Snook - Terrifying Dark Web Websites

Episode Date: July 21, 2025

The internet you know is just the surface. Beneath it lies a hidden world, silent, strange, and often disturbing. In today's video, we'll get into some of the most terrifying websites ever found on the dark web. These aren’t myths. They’re real. And they’re not easy to forget. WARNING: This video contains descriptions and references to extremely disturbing content found on the dark web. Edited by ‪ @WeakSaladOnYoutube  Would you like to see another part in this series? Let me know down below. Thanks for watching and supporting the channel.Subscribe and like for more, thank you for watching, and stay safe... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Beneath the surface of the internet lies a hidden world, a place where anonymity breed some of the darkest, most dangerous corners online. This is the dark web, a digital shadow land filled with secret marketplaces, forbidden forums, and sites most people will never hear about. These websites aren't just mysterious, they're terrifying. In this video, we're diving deep into the most terrifying dark web websites, the ones law enforcement fears, hackers exploit, and ordinary people wouldn't dare to set foot on. Please like and subscribe.

It helps more than you know. And now, let's get into some terrifying dark web websites. Cracked, nulled, Cellix, and StarkRDP. Do you need cracked software? Hacked accounts? Tools to take down a website? Well, for years, sites like cracked, knolled, Selex, and Stark RDP were the go-to hubs for online crime, running wild in plain sight. Although on January 29th, 2025, they disappeared.

Operation Talent, a massive international sting led by the FBI and Europol, shut them down overnight. Raids, arrests, and millions in damage. Here's how it went down. Operation Talent was a multi-state operation involving serious coordination and efforts between multiple global law enforcement agencies of several different countries, namely the United States, Romania, Australia, France, Germany, Spain, Italy, and Greece. This operation, like I said, was targeted on the following sites, Cracked, Nulled, Selex, and StarkRDP. These sites specialized in providing users with crack software, such as Adobe products or video games, as well as selling information and illegal cybercrime services. These services

could be anything from OnlyFans leaks to even taking down entire websites, doxing people, and it could even go as far as blowing up routers. These cyber criminals from all around the world would advertise their services, where they'd provide people with OnlyFans leaks for free, or even paid at times, paid high-balanced PayPal accounts, etc. These sites operated for years without being caught. That was until the 29th of January 2025. The following banner was uploaded on all of these sites.

This banner, as fake as it looks, is completely real. The operation resulted in the following. Two people were arrested in Spain, seven different properties were searched, 17 servers were seized, 50 different electronic devices were seized, and over 300,000 euros were seized in cash in crypto. According to seizure warrants unsealed today, the cracked marketplace has been selling stolen logging credentials, hacking tools, and servers for hosting malware and still data, as well as other tools for carrying out cybercrime and fraud since March 2018.

Cracked had over 4 million users, listed over 28 million posts advertising in cybercrime tools and stolen information, generated approximately $4 million in revenue, and impacted at least 17 million victims from the United States. One product advertised on Cracked offered access to billions of leaked websites, allowing users to search for stolen logging credentials. This product was recently allegedly used. used to sex tort and harass a woman in the Western District of New York. Specifically, a cyber criminal entered the victim's username into the tool and obtained the

victim's credentials for an online account. Using the victim's credentials, the subject then cyberstocked the victim and sent demeaning and threatening messages to the victim. The FBI. Nold had been in operation since 2016 and had over 5 million active users. It had advertised several cybercrime tools, stolen login details, stolen ID, and detailed guides on fraud, and much, much more. The site saw over $1 million in yearly revenue,

with one ad claiming to have the names and social security numbers of over half a million American citizens. The site operated on the ClearNet, but on several other channels such as Telegram, where the staff had confirmed the takedown moments after it had happened. They claimed it was a sad day indeed for our community. Saan, an active admin of the site, had been arrested, alleged to have performed escrow functions on the site and that his services would be used to complete transactions

which involved stolen ID and credentials. He's been charged with conspiracy to traffic and passwords and information, conspiracy to solicit another person for the purpose of offering an access device or selling information regarding an access device and conspiracy to possess, transfer, or use a means of identification of another person with the intent to commit or to aid and abet or in connection with an unlawful activity that is a violation of federal law. Put simply, he's in a shitload of trouble if convicted, facing up to 30 years in prison

for all his charges. Some users online, however, believed these takedowns never stick, speculating that the domains are already back up somewhere else. Rip, I'm sure they will be back up within the week on new domains, or sometimes even the same domain. Yeah, this or it just means it's some other site's turn. These takedowns are kind of useless, LOL. Some others, however, believe that these hacking forms were simply just scams. Me, in a way, hacking forms have been basically dead for years. A new one will come and continue to just be a scam, like these were, all scams. But, according to the FBI, this takedown did make a huge impact. Russian Anonymous Marketplace

