Warning project — no links, no addresses, no mirror lists Not a marketplace directory
Mars Market

Standards

Method and sources

A page that asks you to distrust other people's claims owes you an account of its own. This is that account, including the parts that make this project look weaker than the pages it criticises.

Apply the same test here

On the teardown page we set out five things missing from every page in this genre. Check whether this site has them before you extend it any credit.

Sourcing

What we treat as a source, and what we do not

Claims on this site are drawn from four categories, listed in descending order of weight. Court records and seizure notices, because they are filed under penalty. Law-enforcement press material from Europol, the United States Department of Justice and comparable agencies, because figures are attributable to an institution. Published analytics research from firms that sell compliance products, treated as estimates rather than totals, because their figures are derived from clustering methods that carry stated uncertainty. And peer-reviewed or institutional research on marketplace behaviour, which is the only category that has survived external review.

Direct inspection is used in exactly one place: the teardown of verified-access pages, where we describe what was on the page at the time of inspection and what was absent. That inspection is dated and reproducible, and it is the strongest evidence on this site because it can be checked by anyone with a browser.

We do not treat as sources: trade blogs listing marketplaces with affiliate links, aggregator posts reproducing other aggregators, forum claims about uptime or reliability, and any page whose commercial model depends on your click. Those are not weaker sources — they are the subject of this site.

Limits

What this project cannot do

Honest limits

  • We cannot verify what we cannot see. Hidden services are, by construction, unavailable to inspection. Everything we say about them comes from third parties, and when it does, we say so.
  • We cannot prove a negative. Where we report that a name does not appear in the public record, that is a statement about the record, not about the world.
  • We do not have a monetisation model that funds ongoing field research, so we rely on published material rather than primary investigation.
  • Our figures inherit the errors of their sources. Several loss amounts are estimates by analytics firms, and we mark them as such rather than presenting them as accounts.

Hard refusals

  • No marketplace addresses or links, in any form, on any page, at any time — including in examples, screenshots, comments or corrections.
  • No mirror lists, availability trackers or "which markets are up" features.
  • No rankings, scores, ratings or comparisons of marketplaces against each other.
  • No buying, shipping, escrow, encryption or operational guidance for conducting illegal transactions.
  • No technique description detailed enough to reproduce an attack.

We state these refusals publicly because they are the thing that distinguishes this site from the pages it criticises. A warning resource that quietly added a directory would become the thing it warns about, and the disclaimer at the foot of these pages would not save it.

Corrections

Corrections policy

If something here is wrong, send the correction with a link to a source in one of the four categories above. Corrections that come with a verifiable source are published on the page they affect, with a dated note, and the original claim is not silently removed — it is marked as superseded. Claims that were asserted without sufficient sourcing are removed and the removal is noted.

We will not publish corrections that consist of an operator's assurance, an assertion of good standing, a request to add an address, or a request to add a marketplace to a list. Those requests are refused regardless of who makes them.

Editorial credit — template

Mars Market Editorial
Research and writing: [Author name]
[Author role or credentials — one line, factual]
Review: [Reviewer name and role]
Contact: [corrections address]

Replace the bracketed fields with real, verifiable details before publication. Do not publish unverifiable credentials: a named reviewer with a checking role is worth more than an unverifiable expert title, and a false credential would invalidate the sourcing standard this page describes.