Marketplaces and sites that made dark web history, all dismantled by law enforcement or closed in exit scams. Strictly educational and historical content.
This page documents those that have fallen. The marketplaces, forums, and services running right now are on our Tor version — not indexed, maintained by hand.
Access the Tor version →This category is strictly educational and historical in purpose. All sites listed here are dismantled, seized, or closed — some for years. No link is active or accessible. OnionDir does not in any way promote illegal activities and does not host any content enabling access to them. This page documents the history of the dark web for journalists, cybersecurity researchers, and students. The .onion addresses listed (mostly v2 protocol, deprecated since October 2021) no longer work technically.
Onionsilkroadvb5piz3r.onion First major dark web marketplace, launched in February 2011 by Ross Ulbricht ('Dread Pirate Roberts'). Mainly drug sales, payment in Bitcoin. Seized by the FBI in October 2013, Ulbricht sentenced to life (pardoned by Trump in January 2025).
silkroad6ownowfk.onion Direct successor launched in November 2013, weeks after the first one fell. Seized in November 2014 during Operation Onymous coordinated by Europol and the FBI, which simultaneously closed more than 400 .onion services.
pwoah7foa6au2pul.onion Largest dark web marketplace from 2015 to 2017, with more than 250,000 listings and 40,000 vendors. Seized in July 2017 by the DEA and FBI during Operation Bayonet. Its founder Alexandre Cazes died by suicide in custody in Thailand.
hansamkt2rr6nfg3.onion Second largest marketplace at the time of AlphaBay's fall. Dutch police secretly took control in June 2017 and kept it running for a month, collecting transactions and delivery addresses before public closure at the end of July 2017.
lchudifyeqm4ldjj.onion Successor to AlphaBay and Hansa, active from late 2013 to April 2019. Closure announced by the operators themselves after six years of continuous activity, a rare occurrence in the ecosystem. Many vendors migrated to successor marketplaces.
wallstyizjhkrvmj.onion Major marketplace seized in May 2019 by a coordinated operation between the German police (BKA), Dutch police, FBI and DEA. Three German operators arrested. Exit scam attempted as a last resort before the seizure.
empiremktxgjovhm.onion Marketplace active from 2018 to August 2020. Abruptly disappeared in an 'exit scam': the operators simply shut down the service, taking an estimated $30 million in Bitcoin, leaving thousands of users with no recourse.
darkmarketxxxxx.onion Marketplace billed as 'the world's largest' at the time of its seizure in January 2021. Operation led by the German BKA police with Europol, Eurojust and the FBI. More than 500,000 users and 2,400 vendors recorded at the time of closure.
freedomhostingii.onion Massive .onion service host, hacked in February 2017 by an anonymous collective that exposed the contents of thousands of sites. The attack revealed that Freedom Hosting II was hosting a large proportion of the .onion dark web at the time.
This category documents, strictly for educational and historical purposes, the main illegal marketplaces that existed on the dark web. No link listed here is active: all these sites have been dismantled by international law enforcement, closed by their operators in "exit scams" or have simply ceased to function. OnionDir in no way promotes illegal activities; this page exists to allow journalists, researchers, cybersecurity students and curious readers to understand the history of the dark web.
The evolution of these marketplaces tells a fascinating story of technological cat-and-mouse between criminals and law enforcement. From the launch of Silk Road in 2011 by Ross Ulbricht ("Dread Pirate Roberts"), arrested in 2013 and pardoned by Donald Trump in January 2025, to the seizure of AlphaBay in 2017 during Operation Bayonet conducted jointly by the DEA, the FBI, the Dutch police and Europol, each episode contributed to refining investigator techniques. Successor marketplaces have systematically been either seized or victims of exit scams where operators disappeared with funds held in escrow.
Europol's IOCTA reports and FBI publications publicly detail these operations and their results. Articles by Wired, BBC, Le Monde and many other newsrooms have covered these cases. This category lists the major players chronologically for anyone wishing to deepen their study of the phenomenon. All are offline. The historical .onion addresses listed no longer work (most were v2, a protocol deprecated since October 2021).