Silk Road has had many successors, but none have had the longevity of Ramp, also known as Russian anonymous marketplace. Inspired by the Silk Road's model of anonymous cryptocurrency-based e-commerce, it was a marketplace used to sell substances. It offered one of the widest variety of narcotics on the entire dark web, but with one key difference. It only served Russian-speaking clientele. After the OG marketplace of the Silk Road was shut down, many clones popped up and were quickly shut down by authorities. The biggest of them, Silk Road 2, lasted exactly one year to the day after Silk Road got shut down. For comparison, Ramp lasted nearly five years, from September 2012 when it was launched until July 2017. It was actually less of an eBay-style marketplace

and more of a Craiglist forum where buyers and sellers would find one another. Then, once a connection has been made, most users leave the forum and go to the other side, such as off-the-record to finalize the deal. Off-the-record messaging is a cryptographic protocol that is basically an encrypted, fully secure version of the instant messaging apps we use today. It provides something known as deniable authentication. In short, that means that the people communicating can be sure of who the person is while messaging them, but it cannot later be revealed to another third party, in this case, police. While Ramp does provide an escrow system similar to Silk Road, most sellers and buyers prefer to use off-the-record messaging and then pay in Bitcoin or with the Russian payment service

QIWI. Sellers are known to be very cautious on the site, triple stealing these substances or even going as far as to delivering them to a dead drop where the buyer can go pick it up from. Buyers can also leave reviews on the seller's pages with one particularly happy seller leaving the follow review on a seller's page. In the nose, it is without foreign flavor and is not bitter and sent, and it does not burn. So how do people at Ramp make money? Simply, they charge the top buyers a certain fee for their own private sections on the forums, $300 a month. For another $700 a month, you can pay for your very own banner advertising your product. And if you are really serious about this and you want to sell some of the most potent substances

to the extremely demanding Moscow market, you have to pay $1,000 a month in order to sell from their restricted quota list. The side administrator, also known as Darkside, agreed to an interview with Wired, conducted on Ramp's very own private messaging system on tour. Darkside stays completely anonymous, not even revealing his gender and his location, set as a galaxy far far away. He does apparently speak good English, though, and share details in the above. He claimed that it made over $250,000 a year, but compared to its predecessors, that is much

less, but also compared to its predecessors, it stayed up much longer. According to Darkside, six figures is just a regular income in the local area he stays in, wherever that is. He says, I can be perhaps considered a rich guy for a local, though you can't live well on your legal salary here. We ain't dollar millionaires, just upper middle class guys who do their job and feed their families. He is also supposedly planning to expand the site to include a payment system like Silk Road had or even catered to the English audience, like similar sites did at the time. So how did it survive so long when during that time a Silk Road clone would be seized every other week? It may simply be that the Western authorities didn't want to target it.

It caters mainly to a Russian audience and is also speculated to be hosted in Russia, where authorities usually turn a blind eye to online crime. In Darkside's own words, we never mess with the CIA. We work only for Russians, and this keeps us safe. We can't the whole world and remain safe. The site is also extremely primitive because it doesn't have its own payment system or any complex features, so it is hard to hack. Ramp also focuses exclusively on substances, banning the sale of weapons, stolen credit

cards, counterfeit documents, and even legal, which is much more restrictive than similar sites. It also did not tolerate any political discussion at all. Darkside said that the politics attract extra attention and that they did not want that at all. While it did suffer from frequent DDoS attacks, it would always come back up until July 2017 when Russian police confirmed the news. They had officially shut down the largest remaining dark net market. In the same month, two other online substance markets similar to Ramp, Alpha Bay and Hansa also went down.

