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Dark Web

Darknet markets, carding rings, crypto laundering and the takedowns that ended them — true stories from the hidden internet.

  1. № 01

    Joker's Stash: The Carding Empire That Closed Itself

    Joker's Stash was the largest dark web shop for stolen payment-card data for years, until its operator announced a voluntary shutdown in early 2021.

  2. № 02

    Genesis Market: The Shop That Sold Your Whole Browser

    Genesis Market packaged victims' browser fingerprints, cookies, and passwords into bots that bypassed MFA, until Operation Cookie Monster ended it in April 2023.

  3. № 03

    ShadowCrew: The Forum That Taught Crime to Scale

    ShadowCrew turned stolen credit cards into a wholesale trade for thousands of members until the Secret Service ran Operation Firewall in October 2004.

  4. № 04

    Hydra Market: The Russian Bazaar That Laundered Billions

    Hydra was the largest Russian-language darknet market, moving drugs, stolen data, and crypto cash-out services worth billions until German police seized its servers in 2022.

  5. № 05

    Welcome to Video: The Blockchain That Named the Buyers

    Investigators dismantled a dark web abuse-material site by following its Bitcoin payments across the public ledger, turning anonymous transactions into 337 arrests worldwide.

  6. № 06

    AlphaBay & Hansa: The Honeypot Waiting on the Other Side

    When police seized AlphaBay, the largest darknet market after Silk Road, the fleeing buyers ran straight into Hansa, a rival store the Dutch had already taken over.

  7. № 07

    Silk Road: The Darknet Empire Caught Logged In

    Silk Road was the largest darknet drug market, run by Ross Ulbricht as Dread Pirate Roberts until the FBI seized his open laptop in a San Francisco library.

  8. № 08

    Mt. Gox: The Exchange That Lost 850,000 Bitcoin

    A Tokyo exchange built on top of a Magic: The Gathering trading site briefly handled most of the world's Bitcoin. Then 850,000 coins quietly walked out the door.

  9. № 09

    Bybit Hack: The 1.5 Billion Dollar Crypto Heist

    In 2025 North Korea's Lazarus Group tricked a Bybit signer via a poisoned Safe{Wallet} interface, moving 1.5 billion dollars of Ether in one block.