Legal disclaimer, editorial policy and how to reach us

1. Nature of this publication

BlackOps Market Audit is an independent editorial and research publication. It analyses publicly available information — law-enforcement and judicial releases, academic literature, commercial threat-intelligence reporting, technical documentation and community-maintained public resources — about marketplaces and forums that operate on the Tor network.

The publication exists to serve defenders, journalists, researchers, academics and law-enforcement professionals who need to reason about platforms that operate outside normal commercial accountability. It is not affiliated with, endorsed by, sponsored by, operated by, or connected to any marketplace, vendor, forum, directory, mix service or law-enforcement body. No subject of an assessment has seen, reviewed or approved any part of it before publication, and none has paid us anything.

2. No access routes and no facilitation

Consistent with our editorial policy, and for the reasons given in the security guide:

• We do not host, mirror, resolve, redirect to, or provide instructions for reaching any .onion address, hidden service, market frontend or forum. We do not operate an access directory and we do not publish mirror lists — for live markets or for defunct ones.
• We do not publish a "currently working" link, a "verified link" page, or a link whose presence on this site would be treated as an endorsement of its authenticity.
• We do not accept, solicit, request or store user credentials, wallet keys, seed phrases, private keys, vendor contact details, or any material that could identify a natural person.
• We do not operate a marketplace, forum, vendor-bond programme, dispute-resolution service, escrow service, payment processor or exchange.
• We do not buy, sell, hold, escrow, route, broker or advise on the purchase or sale of any good or service, including contraband, and we do not introduce buyers to vendors.

If a person or page claiming to represent us requests your credentials, your seed phrase, your wallet address or "inside information" from a market administrator, they are not us. Treat it as an attempted attack and report it to the desk and to the relevant authorities.

3. No legal advice

Nothing on this site constitutes legal advice, and nothing on this site is a substitute for advice from a qualified lawyer in your jurisdiction. The law on accessing, operating, transacting on and advertising for darknet marketplaces varies sharply between countries and changes over time; some conduct that is lawful in one jurisdiction is a serious criminal offence in another. Particular statutes referenced for orientation include the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act and related federal fraud provisions in the United States, the Computer Misuse Act and related offences in the United Kingdom, and national computer-crime, drug-trafficking, money-laundering and organised-crime legislation across the European Union, including the German statutes applied in the Archetyp prosecution.

We also do not provide advice on evading investigation, avoiding detection, concealing proceeds, or defeating law-enforcement techniques. The security guide is written to reduce exposure and harm, not to assist evasion.

4. Editorial independence

• No advertising. No banner ads, no sponsored posts, no "partner" modules, no paid placement of any kind, including placement of a market or a directory in a list.
• No affiliate revenue. No affiliate links, redirect chains, referral codes, or covert tracking parameters. If a link on this site ever passed a referral parameter, that would be a bug, and we would want to know about it.
• No paid verification badges. Nobody buys a "verified" marker here. A market is either evidenced or it is not.
• No hardware partnerships, sponsorships or travel. We do not accept anything of value from any party with an interest in a particular outcome.
• No pre-publication review by subjects. A review right is a veto, and a veto is incompatible with a critical assessment.
• Full disclosure of conflicts. Any actual or potential conflict discovered by an author is disclosed on the affected report page, and in the changelog if discovered after publication.

5. Accuracy, currency and corrections

Market status changes within hours. The figures attributed to operators are self-reported and are marked as self-reported. Our confidence intervals represent genuine uncertainty rather than a rhetorical hedge. We may not be aware of a material fact, and our sources may be mistaken, as sources sometimes are. Every assessment carries the date on which it was made, and the model version under which it was produced.

When we are wrong, we correct publicly. The original claim stays visible, the correction is dated, and the affected score is recomputed and shown alongside the previous value. The full corrections policy and the changelog are published on the methodology page.

6. Content warnings and harm reduction

This publication describes drug markets, stolen data, financial fraud, firearms and violent criminal enterprise, at the level of detail that security analysis requires. Some readers may find this material distressing.

If you or someone you know is affected by substance use, or if you have had recent contact with law enforcement in connection with this kind of activity, free and confidential help is available. In the United States, the SAMHSA National Helpline is available on 1-800-662-4357, 24 hours a day, free and confidential, and findtreatment.gov locates treatment services. Naloxone is available in most countries and is carried by harm-reduction services in most large cities. National drug-checking services publish accurate, non-judgemental risk information and are not law-enforcement bodies. In the European Union, national emergency, poison-control and crisis numbers are listed in your local health-service directory.

7. Phishing and malicious use

We operate a strict policy against phishing. We do not host, link to, mirror, or assist with any credential-harvesting page, and we actively report cloned marketplaces and vendor impersonation pages to their hosting providers and registrars. We do not publish or curate clone addresses, and we will not provide material that would help someone build one.

Requests to remove accurate security research are not automatically granted. A request must identify the specific claim, explain why it is false, and identify the evidence. We will publish a correction if we can verify the claim, and we will say so if we cannot.

8. Intellectual property

We publish original analysis and quote from primary sources with attribution. Third-party reporting is referenced by title, publisher and link. Where a quotation is reproduced, it is for the purpose of analysis and criticism, and remains the property of its author. Logos, trademarks and product names referenced in our reports remain the property of their respective owners and are used for identification and commentary only. We have not been asked by, and do not claim any endorsement from, any organisation named on this site.

9. Liability

To the maximum extent permitted by law, the publishers and contributors to this site accept no liability for any loss arising from use of, or reliance on, the information published here, including financial loss, legal consequences, or loss of data or privacy. The site is provided "as is". You are responsible for complying with the law that applies to you.

10. Contact, and what to send

The desk is reachable at [email protected]. We read everything, and we reply to anything that concerns the accuracy of our work.

• Corrections — name the claim, the evidence and the source of the evidence. We will publish the correction if we can verify it.
• Phishing clone reports — send the URL, the date you found it, and a screenshot if you have one. We will forward it to the relevant curator and, where identifiable, to the hosting provider or registrar.
• Evidence packs — dimension-level evidence, dated incident records and the full source list, for defenders, journalists and researchers. We ask that you identify your organisation and the purpose of the request, because we would rather publish for accountable users than publish for curiosity.
• What we will not accept — credentials, wallet keys, seed phrases, personal data about an individual, stolen datasets, vendor contact lists, or requests to attribute a false claim to a real operator.

Onion service: not deployed. When one is deployed, its v3 address and a signed fingerprint will be published on this page, and readers will be able to verify the fingerprint against a known-good copy before trusting any address. Until then, treat any claim that this site has an onion service as false.

11. Governing terms

These terms are governed by the laws applicable at the place of publication, without regard to conflict-of-law rules. If any provision is held unenforceable, the remainder continues in force. We may amend these terms; the version in force is the one published on this page, identified by the edition number in the header.

Primary sources referenced across the desk