Even though many believe that law enforcement ignored ramp, that was apparently not the case, as Russian authorities released the following statement to a Russian news agency. As a result of the activities carried out in July 2017, the largest Russian language trading platform ramp, Russian anonymous marketplace, the largest in the Russian language segment, was terminated. The MVD has permanently implemented a set of measures aimed at identifying and suppressing the activities of members of criminal groups engaged in the distribution of synthetic substances, potent substances, and precursors in a non-contact way using the internet.

The main efforts are aimed at suppression of substance supply channels and elimination of organized groups and criminal communities engaged in their sale. Dark Ode. If the Dark Web had a Wall Street, Dark Ode was its stock exchange, a high-stakes marketplace for the world's top hackers bought, sold, and traded illegal goods like stolen identities, hacking tools, and botnets. It didn't look like much from the outside. just another hidden forum.

But behind the scenes, it was a slick, highly organized operation. If you wanted to hire someone to break into an email, grab stolen credit cards, or control a massive army of hijacked computers, Darkoad was the place to be. This wasn't some messy underground chat room. It was a polished marketplace where cyber criminals dealt in secrets in malware as casually as people buy apps on their phones,

professional, efficient, and dangerous. Compared to its competitors, Darkoad was generally regarded as the most dangerous by authorities, as it had the largest group of criminal hackers and represented the biggest threat to data safety. In fact, a prominent attorney, David Hickton, said that Darkoad was the most sophisticated English-speaking forum for criminal computer hackers in the world, which represented one of the gravest threats to the integrity of data on computers in the United States. You can see the scale and impact this dark web criminal form had. Started in 2009 by a coder named Acerdo. It was originally created to sell their bot called Butterfly Bot.

If you're active in the cybersecurity space, you might know this bot as Mariposa, which was a botnet used for denial of service attacks that was discovered in 2008. It would install itself onto unprotected computers and start monitoring for sensitive information and then would propagate into other computers. After the computer is fully infected, it would contact the malicious actor's server and serve as a bot for their purposes, for example, a DDoS attack. It costs an estimated tens of millions of dollars to remove and over 800,000 individuals' personal data was stolen. By the end of 2009, U.S. Authority seized control of the bot network, but unfortunately, the owners took it back and launched a revenge attack, which actually knocked out internet connectivity

for many Canadian universities and government agencies. The following year, in Spain, the suspected leader of the group that created the botnet was arrested along with two others. The creator of Butterfly Bot, where this all started, Aserdo, also known as Matjaz Skornik, was arrested in Maribar, Slovenia, but was released due to lack of evidence. Around this time, Matzjas gave up control of the Dark Ode Forum to Crim, who created an exploit kit named Crime Pack that was sold in the early days of the forum. Madjazz was arrested again in October of 2011 and finally convicted in December 2013 in

Slovenia for creating a malicious computer program for hacking information systems, assisting in wrongdoings, and money laundering. With nearly five years in prison to look forward to, you would think that Madjazz was done with the internet. However, just a year later, he founded Nice Hash, a cryptocurrency mining marketplace, He was detained yet again in 2019 in Germany when the FBI reopened the Mari Posa Botnet case with new charges. Anyway, back to the main topic. After Matjah started selling his bot, the forum grew very popular and turned invite only.

Existing members were given invites who they could give to whoever they want, and this only made Darkoad a more exclusive and trustworthy forum. A few years later, in 2012, a new access model would be announced. There were now two layers to the members. Membership. Level 0, also known as Fresh Fish, was given to the new members after they were invited by another member and were vetted with an interview with the admin. The next level up was Level 1. To gain trusted access, you would have to prove yourself and then you could access the real meat in the Level 1 marketplace. Further on, the system was revised to ban fresh fish from inviting

people. Level 2 was created for the highly trusted members. With Darkoad becoming such a hot spot, it stumbled upon the bane of many forums, trolls. You might think that the invite-only model would have avoided this problem, but that only works if all the members really care about the site. This is a criminal forum after all, and like most criminals, money can easily sway their allegiance. There was always somebody willing to give you an invite for some quick cash, and researchers would exploit this and gain easy access to the site.

