A lot of it is just really fucking...weird, to be honest.
Like you'll see some really batshit crazy political stuff from someone that's probably suffering some kind of delusion by being off their meds or something.
I tried browsing it and, man, it hurts your brain trying to read some of it.
I fucking hate it, i don’t believe anything I read anymore. Even reddit posts. I just browse with detachment assuming someones opinion is likely some greater interest corporation/political party having some underlying agenda to push. Even shit on ask reddit tthat seems personal is often an account that waas created 5 days with one other post. I’m like whats the point? I think the ultimate melt down of the social media internet is when enough time has past where the bots have been around long enough to where you can’t even discern usernames created just for a an AI post versus ones long time created ones.
Everything in AITA is fake. Everything on AIO is fake. Everything on Ask Reddit is fake. Just bots replying to bots and reposting other bots. At least I hope it is the case, though there are probably a lot of people dumb enough to go along with the most poorly written fake ragebait slop if it confirms their biases.
AIO My wife threw our 5 year old son out in the snow for spilled milk, and locked me in a closet to keep me from rescuing him. We have our ups and downs but idk about this one, aio?
Remember that website about a guy who threatened to kill and eat his pet rabbit if the internet didn't give him 50 thousand dollars? And the website was mostly rabbit recipes. It was hilarious in the way only the internet could be.
Fuck you, Jonesy. Your mum shot cum straight across the room and killed my Siamese fighting fish, threw off the off the ph levels in my aquarium, you piece of shit.
I have a friend in real life whose mannerisms are Stewart to a fucking t and trying to get that fucking cunt to watch letterkenny is like pulling teeth. STEWERT!! pulls out an epi pen
It's not hard to access but trying to find anything is incredibly frustrating.
Also, even if you have the onion address and manage to find what you want half the time pages don't load.
Lmfao, my partner and I were watching a show and they were talking about the dark web. She asked me if I knew how to access it, and I said yes. She got really excited and kept asking me about it, so I pulled out my laptop and just showed her some sites. She was extremely disappointed. Like, yeah, you can buy drugs like you do on Amazon, and it looks just like a dumb online store.
Rip everyone who's ever been exit scammed, not that I ugh, know what that is or have ever, hypothetically speaking, brought drugs off of the dark web cough cough
I remember in 2014 when 16yo me decided "let's see if I can get to any cool websites" and i ended up finding one that had guns, drugs, counterfeit money, reviews for all of it saying what stuff worked and what stuff was fake/scam. Very fun times. Got scared and uninstalled later
The dark web as most people know it are generally onion sites which means you have to use TOR. This means you are going through a minimum of three different proxies. Possibly more depending on your settings and if youre using a VPN to connect prior.
At all times your maximum speed of download is the fastest speed of all of those nodes along the way. If any of them are slow the whole thing will be slow, and you can trust at least one of them will be slow.
Yup cia and fbi both have ways of tracking you on there. They can also get hosted sites taken down although that usually takes a bit of time and anyone could get a new domain for just a few bucks
I've seen a theory that the CIA/US military created the dark web just to hide their own activity. But in order to act anonymously they need other people to use it, otherwise any activity is obviously them. But as the original creators they likely have a level of overarching control.
The military created the foundation of the actual Internet.
“Yes, the U.S. military, through its Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA), funded and initiated the precursor to the internet, called ARPANET, in the late 1960s as a robust, decentralized communication network for defense research during the Cold War, which later evolved into the global internet we use today. While the military laid the foundation and provided crucial funding, the internet's development involved many scientists, researchers, and institutions, with the National Science Foundation (NSF) further catalyzing its commercial growth”
As a military venture, Arpa had a specifically military motivation for creating the internet: it offered a way to bring computing to the front lines. In 1969, Arpa had built a computer network called Arpanet, which linked mainframes at universities, government agencies, and defense contractors around the country. Arpanet grew fast, and included nearly 60 nodes by the mid-1970s.”
This is kinda true, in that even on Tor you still need to exercise caution as there are honeytraps and carelessness can expose you, but each time the FBI have sucessfully identitified users its required significant resources and often other help like tips, undercover operations, clever investigative techniques and a little luck. If you're just one random user, you are safe enough unless you are at the wrong place and at the wrong time like in the case of PlayPen. Plus, anyone up to no good are usually using extra things on top of TOR to mask their identity. You can be de-anonymised, but its difficult for law enforcement to do. But if the FBI are proper on your tail, you are pretty much screwed if all you have done is use TOR.
Right? I'd say they were in the right place at the right time to be caught. Not like, oh they tripped and stumbled into a darkweb CP market on their phone in the FBI HQ lobby. ; "just in the wrong place at the wrong time."
In addition getting the malware wouldn't be what they are arrested for, it's just enough to get a warrant to search their computer to find everything they've saved there.
If someone did somehow stumble in at the wrong time I'd expect they'd nope out without saving any of that shit to their computer. It'd be a bad time for them during the investigation but probably wouldn't be convicted.
TOR has always been susceptible to attacks based on control of enough nodes and resultant traffic analysis, or by leveraging unencrypted traffic from controlled exit nodes, but the real money for breaking anonymity is to try to trick/force your computer to out itself by also connecting to a web address they control outside of TOR too then correlating the two connections, and there are a number of methods for doing that.
