Record

Timeline: documented collapses and seizures, 2013–2026

Every entry below comes from a court filing, a seizure notice, an enforcement press release or a published analytics report. No marketplace in this table is operating advice — the table is a record of endings, and endings are the only thing every venue in this sector has in common.

Read the column, not the row

Five enforcement operations appear here. Twenty-six venues do not: they closed by taking the money and disappearing. That ratio is the single most useful number on this page.

Filterable record

Marketplace endings, in order

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Seizures, exit scams and enforcement operations, 2011–2026
Date	Case	Outcome	Detail as published
2011	Silk Road begins operating	Launch	First marketplace in this sector to reach significant scale, and the origin of the escrow model every later venue copied.
Oct 2013	Silk Road seized	Seizure	Site taken down and the operator arrested in the United States; servers and funds seized.
2013	Sheep Marketplace	Exit scam	Operators disappeared with approximately 40,000 BTC belonging to users.
Nov 2014	Operation Onymous	Operation	619 hidden-service domains seized with 17 arrests across 21 participating countries.
2015	Evolution	Exit scam	Approximately USD 12 m lost; the closure overlapped with a parallel enforcement action against the operators.
Jul 2017	AlphaBay	Seizure	Largest venue of its generation removed in a co-ordinated multi-country action.
Jul 2017	Hansa	Seizure (covert)	Seized and then operated for a period by Dutch police to gather evidence against users migrating from AlphaBay.
Apr 2019	Wall Street Market	Exit scam	Approximately USD 11 m taken from escrow, followed by arrests of the alleged operators.
Apr 2019	Dream Market	Retirement	Wound down by announcement rather than disappearing — the rarest ending in the table.
2020	Empire Market	Exit scam	The largest Western venue of the period went dark permanently, with roughly USD 30 m in escrowed funds.
Sep 2020	Operation DisrupTor	Operation	179 arrests across six countries, targeting vendors rather than the platform.
Apr 2022	Hydra Market	Seizure	Servers and cryptocurrency wallets seized in Germany in co-ordination with United States authorities; the largest single removal to date.
May 2023	Operation SpecTor	Operation	288 arrests across nine countries; €50.8 m in cash and virtual currency, 850 kg of drugs and 117 firearms seized.
2024	Nemesis Market	Seizure	Went offline without explanation; a seizure notice followed months later, illustrating why a closure cannot be classified at the time it happens.
2024	Incognito Market	Exit scam	Escrow drained, then users were threatened with publication of their transaction records unless they paid.
16 Jun 2025	Archetyp Market	Seizure	Taken down by law enforcement after five years of operation.
Jul 2025	Abacus Market	Exit scam	Went dark with no seizure notice; more than USD 200,000 moved out of the hot wallet.
2026	BidenCash	Seizure	Carding-focused marketplace reported taken down in mid-2026.

Dates and figures are as published by the sources listed below. Several amounts are estimates produced by analytics firms rather than accounting totals.

Interpretation

Three things the table shows that no review page will tell you

Survival is short

Five years is a long life

Archetyp operated for half a decade before being seized, which is close to the ceiling observed in this sector. Venues that present themselves as long-established are usually describing a brand name that has migrated between operators.

Theft outnumbers enforcement

Most endings are inside jobs

For every operation in the table there are many venues that simply took the balance and stopped answering. Enforcement is the visible ending; theft is the common one.

Classification lags

You cannot tell at the moment of closure

Nemesis went dark in 2024 and the seizure notice appeared months later. Users deciding whether to wait for the venue to return are deciding without the information they need.

Sources

Europol — Operation SpecTor (2023): 288 arrests, €50.8 m seized; Operation DisrupTor (2020): 179 arrests; and the co-ordinated takedown of hidden services under Operation Onymous (2014).
United States Department of Justice — press material on the seizure of Hydra Market infrastructure (2022) and on Operation DisrupTor arrest totals.
TRM Labs — 2026 Crypto Crime Report and the Abacus analysis: darknet marketplace inflows of USD 1.7 bn in 2025; Archetyp seizure of 16 June 2025; Abacus hot-wallet outflow.
Chainalysis — What Is a Darknet Market? and crypto-scam reporting: Wall Street Market escrow loss of approximately USD 11 m; Incognito Market user extortion; market roster snapshots.
Arief, B. et al., Dark Ending: What Happens when a Dark Web Market Closes down, University of Kent — Empire Market, approximately USD 30 m, and the finding that exit scams dominate closures.
Elliptic — Why are Billion-Dollar Darknet Markets Retiring?: Sheep Marketplace, approximately 40,000 BTC, 2013; Evolution, approximately USD 12 m, 2015.
Europol, IOCTA reporting on Operation Onymous — 619 domains and 17 arrests.
Industry trade reporting on the mid-2026 BidenCash takedown; included here as a reported event and flagged accordingly.

This table is compiled from the published record. Where a closure has not been formally attributed, the outcome is described as reported rather than asserted.