Obviously, the forum moderators didn't sit and watch and began implementing measures such as mass demoting accounts and banning strangers and even targeting researchers directly. Hackers were becoming wary with researchers becoming common, and then in 2013, the downfall began. A username Special First was voted as admin. They had a rather extreme strategy for rooting out researchers. Even though they banned people who invited them, researchers always came back and Special First would start handing out bans to anyone with even the slightest suspicion. Soon, Darkoad consisted only of security researchers, the FBI, and a very small selection of actual hackers who were highly trusted.

Of course, a marketplace can't function without buyers, and Special First started basically removing the exclusivity of the site and spamming invites on regular hacking forums. They even went as far as sending messages to mailing lists from old hacking forums and even posting in the comments of the cybersecurity researchers blogs themselves. The heyday of Darkoad was clearly over, and just a couple years later, the site was shut down for good. Codenamed Operation Shrouted Horizon, the FBI along with law enforcement agencies from 20 different countries seized the site and arrested several members. Over a period of 18 months, they collected evidence for a variety of crimes, including, but not limited to, conspiracy to commit computer fraud, conspiracy to commit wire fraud, conspiracy to commit money laundering, conspiracy to commit money laundering, conspiracy to

commit bank fraud, conspiracy to send malicious code, spamming, identity theft, and racketeering, and extortion. Around the world, around 70 people were arrested, but this is obviously only a fraction of the users and many of Darko's frequent visitors are still out there. Just two weeks after a shutdown, however, the site relaunched on the Tor network with supposedly increased security, although shortly after, it was hacked and the database leaked. Dockspin. Many of you are probably active on various social media online and follow a few internet celebrities. They usually stay anonymous because they want to protect their privacy against the many followers they have. However, sometimes that celebrity might irk the wrong person or

get on the wrong side of a particularly vengeful community and they might dox them as a kind of petty revenge. If you don't know what doxing is, it's basically revealing personal information such as their name, address, banking information, without the person's permission. Obviously, this is dangerous and also illegal, as the internet isn't exactly known for containing the most mentally stable individuals. People get death threats or get SWAT teams called on them all the times as some sort of prank. Of course, doxing is illegal in most countries around the world, but some dark web websites don't really follow the law. One website explicitly made for this purpose is Doxpin. Doxbin was a paste bin, which is basically a website where users can store text

files and can then share a link to allow others to view the content. It describes itself as judge, jury, and executioner for all matters relating to Onion Land. It first attracted major attention when one of the site admins, known as Intangar, hacked the hidden wiki. The hidden wiki is a sort of strange page to the dark web that contains links to many illegal websites. It also used to include links to to sites that provided, which Entangor objected to, and so he hacked the website and scrubbed the site clean. On the Doxman's website, he posted the following message, saying that he would support the hidden wiki if they, A, don't link to sites, and B, allow community editing. Intangir said that he wanted to do something good while showing that the hidden wiki had terrible security and took

its domain as well. Some people on Reddit didn't take this news well. Of course, they weren't defending existing, but instead had a problem with the inherent censorship. One Redditor wrote that it's about keeping Tor free. Another felt like that the supposed excuse for the kids would be used to control other things such as the UK's ban. The UK planned to make websites verify the age of the users similar to what is implemented in some US states now, but the plan was cancelled a couple years later. And Tangar didn't really seem to care as he wrote on Doxpin. What I love about these neckbeards complaining about censorship is that if someone put their docks up, they'd be following up my inbox with things like,

take this down, internet freedom, etc. And I would just add the crying to their docs and make fun of them. If someone added a pro NSA page to the wiki, they'd probably edit it, or at least spam the talk page about having it taken down. Yet they're okay with links. After the hack, the hidden wiki came back, promising to not include any links to those websites anymore. In an interview with The Guardian, the site's admin,

Natchash says he does it to expose shitheads who had it coming. One of his first targets, or Patient Zero, as he called him, was Jason Lee Van Dyke. Van Dyke is a lawyer from Texas who represented a student from a Texas University who was a victim of a revenge website called Pink Meth. He attempted to sue the Tor project, and Natchash was not happy with this, seeing it as an attack on Tor. The Tor project is how the majority of Dark Globe websites are hosted. It is a network that enables anonymous connections and therefore hides the people who use it. The chash was also close to those who ran Pink Meth website and soon after Van Dyke's personal information was uploaded to Docksbin.

