbing an old market's onion address or a slightly misspelled version of it to trick nostalgic or careless users into logging in and depositing money. Once the crypto hits their wallets, they disappear. It's a pattern that's happened so many times, it's basically tradition. Sites like Silk Road, Alphabet, and Agora have all returned from the dead, quote unquote, and copycat forum at some point. Reddit and Dread, which is a dark web forum, light up every time it happens with users arguing over whether it's real or a setup. Occasionally, a site will even post stolen screenshots or reuse code to look convincing. But when people dig deeper, they find missing PGP keys, which is the cryptographic signatures the real admins would have used, weird wallet addresses or lazy copypaste design work. It's kind of up, but I mean, everything about this video is up. So, Back Page Back Page started out looking like a clone of Craigslist, a big messy classified site where people could post ads for jobs, apartments, cars, or services. It was founded in 2004 by two men, Michael Lacy and Jim Larkin, who had already built an alt weekly media company. For a while, Back Page just ran as another piece of that business, community listings and personals. But by the early 2010s, its adult services section had become its main draw and main source of income. That's where escorts, massage providers, and eventually, sadly, traffickers were advertising. At first, the company defended those listings under free speech arguments, saying that they were simply hosting third-party content the same way Craigslist or Facebook did. Critics, including advocacy groups and police, argued that the adult section had turned into a massive marketplace for sex trafficking, including, you know, investigations by outlets like the Washington Post and the New York Times found ads that clearly described trafficking situations, and court filings later showed that the company staff sometimes edited posts instead of removing them, supposedly to make them look less explicit while keeping the ad revenue. Years of pressure built up. Congress passed new laws like FOSTA which made websites legally responsible if users used them for sex trafficking activities. In April 2018, the FBI seized Back Pages domains and arrested its founders and several executives. The seizure banner that replaced the homepage became one of the defining images of the fight over online liability. Millions of ads were wiped overnight and law enforcement agencies around the world suddenly lost one of their best sources for tracking trafficking activity. because as much as it was exploited, investigators also used it to find victims. Thank you for getting to the end of the video, guys. This is the end. Thank you so much for watching. I hope you enjoyed. I had a good time with this one. Well, not really because it was kind of disturbing and up, but you you know what I mean. I I love making videos for you guys. This shit's interesting to learn about. It's disturbing, but it's interesting. I hope you all have a great night, everyone. Sweet dreams.