Or they just have a tracking pixel on the site that pulls its link from an outside page. Depending on your adblockers or script stoppers simply going to the page can get your computer to connect which can give all sorts of information you'd be surprised about.
The idea of Tor onion sites is that neither side knows the IP address of the other side. The only way the FBI could get your IP is through an exploit (which they have done previously, but that exploit was quickly patched) or controlling the majority of the Tor nodes
The whole Internet was born from ARPA which is now DARPA, which is the mad scientists of the military.
Thinking that anything you do online is anonymous is a matter of subjectivity.
The US military with the aid of universities created the Internet, it's hard to imagine you can truly hide from the people who created the platform and set the rules of it.
I convinced a bunch of colleagues that blackle (Google with a black instead of white interface) was the dark web and they were all too scared to search for anything on it
In their defense, I just checked it out and it feels kind of janky. If I was technologically illiterate I'd totally believe a sick ass hacker man like yourself
Nowadays, yes. But when I was growing up I genuinely stumbled across zoophile stuff, cp, murder videos etc. I even found all that stuff just trying to download free videos on limewire when it first was around.
"It's the wild west! Nothing but outlaws and criminals!"
The dark web is about as much the wild west as the first internet was. It feels a lot like Web1.0 to me. Just filled with weird stuff that's hard to find.
That you can use a Tor browser to access it securely and privately . The biggest tor routers are honey pots run by the FBI. Everything you do on there is monitored and logged.
Who in the fuck would use brave to access tor? Hahaha, I mean fuck, I appreciate what brave does out the box as a browser for blocking ads but god damn.
The Tor Project, a nonprofit organization, developed and oversees the Tor network, which was initially funded by the United States government in the 1990s and early 2000s, including through the Naval Research Lab and the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA).
Basically the US government created it. And they are known for spying. Also look into the Pegasus project.
If they want to spy on you, they will.
Or, best said, "a locked door only keeps an honest man out".
Take your time and look into it. Look into the routes that it goes through. Going further, many of those who want to obfuscate as much as possible use a burner laptop with tails installed and connect to a wifi network that is not their own (some Linux systems can crack wifi pretty quickly).
I have a friend who wants to expose certain things. I always tell him "go ahead. Then you will get a picture delivered of your family sleeping in bed and realize if someone wants to get you, they will."
No doubt the Feds are running honey pots, they're also trying to deanonymize people through running their own nodes. You hear this all the time, given the governments track record on privacy and the war on drugs, terrorism, etc, you can assume that if they want you then they have the means of getting you. Going to assume none of us are Pablo Escobar though and the money invested into their campaigns aren't exactly worthy of the average user.
The biggest lie is that once you visit the dark web, you’re instantly tracked or hacked. If you’re careless, sure, but just accessing it doesn’t magically make something bad happen. Common sense matters more than fear.
one of the most alarming things I saw when poking around a few years ago was "hitman service". It was a badly formatted web page that looked like it was from 1998 that also had hard drugs, fake IDs, passports, and other stuff.
Look up a podcast called 'Kill list' its actually really well done and interesting, and its about how those 'hitman services' are scams.
Its just killing people is a hard and dangerous job. Way easier to take people's money and then ignore them or blackmail them for more cause you have evidence that they tried to commision a murder....
Most people think the dark web is some hacker-only place full of hitmen and red rooms. In reality, a lot of it is just boring forums, privacy-focused communities, and people trying to avoid surveillance. The scary stuff exists, but it’s not what most users see daily.
That it’s some magical separate internet you “accidentally stumble onto” instead of just a bunch of hidden sites you have to deliberately go looking for. Also movies make it look like you type “dark web” once and instantly see hitmen, organs and hackers bidding in neon green text, when in reality it’s mostly scams, forums and disappointment.
That it’s all illegal and terrifying, most of it is just people trading niche info, curiosities, or privacy tools. The horror stories are the exception, not the rule.
I read a story once of a guy who used the dark web to try and fix an obscure programming bug having failed to find the answer on the main web. He unknowingly downloaded a trojan in a PDF, and found out because the hacker left a text file on his machine saying "I snooped around and realised you're just a kid trying to solve a problem rather than someone dodgy. Here's a fix for your code, next time be careful what you download".
You'd have to literally be a criminal in the criminal world to see the illegal stuff we all hear about. They don't exactly give that access to just anyone and having it out in the open is a good way to have the cops bust whatever you are doing.
You won't see guns, drugs, etc. for sale unless you hang with a shady crowd and they trust you.
Realities of dark web financial services.... biggest lie is free money. most is used to scam people, there is no free money, there are risks involved and main one is acctualy being scammed by trying to acquire the tools or so to get that quick and easy money. Although the monetary gain from it is crazy big, if we look from a perspective of fraud
Let's start simple. Bank logs....
Bank logs refer to compromised online banking account credentials, often including Username and password, ip address...location, Browser fingerprint, cookie... session data. Sometimes even OTPs one time password bypass tools or instructions. They are mostly used to transfer money out usually to money mules... purchase things online use the accounts for laundering
Are they really sold on dark web? Yes they are sold on dark web, but most of the listings are scams, a huge portion of these sellers are fake ,they will take crypto then disappear also there is never guarantee the log works, hasnt already been used, or even exists lol... Law enforcement agencies like the FBI... Europol etc... monitor all that shit.