Another person who was targeted by the internet was Robert Whitney, who was doxed after an argument online when he claimed to have discovered a security flaw for a coding website. People sent SWAT teams to his house saying that they were in grave danger when in reality nothing was happening. In one case, police were informed. that people were being held hostage at gunpoint. Of course, the police didn't want to risk it, so they usually do turn up heavily armed even if they suspect it is a prank call.

The site was eventually seized in November 2014, along with several others in Operation Onomis. Authorities did not reveal how exactly they managed to take it down, but the main theories are that either the website had some security issues in its code, or it was a direct attack on the Tor network itself. However, ironically considering the sites, no personal information of the sites' admins was found and no one was arrested. It is rather easy to take back control of a seized site on the Tor network, so the Doxman's site could come back up any time. This is because the admins

haven't been arrested and still have access to the private key that controls the website and can freely access it and do whatever they want with it. But Nachash has no such plans apparently as in his own words. It's a 12-year-old skid shit show, and it's not worth my time. Dot Web and Dread. For some of the websites we discussed before, some of the information sources linked to a site called Deep. Dot Web. But like me, if you try to go to the site, we'll find that it no longer exists.

Deep. Dot Web is actually a news website dedicated mainly to the dark web and its surrounding topics such as the Tor network, cryptocurrency and privacy. Major news about dark web markets would be posted here first. For example, the hacking of Silk Road, and then mainstream. news outlets would cover it. The site even included comparisons between websites to help the confused customer choose the best site to buy substances from. Technically, this is not illegal, as the site itself did not sell any substances or have any illegal activities going on. It was just a

news site, right? It's actually not even illegal to post links to any black market sites, even if they themselves are shady. Like most free news sites, it ran ads on his website and had an affiliate marketing system. You might see this on some YouTuber's descriptions where they post an Amazon link to some product, and if you buy through the link, the creators get a small percentage of it. Deep.Web had a similar system where it would post links to dark net markets and would earn some revenue whenever a user bought from there. In an investigation by Israeli police, the site owners, Taupra Har, and Israeli who lived in Brazil and Michael Fawn, also of Israel, were raking in millions every year from these affiliate deals.

The Department of Justice reported that 23.6% of all orders on Alva Bay involved Deep. Web, although that wasn't what they were charged for. It was the common enemy of every shady businessman in the U.S., the good old IRS. The owners were arrested for conspiracy to commit money laundering and both pled guilty to their charges and were sentenced to 97 months in prison. Approximately 8,155 Bitcoins of revenue were transferred to shell companies and then to their personal wallets. It was worth $8.4 million then, but today it would be worth about $890 million. All of it was forfeited.

After the arrest, the website was seized by authorities and only archives of it exist on the internet. But this is the dark web, and new websites pop up after its predecessor is. shut down. Dread is a Reddit-style dark web discussion form that is the successor of deep dot web. It rose in popularity in 2018 after Reddit started banning lots of darknet market discussion subredits and people needed a place to discuss their favorite Silk Road clone. Do this day, it does remain online and there's even a dedicated subreddit for its current status, R-slash Dread Alert. One of the biggest blows to darknet markets occurred on this site when a prominent site known as Wall Street Market fell.

The site was going through a turbulent period when the owners committed an exit scam on the users running away with approximately $14 million worth of crypto. Basically, an exit scam occurs when the owner of a business runs away with the funds of people who participated in it without ever delivering their product or service. This scam is especially popular in the online darknet market space, as most transactions are in crypto and you cannot charge back crypto like you can with normal currencies and banks. One of the WSM moderators named Medellin started blackmailing the site users in the middle of this as they were trying to leave. They would ask for 0.05 Bitcoin threatening to leak their private info to law enforcement.

