The dark web is a place not for the faint of heart. Drugs, crime, and all kinds of sordid examples of human depravity are commonplace.
One Redditor asked, [Serious] People who have been on the Deep Web, what's the scariest thing you've found?
Submissions have been edited for clarity, context, and profanity.
Bed bug bad boy.
Giphy
I remember a long time ago there was a guy online that was trying to buy large quantities of bed bugs. When questioned why he wanted them he basically said that he wanted to try to breed them to be resistant to normal methods of killing them while simultaneously breeding in a weakness that only he knew. This way he could release them in peoples houses and then force them to pay him to get rid of the bed bugs since no one else would be able to kill them.
Well this is unnerving.
My own password.
Found a chan that had a link to a website that when you put in an email address, it would show you the password in plain text if that email address had been pwned. Typed in one of my old (now closed) emails, and there it was. Just a blank page with my email address and password on it, sitting right there for anybody to find.
Don't underestimate the power of the dark side.
Giphy
A friend of mine claims he was snooping around where he didn't belong (black market forums and hacking forums) when someone private messaged him basically saying "I've looked into you because I see you in here a lot and I know you're not here to buy or use the services because you're just a kid. I don't mind but others will and you haven't protected yourself well enough to be here. Get off if you know what's good for you."
Secret spy cams.
Someone showed me this website once where it was like a stream feed aggregation on these pages, and there were HUNDREDS of pages and each page had probably 50 streams on it.
They were all feeds from "do it yourself" security cameras that people have in their homes that backup to the cloud. So crazy to see... These people probably have no idea.
Maybe a scam? Maybe not. It's the dark web.
Hitman site. No idea if it was a scam, I'd be willing to bet they just take the money and run, but I noped out quickly anyway. It was like you pay them the equivalent of $5,000 upfront in Bitcoin and they kill someone of your choosing and cover it up and you pay the rest later. Scary as f*ck.
So. Many. Drugs.
Giphy
The deep web is largely not a scary place unless you really go digging for things. All that I've really seen is lots of drugs, stolen goods, counterfeits, guns, etc.
Five finger discounts?
A guy whom you tell something you want and he'd go steal it from a store and sell it to you for like half the cost. It's an interesting business lol
The dark web can be enriching, like when someone sells uranium.
Played around with the dark web in college just out of curiosity but never got anything. Scariest thing I saw on alphabay was someone selling enriched uranium. Probably a scam but it was still scary.
Suicide pills. Classy.
Giphy
Someone was selling potassium cyanide in 5 gram baggies on the old Silkroad. Cant imagine it was intended for anything good.
Lots and lots of "sickos."
I haven't fired up TOR in years but I found it really disturbing how easy it was to bump into child porn. Also animal abuse, lots of random images of burned and tortured pets.
There are a lot of sickos out there. You try not to think about it, but they exist and that scared me.
Don't do this.
I've seen the bad stuff. But the worst was probably a group of people who try to infect others with HIV. Noped out of that pretty quick.
Poor, lonely bank account.
Giphy
Your bank account is technically on the deep web because it's not googleable and it can't be accessed by everyone.
Mine's a dark, desolate place. Pretty scary.
A classic.
I vividly remember being shown by a group of older kids the "Taxi shotgun" picture. Absolutely horrific. It was a picture of a guy that got shot while driving his taxi, with a double barrel.
A bargain, really.
Giphy
Hit men are $10k each. It's really scary knowing that someone out there can just pay a hit man so little to do something so evil.
@ColoradoNana6/X
@nogg_the/X
@imduckymex/X