Now most important part is, even if you find a seller, that sells legit bank logs, the succes rates for cashing them out are so low, that literally only few people are making money out of it, you could probably make more money working in fast food than trying to cash out the bank logs.
Again anyone saying to you that they are selling methods to cash out logs, are lying to you, no one is selling any methods anywhere lol, the more people know. the method someone use, the bigger the chance that the method will get burnt quicker, so in the end a person who started doing it will loose money. So stop buying methods and stop, creating banking accounts for 30 bucks to someone to use it and make you a money mule...
Next one... crypto logs, it is literally stolen blacklisted crypto. But there is a huge catch to it, its same like Bank logs, plenty of scams plenty of burnt ones. Plenty of logs that you can flash on your ig or use to scam other ppl but never move the crypto etc etc.
But one thing with crypto logs, that some are sold ofcourse is AML score, and some are sold with 100% AML score, these are actually not impossible to cash out, but fairly difficult, but some are sold with 0 to 50% aml score that only lands as suspicious, these are quick money grabbers, but still requires a lot of extra steps to cash out, so again if you buy it check the AML score, use real sellers…
Drainers, probably absolutely nothing new, everyone hears about them but, again there is so much scams around it that its barely possible to find them... keep in mind there are few ways to get a drainer.....
As a Service Model... Drainer as a service or known as DaaS...
Buyer pays for access to the drainer backend and dashboard. Creator often takes a cut 10 to 40% of every successful theft. Pricing may be free to use, but with a profit share model or monthly rental fee 1k to 5k amonth, some drainers are sold with full source code, allowing total control. These are more expensive and used by more advanceds actors... also when you buy a drainer it typically includes admin panel to view stolen wallets and funds phishing page templates like mint, claim, connect wallet... etc... transaction obfuscation to trick wallet UIs.... Wallet draining logic ERC-20... nFTs, ETH/BNB/MATIC, etc... all the shit... Anti bot and anti phishing detection evasion etc...
There are many services that exist, like insider trading, rug and pulls groups, debt erasing
through money laundering schemes like lotteries and charities. Real bank logs or crypto logs costing basically half of what's in them, not few hundred, if they are real and not burnt. Crypto logs even more expensive, drainers are expensive, crypto loads, and so on and on and on, there are almost no limits to posibilities itself, just buying anything besides drugs on markets and so is mostly scams... I know that people here on Reddit mostly know only about dread which is probably 99% of scamers trying to scam other scamers etc... So just go deeper, network a lil bit. There are plenty of other services besides financial.... hackers, syntethic identities, leads, leaks etc etc…
Always be aware, don’t answer dms even about these satire topics, don’t contact others, many people even on Reddit are looking for opportunities just to scam baiting for you to contact them.
Honestly crypto draining but like chill draining 30-50k a month, massive ammounts would require to go through money launderes, so eventually you spiral to a whole criminal world which I would suggest to pass by. You can buy drainer packs now days, from 1k to 120k for the best one Ai based. Basically anyone who’s into crypto knows how crypto draining has risen in past couple years, it’s massive, when I was still in world of fraud there were people from single moms to bussines men to influencers buying these drainers. It’s highly efficient and easily accessible and comes in packs with full on instructions from setting up, opsec, to draining and to cashing out etc. basically it became such an accessible and easy part of fraud that a literal monkey could do it.
Totally stream of consciousness. I type like this, sometimes. Complete with ellipsis. I forget what sub, but I've gotten automodded for it. It's interesting to see all the odd and unexpected ways ai is ruining everything lol
My favorite is the people saying that they are selling money that was supposed to be destroyed at a mint somewhere. They claim they can't get rid of it or spend it where they are, so they will sell it to you pennies on the dollar.
People believe the dark web is super advanced and mysterious. Truth is, most of it is poorly designed websites, slow connections, and a lot of dead links. It’s more underwhelming than terrifying.
Don't fall for it. It's all a honey pot since silk road 1 went down. Basically the government now hosts enough of the servers to track people. They might let you buy one thing, but they are watching.
Not a lie but a common misconception the deep web and the dark web are the same they're not. The dark web isn't much different than the regular web.
There are two key differences: the manner in which you access it (Tor or onion router or I2P) and the sites have .onion or .i2p addresses unless it's Freenet, which is unique in that it uses p2p and doesn't have .address. None of which can be accessed by a regular web browser.
Whereas the deepweb is simply websites that are not indexed for general traffic (think databases and the like).
That its main purpose was for criminal activity. It was actually a way for the government to use the internet without the risk of spies hacking their data. I could be wrong though, I only knew about half of it and my mind was filling in the blanks.
I believe it has also been used by political dissidents, pro democracy activists, and journalists. I’m not sure how true that is now, but I remember reading about it during the Arab Spring.
That it's 1) for hackers only, 2) it's only for child abuse material and illegal drug sales. That's not just my stupid opinion. The FBI used to put posters in Internet cafes asking people that saw other people on what appeared to be the "dark web" or using an operating system like Linux to call and report it because it was suspicious and possibly involved illegal activities. I wish I could find a photo of one of those posters. They were real. Linux and the dark web are NOT illegal, and although illegal activities happen there, they also happen in churches, banks, offices, and in people's homes.