A few days later, Medellin apparently had had enough and posted the IP address and logging credentials for the WSM servers on Dread. Law authorities quickly latched onto this and the site was taken down eight days later and three were arrested. Dread itself is not completely innocent either. Stolen credentials are sometimes sold on the site. For example, in 2020, a vendor known as Exploit Dot tried to sell KYC documents, which would include ID such as driver's licenses. They were selling 100 documents for $10 and even offered bulk discounts. In an independent investigation by CCN, they got access to a few free samples and they seemed to be legitimate KYC verification documents for Binance, a popular crypto, currency marketplace. However, Binance is known to have very good security practices and supposedly

no leak had occurred so they may be fake. Dredd also has in-depth guides on how to manufacture substances. In one of Dredd's versions of subredits, substance manufacturer, you can ask questions for every step of the process. The only rules are no sharing personal information, no revealing the source of your raw materials for your chosen substance, and strictly no selling substances. In darknet markets, another kind of sub-edit on this site, you can find reviews of the most popular markets, so you can be sure that you won't be getting scammed. XSS Russia is known for their dodgy internet, and the amount of cybercrime that takes place

there is absolutely unreal. But there are several hidden Russian sites that have come to light recently, all of which were only accessible through the Tor network. These sites specialize in ransomware, zero-day exploits, a legal product trade, and a lot more. One of the oldest sites is exploit. This website has been home to underground black hat hackers since 2005. They help other users in social engineering, finding and exploiting vulnerabilities, and much more. If you don't know, social engineering, put simply, is using information to manipulate and lie your way to defraud someone into doing something.

Zero-day vulnerabilities are vulnerabilities in company's systems, which is unknown to the company themselves. People will use these exploits until eventually someone from the company finds out and they patch it. That's when these hackers will find a new zero-day vulnerability and exploit that. Seeing as this was one of the oldest hacking forums out there, to gain access, you either had to pay a $100 entry fee or have a good reputation on other forums and have a good history. This made it a closed forum, and this was done to ensure the security of the site, that not anyone can simply come and go as they please, except in 2021.

Exploit faced a breach when an intruder gained access to a server that protected the forum from DDoS attacks. This was a targeted attack that took down four other sites. But this then links to Ramp, which we talked about earlier. People flooded to Ramp after Exploit and another site was taken down. As mentioned before, Ramp was shut down in 2017, but Ramp 2.0 came to life in 2021, and the only way to gain entry, you had to be reputable user of XSS or Exploit for over two months, which is now impossible considering both sites are shut down. This turned Ramp 2.0 into a retroactive cybercriminal community

for those who could prove they are who they say they are, allowing only legitimate individuals into the site. What is XSS? Similar to exploit, it's a closed forum which is more centered towards Russian cybercriminals than being easily accessible for most cybercriminals, which was unlike Ramp, which offered the site in Russian, Mandarin, and English. To gain access to the site, you simply create a new account, answer a few questions,

and boom, you're done. Sounds pretty easy, right? This doesn't sound much like a close form until adding the fact that an admin from the site approves your request to join. Depending on your credentials and your answers to the questions they give, they can either accept or reject you for any reason. If you're granted access, though, you'd be able to take part in discussions involving credential access, exploits, and valuable zero-day vulnerabilities lacking any security patches.

The site would go to extensive measures to protect their users, though. If you're allowed in, IP address logging would be disabled, and you would have truly encrypted private messaging systems. Until 2021, Ransomware topics ran rampant on the site. After all, most of these people wanted to make a quick buck, or well, in this case, a few thousand. But in 2021, these topics were banned by the admin, likely due to the government cracking down on sites like these.

And so they took this measure to prevent their site from being put in the crosshairs. A lot of these sites have turned to Telegram to conduct their business. Famous for enforcing free speech, Telgram lets almost anything and everything slide, making it the number one place for criminals to communicate. It also allows for a higher level of privacy, as while you do have to link a phone number, any spoofer can be used to link a fake number

and create an account hiding literally all your info. And all right, guys, that wraps up some terrifying dark web websites. This was the second installment, so if you guys haven't seen the first one, please go check that out. That video is doing very well, so let me know down in the comments. If you enjoyed this one, and if you did enjoy this one, I'm sure you'll enjoy other videos on this channel. So check them all out. And also comment down below if you'd like to see another installment in the Dark Web website series. Thank you so much for watching to the end of the video.

Please like and subscribe. Help so much. And now this was Snook, and I'll see you next time. Bye.