That it’s lawless and hard to navigate. It actually has a Reddit clone that monitors and logs most sites and drug dealers and if they are a scam or not.
That it's even relevant for crime and crime adjacent things (at least in my country). No one is using it anymore, you can find whatever you need from Telegram or Signal and it's much easier.
Dark web myth: full of rare unicorn porn. Truth: buy the link, get a video of a guy in a unicorn suit fucking your bitcoins and riding off into the sunset
That everything is illegal, that it’s inaccessible, and that it’s always dangerous.
A lot of it is just really fucking...weird, to be honest.
Like you'll see some really batshit crazy political stuff from someone that's probably suffering some kind of delusion by being off their meds or something.
I tried browsing it and, man, it hurts your brain trying to read some of it.
The open web used to be really weird too, now it’s a big corporation.
I fucking hate it, i don’t believe anything I read anymore. Even reddit posts. I just browse with detachment assuming someones opinion is likely some greater interest corporation/political party having some underlying agenda to push. Even shit on ask reddit tthat seems personal is often an account that waas created 5 days with one other post. I’m like whats the point? I think the ultimate melt down of the social media internet is when enough time has past where the bots have been around long enough to where you can’t even discern usernames created just for a an AI post versus ones long time created ones.
Everything in AITA is fake. Everything on AIO is fake. Everything on Ask Reddit is fake. Just bots replying to bots and reposting other bots. At least I hope it is the case, though there are probably a lot of people dumb enough to go along with the most poorly written fake ragebait slop if it confirms their biases.
AIO My wife threw our 5 year old son out in the snow for spilled milk, and locked me in a closet to keep me from rescuing him. We have our ups and downs but idk about this one, aio?
ESH. You should be supporting your wife instead of whining about it on reddit. She should have given birth to a girl instead.
YTA her milk her rules
I can tell you on good authority that AITA is not all fake. I know because I’ve seen people’s posts I know IRL in there.
Wow, so not literally every single person on Reddit is a bot - what great insight you've brought us
I have been saying this for so long. I believe nothing anymore. I’m off all social media but this, and like you I browse completely detached.
Remember that website about a guy who threatened to kill and eat his pet rabbit if the internet didn't give him 50 thousand dollars? And the website was mostly rabbit recipes. It was hilarious in the way only the internet could be.
This was Savetoby.com for those interested. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Save\_Toby\]
The site is now defunct but those were some funny times.
They even wrote a book about it.
Oh wow. That hit when I was in university and I remember all the girls losing it over the recipes. Good times lol
I wonder if eventually the dark web will become the people’s web, while the open web is left to corporations and ai bots. Like white flight, but not.
I'm sure that there are bots on the dark web as well, and there will be no shortage of them there in the future either.
Sounds like the regular internet
Like Hard Right Jay.
r/unexpectedLetterkenny
I expected Letterkenny the moment I saw the phrase “dark web!”
i only realized there's a whole comment thread of Letterkenny references below this comment after i replied
I just love that letterkenny doesn't takes kindly to fascists. America could learn a thing or two from their Canadian brothers, to be faaaaaair.
That's where Teddy from Bugonia browses
Are you sure it was the dark web? I think that's Twitter.
I see you've stumbled upon reddit.
People expect Red Rooms and hitmen, but 90% of it is just broken links, scams, and CSS that hasn't been updated since 2003.
The biggest danger isn't getting hacked, it's waiting 5 minutes for a page to load only to realize it's a 404.
You don't need to whisper when you say "dark web." Well, not anymore.
[removed]
I know more than a few fucking idiots in that category. Tor snitches, telling all their business, sit in the court and be their own star witness.
Do you see the perpetrator? Yeah I’m right here! Fuck around get the whole label sent up for years.
Rap snitches, telling all they business,,,
[removed]
Oh yes, more than a few people did. Even some at the top level failed the opsec sniff test that led to them getting federally fucked.
Give yer balls a tug!
Fuck you Shoresy!
Fuck you, Jonesy. Your mum shot cum straight across the room and killed my Siamese fighting fish, threw off the off the ph levels in my aquarium, you piece of shit.
FUCK YOU SHORESY!
[removed]
Fuck YOU, Shoresy!
Fuck you, Jonesy. Should've heard your mum last night. She sounded like my great aunt when I pull a surprise visit, oooooooooooh
Tit fucker!
Allegedly
Stewart!
STRT!!!
I have a friend in real life whose mannerisms are Stewart to a fucking t and trying to get that fucking cunt to watch letterkenny is like pulling teeth. STEWERT!! pulls out an epi pen
figure it oot
Pitter patter
To be fairrrr
To be faaaaaair
To be faaaaaaiiiiirrr
Let's get at 'er
that it's hard to access
It's not hard to access but trying to find anything is incredibly frustrating. Also, even if you have the onion address and manage to find what you want half the time pages don't load.
You mean to tell me they don't have goggle on the dark web?
The goggles do nothing!
Oh snap, I did that didn't I?
Oh well, it's the internet so it's forever now. No sense fixing it.
TBF I thought you were intentionally being a smartass
That's usually a safe bet, but not this time!
r/unexpectedsimpsons
Up and Atom!
Can’t index and crawl onion sites as easily. There are search engines though!
Torch exists, its just far from comprehensive.
Ironically I wonder if this is by design to keep the 5.0 out.. maybe not the best security idea if so but funny if true.
No, it is just hard to run enterprise level services on a shoestring budget while trying to stay anonymous.
The local cops may not know how to work PGP and set up a Linux live distribution, but the FBI is all over it.
Tor.taxi and you’re set.
Haven't been there in a while but it was often outdated.
Exactly people act like it is some secret maze when it is just a browser and a link most of it is boring scams anyway
lol true
Lmfao, my partner and I were watching a show and they were talking about the dark web. She asked me if I knew how to access it, and I said yes. She got really excited and kept asking me about it, so I pulled out my laptop and just showed her some sites. She was extremely disappointed. Like, yeah, you can buy drugs like you do on Amazon, and it looks just like a dumb online store.
That it’s some hacker movie hellscape when most of it is boring forums mirrors of normal sites and people trying not to get scammed
Rip everyone who's ever been exit scammed, not that I ugh, know what that is or have ever, hypothetically speaking, brought drugs off of the dark web cough cough
I remember in 2014 when 16yo me decided "let's see if I can get to any cool websites" and i ended up finding one that had guns, drugs, counterfeit money, reviews for all of it saying what stuff worked and what stuff was fake/scam. Very fun times. Got scared and uninstalled later
Most of the “dark web horror stories” people repeat come from movies, not reality.
The hard part is not getting access, the hard part is getting anonymous surfing, and no, a simple VPN wont make it.
I don’t know, sometimes those CAPTCHAs are very hard.
Streaming red rooms, when its practically impossible to play video over the dark web as it is, let alone live stream something.
What makes it so hard??
It's slow as fuck.
The dark web as most people know it are generally onion sites which means you have to use TOR. This means you are going through a minimum of three different proxies. Possibly more depending on your settings and if youre using a VPN to connect prior.
At all times your maximum speed of download is the fastest speed of all of those nodes along the way. If any of them are slow the whole thing will be slow, and you can trust at least one of them will be slow.
The anonymity. I’m pretty sure the FBI caught people by identifying the entry and exit points.
Yup cia and fbi both have ways of tracking you on there. They can also get hosted sites taken down although that usually takes a bit of time and anyone could get a new domain for just a few bucks
Also my neighbor's son, Gary. He's really good at the cyber
I've seen a theory that the CIA/US military created the dark web just to hide their own activity. But in order to act anonymously they need other people to use it, otherwise any activity is obviously them. But as the original creators they likely have a level of overarching control.
Onion routing was created by some guys who worked for a U.S naval research lab.
Yeah look up TOR on Wikipedia it was created by the navy
The military created the foundation of the actual Internet.
“Yes, the U.S. military, through its Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA), funded and initiated the precursor to the internet, called ARPANET, in the late 1960s as a robust, decentralized communication network for defense research during the Cold War, which later evolved into the global internet we use today. While the military laid the foundation and provided crucial funding, the internet's development involved many scientists, researchers, and institutions, with the National Science Foundation (NSF) further catalyzing its commercial growth”
As a military venture, Arpa had a specifically military motivation for creating the internet: it offered a way to bring computing to the front lines. In 1969, Arpa had built a computer network called Arpanet, which linked mainframes at universities, government agencies, and defense contractors around the country. Arpanet grew fast, and included nearly 60 nodes by the mid-1970s.”
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2016/jul/15/how-the-internet-was-invented-1976-arpa-kahn-cerf#:~:text=The%20people%20who%20invented%20the,the%20internet%20wouldn't%20exist.
Also heard the rumor they created crypto to facilitate dark money transfers around the world
This whole thread is probably a honey pot. Someone check OP for a fucking wire.
This is kinda true, in that even on Tor you still need to exercise caution as there are honeytraps and carelessness can expose you, but each time the FBI have sucessfully identitified users its required significant resources and often other help like tips, undercover operations, clever investigative techniques and a little luck. If you're just one random user, you are safe enough unless you are at the wrong place and at the wrong time like in the case of PlayPen. Plus, anyone up to no good are usually using extra things on top of TOR to mask their identity. You can be de-anonymised, but its difficult for law enforcement to do. But if the FBI are proper on your tail, you are pretty much screwed if all you have done is use TOR.
I hadn't heard about PlayPen.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Playpen_(website)
https://www.eff.org/pages/playpen-cases-frequently-asked-questions
I'm guessing the people prosecuted in "Operation Pacifier" were more than in the wrong place at the wrong time.
Right? I'd say they were in the right place at the right time to be caught. Not like, oh they tripped and stumbled into a darkweb CP market on their phone in the FBI HQ lobby. ; "just in the wrong place at the wrong time."
In addition getting the malware wouldn't be what they are arrested for, it's just enough to get a warrant to search their computer to find everything they've saved there.
If someone did somehow stumble in at the wrong time I'd expect they'd nope out without saving any of that shit to their computer. It'd be a bad time for them during the investigation but probably wouldn't be convicted.
TOR has always been susceptible to attacks based on control of enough nodes and resultant traffic analysis, or by leveraging unencrypted traffic from controlled exit nodes, but the real money for breaking anonymity is to try to trick/force your computer to out itself by also connecting to a web address they control outside of TOR too then correlating the two connections, and there are a number of methods for doing that.
So like when you see a link to a standard site rather than an onion site, don't click that.
Or they just have a tracking pixel on the site that pulls its link from an outside page. Depending on your adblockers or script stoppers simply going to the page can get your computer to connect which can give all sorts of information you'd be surprised about.
Yep assume every exit node is now compromised.
The FBI runs a lot of honeypots there where they collect IP addresses and do a bust once they have enough.
The idea of Tor onion sites is that neither side knows the IP address of the other side. The only way the FBI could get your IP is through an exploit (which they have done previously, but that exploit was quickly patched) or controlling the majority of the Tor nodes
Controlling the majority of nodes seems very within the realm of possibility. Some estimates say that there are around 10,000 nodes currently
"Whoever's in control of the exit nodes is also in control of the traffic, which makes me...the one in control." -Mr Robot
Exactly, I completely agree. It's impossible for any corner of the internet to be completely ignored
FBI work at least a third of all nodes. Tor isn't anonymous
The whole Internet was born from ARPA which is now DARPA, which is the mad scientists of the military.
Thinking that anything you do online is anonymous is a matter of subjectivity.
The US military with the aid of universities created the Internet, it's hard to imagine you can truly hide from the people who created the platform and set the rules of it.
And don’t forget who was in Congress and got the funding for it and thus helped to create it: Al Gore.
I convinced a bunch of colleagues that blackle (Google with a black instead of white interface) was the dark web and they were all too scared to search for anything on it
lol
In their defense, I just checked it out and it feels kind of janky. If I was technologically illiterate I'd totally believe a sick ass hacker man like yourself
To be fair, page 2 of Google is insane
The fact is that you can't accidentally stumble on illegal material; anyone claiming to have stories of stumbling across red rooms, etc, is a liar.
You have to actively search, or be invited to such forums.
I crawled for open ftp servers and found many caches of stuff. Lots of open forums where material is posted and exchanged openly. Red rooms, never.
All of that stuff is done in Telegram and Signal. That's why these apps are under so much scrutiny.
As mentioned above, with the dark web stream, even at 240p, I know I could play the stream.
Nowadays, yes. But when I was growing up I genuinely stumbled across zoophile stuff, cp, murder videos etc. I even found all that stuff just trying to download free videos on limewire when it first was around.
"It's the wild west! Nothing but outlaws and criminals!"
The dark web is about as much the wild west as the first internet was. It feels a lot like Web1.0 to me. Just filled with weird stuff that's hard to find.
That you can use a Tor browser to access it securely and privately . The biggest tor routers are honey pots run by the FBI. Everything you do on there is monitored and logged.
Infact many people use Brave browser to access it.
But Brave was openly leaking IPs, so anyone who used Brave to access Tor should consider themselves compromised
Who in the fuck would use brave to access tor? Hahaha, I mean fuck, I appreciate what brave does out the box as a browser for blocking ads but god damn.
Source?
I think you’re probably right, but this is a claim I see often with little support.
The Tor Project, a nonprofit organization, developed and oversees the Tor network, which was initially funded by the United States government in the 1990s and early 2000s, including through the Naval Research Lab and the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA).
Basically the US government created it. And they are known for spying. Also look into the Pegasus project.
If they want to spy on you, they will.
Or, best said, "a locked door only keeps an honest man out".
Take your time and look into it. Look into the routes that it goes through. Going further, many of those who want to obfuscate as much as possible use a burner laptop with tails installed and connect to a wifi network that is not their own (some Linux systems can crack wifi pretty quickly).
I have a friend who wants to expose certain things. I always tell him "go ahead. Then you will get a picture delivered of your family sleeping in bed and realize if someone wants to get you, they will."
No doubt the Feds are running honey pots, they're also trying to deanonymize people through running their own nodes. You hear this all the time, given the governments track record on privacy and the war on drugs, terrorism, etc, you can assume that if they want you then they have the means of getting you. Going to assume none of us are Pablo Escobar though and the money invested into their campaigns aren't exactly worthy of the average user.
Are you talking about me, your friend? I'm just asking...
The biggest lie is that once you visit the dark web, you’re instantly tracked or hacked. If you’re careless, sure, but just accessing it doesn’t magically make something bad happen. Common sense matters more than fear.
That it has red room livestreams of people being murdered
Or hitmen that you can hire.
Those are scams if you see one.
Or police traps
In a way, isn't a police trap technically a scam? I'd be pretty pissed if I hired a hitman only to get arrested. I'd want my money back!
Ya know what they say, if you want something done, do it yourself. Be the change in the world you want to see ;)
I knew a guy who tried to order a grenade from the dark web and he's still in prison
The no fun police work lots of overtime
one of the most alarming things I saw when poking around a few years ago was "hitman service". It was a badly formatted web page that looked like it was from 1998 that also had hard drugs, fake IDs, passports, and other stuff.
Look up a podcast called 'Kill list' its actually really well done and interesting, and its about how those 'hitman services' are scams.
Its just killing people is a hard and dangerous job. Way easier to take people's money and then ignore them or blackmail them for more cause you have evidence that they tried to commision a murder....
Most people think the dark web is some hacker-only place full of hitmen and red rooms. In reality, a lot of it is just boring forums, privacy-focused communities, and people trying to avoid surveillance. The scary stuff exists, but it’s not what most users see daily.
Not always, but they do have really bad cybersecurity https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=cYZmRp90hss
That it's capable of supporting live streams at all.
For real. A basic market place takes like 20 minutes to load.
Biggest lie is that it’s all hitmen and murder when most of it is just boring forums and sketchy marketplaces.
That it’s some magical separate internet you “accidentally stumble onto” instead of just a bunch of hidden sites you have to deliberately go looking for. Also movies make it look like you type “dark web” once and instantly see hitmen, organs and hackers bidding in neon green text, when in reality it’s mostly scams, forums and disappointment.
From Michael Bay
Creater of the Scams, Forums, and Disappointment franchise
comes a new film about what happens when the text you type is green.
Jason Statham stars as Dark Web in
Hitmen, Organs, and Hackers
Don't accidentally stumble... Into Dark Web.
In theaters Christmas Day 2025
That it’s all illegal and terrifying, most of it is just people trading niche info, curiosities, or privacy tools. The horror stories are the exception, not the rule.
I read a story once of a guy who used the dark web to try and fix an obscure programming bug having failed to find the answer on the main web. He unknowingly downloaded a trojan in a PDF, and found out because the hacker left a text file on his machine saying "I snooped around and realised you're just a kid trying to solve a problem rather than someone dodgy. Here's a fix for your code, next time be careful what you download".
You'd have to literally be a criminal in the criminal world to see the illegal stuff we all hear about. They don't exactly give that access to just anyone and having it out in the open is a good way to have the cops bust whatever you are doing.
You won't see guns, drugs, etc. for sale unless you hang with a shady crowd and they trust you.
That's not true. The silk road was one of the big draws of the deep web and the entire point was anyone could hop on an buy drugs.
Realities of dark web financial services.... biggest lie is free money. most is used to scam people, there is no free money, there are risks involved and main one is acctualy being scammed by trying to acquire the tools or so to get that quick and easy money. Although the monetary gain from it is crazy big, if we look from a perspective of fraud
Let's start simple. Bank logs.... Bank logs refer to compromised online banking account credentials, often including Username and password, ip address...location, Browser fingerprint, cookie... session data. Sometimes even OTPs one time password bypass tools or instructions. They are mostly used to transfer money out usually to money mules... purchase things online use the accounts for laundering Are they really sold on dark web? Yes they are sold on dark web, but most of the listings are scams, a huge portion of these sellers are fake ,they will take crypto then disappear also there is never guarantee the log works, hasnt already been used, or even exists lol... Law enforcement agencies like the FBI... Europol etc... monitor all that shit.
Now most important part is, even if you find a seller, that sells legit bank logs, the succes rates for cashing them out are so low, that literally only few people are making money out of it, you could probably make more money working in fast food than trying to cash out the bank logs.
Again anyone saying to you that they are selling methods to cash out logs, are lying to you, no one is selling any methods anywhere lol, the more people know. the method someone use, the bigger the chance that the method will get burnt quicker, so in the end a person who started doing it will loose money. So stop buying methods and stop, creating banking accounts for 30 bucks to someone to use it and make you a money mule...
Next one... crypto logs, it is literally stolen blacklisted crypto. But there is a huge catch to it, its same like Bank logs, plenty of scams plenty of burnt ones. Plenty of logs that you can flash on your ig or use to scam other ppl but never move the crypto etc etc.
But one thing with crypto logs, that some are sold ofcourse is AML score, and some are sold with 100% AML score, these are actually not impossible to cash out, but fairly difficult, but some are sold with 0 to 50% aml score that only lands as suspicious, these are quick money grabbers, but still requires a lot of extra steps to cash out, so again if you buy it check the AML score, use real sellers…
Drainers, probably absolutely nothing new, everyone hears about them but, again there is so much scams around it that its barely possible to find them... keep in mind there are few ways to get a drainer..... As a Service Model... Drainer as a service or known as DaaS... Buyer pays for access to the drainer backend and dashboard. Creator often takes a cut 10 to 40% of every successful theft. Pricing may be free to use, but with a profit share model or monthly rental fee 1k to 5k amonth, some drainers are sold with full source code, allowing total control. These are more expensive and used by more advanceds actors... also when you buy a drainer it typically includes admin panel to view stolen wallets and funds phishing page templates like mint, claim, connect wallet... etc... transaction obfuscation to trick wallet UIs.... Wallet draining logic ERC-20... nFTs, ETH/BNB/MATIC, etc... all the shit... Anti bot and anti phishing detection evasion etc...
There are many services that exist, like insider trading, rug and pulls groups, debt erasing through money laundering schemes like lotteries and charities. Real bank logs or crypto logs costing basically half of what's in them, not few hundred, if they are real and not burnt. Crypto logs even more expensive, drainers are expensive, crypto loads, and so on and on and on, there are almost no limits to posibilities itself, just buying anything besides drugs on markets and so is mostly scams... I know that people here on Reddit mostly know only about dread which is probably 99% of scamers trying to scam other scamers etc... So just go deeper, network a lil bit. There are plenty of other services besides financial.... hackers, syntethic identities, leads, leaks etc etc…
Always be aware, don’t answer dms even about these satire topics, don’t contact others, many people even on Reddit are looking for opportunities just to scam baiting for you to contact them.
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Honestly crypto draining but like chill draining 30-50k a month, massive ammounts would require to go through money launderes, so eventually you spiral to a whole criminal world which I would suggest to pass by. You can buy drainer packs now days, from 1k to 120k for the best one Ai based. Basically anyone who’s into crypto knows how crypto draining has risen in past couple years, it’s massive, when I was still in world of fraud there were people from single moms to bussines men to influencers buying these drainers. It’s highly efficient and easily accessible and comes in packs with full on instructions from setting up, opsec, to draining and to cashing out etc. basically it became such an accessible and easy part of fraud that a literal monkey could do it.
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It doesn’t feel like ai, it’s not written well enough. But holy ramble
It’s not ai lol ;D my past 20 years of exp in fraud field is talking, but I’m too under educated to write like AI lol
Totally stream of consciousness. I type like this, sometimes. Complete with ellipsis. I forget what sub, but I've gotten automodded for it. It's interesting to see all the odd and unexpected ways ai is ruining everything lol
Haha yh yh ;D I mean whatever shit happens I assume
I hate the bland methodical writing of AI.
People writing about stuff they are interested in will always sound interesting. Thanks for the comment.
Appreciate, cheers mate!
It’s not AI it’s Autie.
My favorite is the people saying that they are selling money that was supposed to be destroyed at a mint somewhere. They claim they can't get rid of it or spend it where they are, so they will sell it to you pennies on the dollar.
Fake reviews and pictures of bags of cash. lol
Yh everything money related that is advertised is always fake, but it’s there because thousands of ppl fall for it lol
“Hi.”
Accept Message
Why would I do that?
People believe the dark web is super advanced and mysterious. Truth is, most of it is poorly designed websites, slow connections, and a lot of dead links. It’s more underwhelming than terrifying.
Don't fall for it. It's all a honey pot since silk road 1 went down. Basically the government now hosts enough of the servers to track people. They might let you buy one thing, but they are watching.
It’s ok. I just need to download the one car.
I’d definitely pirate a house in this economy
You wouldn’t!
Not a lie but a common misconception the deep web and the dark web are the same they're not. The dark web isn't much different than the regular web.
There are two key differences: the manner in which you access it (Tor or onion router or I2P) and the sites have .onion or .i2p addresses unless it's Freenet, which is unique in that it uses p2p and doesn't have .address. None of which can be accessed by a regular web browser.
Whereas the deepweb is simply websites that are not indexed for general traffic (think databases and the like).
That it’s some ultra-mysterious hacker underworld. In reality it’s mostly dead links, scams, outdated forums, and people cosplaying as criminals
That it’s rumored to be hosted not on servers, but power flush toilets.
Murder for hire. Near all hit hitman for hire services on the dark web are scams or law enforcement honeypots
And if you do engage with a fake hitman service and get scammed... what are you going to do? Call the police??
"Hello officer, I was trying to hire a hitman and it wasn't a hitman and they stole my money".
That you’re some super hacker for knowing how to use a TOR browser.
That you are safe and anonymous.
It's not so dark since they upgraded to LED lighting.
it's not as anonymous as you'd been led to believe.
That its main purpose was for criminal activity. It was actually a way for the government to use the internet without the risk of spies hacking their data. I could be wrong though, I only knew about half of it and my mind was filling in the blanks.
I believe it has also been used by political dissidents, pro democracy activists, and journalists. I’m not sure how true that is now, but I remember reading about it during the Arab Spring.
Red Room
Black Lodge
That gum you like is going to come back into style.
That there is no light on there. Not everything is in dark mode.
You'll get tracked
My bluetooth has been tracking me since b4 I was born....
That a russian hitman will kill you if you use it without vpn 😂
That it's dark. It's not. It's a side of web not controlled by big orgs. They still live in 90s html and provide amazing services
What are the best services you have found? Thanks.
Non KYC exchanges
Buying/selling people and pretty much all gore or assassination stories with the exception of a few. It's mostly just drugs and fraud on there.
That it's 1) for hackers only, 2) it's only for child abuse material and illegal drug sales. That's not just my stupid opinion. The FBI used to put posters in Internet cafes asking people that saw other people on what appeared to be the "dark web" or using an operating system like Linux to call and report it because it was suspicious and possibly involved illegal activities. I wish I could find a photo of one of those posters. They were real. Linux and the dark web are NOT illegal, and although illegal activities happen there, they also happen in churches, banks, offices, and in people's homes.
Dark web is literally only called that by edgelords and people who dont understand unlisted web pages.
I have no clue how to get on dark web
Red rooms
That it’s lawless and hard to navigate. It actually has a Reddit clone that monitors and logs most sites and drug dealers and if they are a scam or not.
That it's even relevant for crime and crime adjacent things (at least in my country). No one is using it anymore, you can find whatever you need from Telegram or Signal and it's much easier.
Dark web myth: full of rare unicorn porn. Truth: buy the link, get a video of a guy in a unicorn suit fucking your bitcoins and riding off into the sunset
that everyone on the dark web is a criminal or that you’ll instantly get hacked, most people just use it for privacy and research 😏
I was on it back in 2010/2011. It was a whole lot different back then.
Movies make it look instant-danger but it’s mostly bad websites and ugly ui.
It’s full of secret, forbidden knowledge, most content is random or low-quality.
That everyone on it is a hacker or criminal
Only elite hackers hang out there, most users are just scammers.