ToRReZ Market is an up-and-coming darknet market that was launched in early 2020 and has grown immensely in the new year, currently featuring over 20,000 listings. Like most darknet markets, ToRReZ’s biggest category of listings is for Drugs and Chemicals, but they also have a formidable selection of Fraud-related items, as well as tutorials/e-books. It is populated by over 1,000 vendors which come from over a dozen other markets, which gives it a good degree of variety not readily seen in other markets.
ToRReZ claims to be the “first community-driven market on the Tor network,” but we’re not exactly sure if that’s true or not. It does have a lot of little thoughtful features geared toward making the market browsing experience easier, and easier to look at, as well. For example, they have a dark mode that can be flipped on for a less light-intensive website. They also allow you to view listing prices and account balances in a large number of currencies, and they support 4 different cryptocurrencies as deposit options.
ToRReZ market seems to take their security pretty seriously and makes it as easy as they can to help the user encrypt message information on their end. We appreciate their usage of a special 2-FA system for login that is closer to Google Authenticator and Authy, which is more convenient than having to sign a PGP message every time you want to log in.
The biggest reason for negative feedbacks on the market come from orders never received, which is likely more a reflection that packages are sometimes intercepted than of the market employing bad vendors. Whether or not this has anything to do with the market itself – or is applicable across all markets – can’t be known for sure, but it is a reminder to always use the utmost discretion when choosing a vendor, and a shipping address for that matter.
One thing you’ll notice is that the market uses a lot of captchas. This is kind of annoying, especially because it’s often hard to tell the difference between upper and lowercase letters and this means having to do a captcha 4-5 times before moving onward, but you can bet that DDOS attackers aren’t shutting the market down any time soon.
Quick Facts about ToRReZ Market
- Link: mgijm6w3wcthlzzt6uvea5uczxbhtl2stfnb55kcwhu27a5hkaelhpad.onion
- Founded: 2020
- Number of listings: 20,000+
- Listing categories: Drugs and Chemicals, Counterfeit, Software & Malware, Tutorials and e-books, Services, Carded Items, Fraud
- Coins accepted: Bitcoin (BTC), Litecoin (LTC), Zcash (ZEC), Monero (XMR)
- Multisignature escrow: Yes
- Finalize Early (FE) Allowed: Yes
- Vendor bond: $500
Before Getting Started
There are a few concepts of which you’ll need to have at least a basic understanding in order to use ToRReZ Market or any darknet market:
- How to use a Tor browser.
- How to buy and transfer cryptocurrency.
- How to use PGP keys.
The very first thing you will need is to install the Tor browser on your computer, which is essential to accessing .onion sites like ToRReZ Market. Though it’s true that Tor browsing is – for the most part – private and untraceable via your IP, your internet service provider (ISP) still logs information that identifies your connection to the Tor network, even if they don’t know exactly what sites you visited. For enhanced anonymity, consider buying a Virtual Private Network (VPN) to better hide your connection to the Tor network.
You will also need a basic understanding of cryptocurrency: how to send and receive it and how to get it. Keep in mind that the Bitcoin blockchain records all movement of BTC, so it is considered unwise to send your coins from an exchange that has personally identifying information (such as that submitted for KYC/AML purposes) directly to a darknet market like ToRReZ. Consider making use of a Bitcoin mixing service (or “tumbler”) to thoroughly remove the trace of your identity to your coins. At the very least, send your coins to a personal wallet before sending it to a market-owned address.
Basic OPSEC practices include never choosing an account name that can be associated with your real-life identity, always using a VPN to connect to Tor, and always encrypting sensitive information using PGP. In addition, using Monero (XMR) as a payment method of choice can do a lot for the privacy of your transaction. Unlike Bitcoin, Monero uses an obfuscated blockchain. This means that no party outside of a XMR transaction can determine its source, amount or destination.
If you do use Monero (and we recommend that you do) – again, as with Bitcoin – don’t send it to a market directly from an exchange. Send it to a personal address first and then to the market address, as this will break any possible blockchain link between the exchange and the market.
How to Register an Account
Once you’ve arrived at the official ToRReZ Market login screen, press “Register” to open an account.
Next, you’ll need to create a username and enter a password twice. Be sure to choose a username that can’t be linked back to your real life identity, and choose a password that is a random combination of upper and lowercase letters, along with at least one number and special symbol. You’ll also choose a PIN that will be used to confirm purchases (also entered twice). Save this information somewhere secure where it can’t easily be found yet you can always remember where it is.
After you have entered in this info and filled the captcha, press the green “Register” button to continue.
Next up will be confirming that you’ve save your mnemonic. This is a 12 word phrase that can be used to recover your account in case you somehow get logged out of it. Save it along with your login information, and then re-type the phrase into the text box before continuing. After doing this and clicking to continue, you’ll probably have to log back in to your account. This time around, just enter your username, password, and fill the captcha to login. Upon successful login, the market’s main page should look something like this:
The first thing you should do is import your PGP public key. This will allow you to receive encrypted messages from vendors and other members. To do this, hover over the “My Account” menu option and select “Account Security”.
Click on the link in the text that says “Click here to set your PGP key.” This will bring you to a new screen with a text box in which you will paste your PGP public key. The box should look something like this when correctly filled:
After pressing “Save” to continue, you’ll be asked to verify ownership of your PGP key by decrypting a message with it. Use your PGP tool to decrypt the message, which is a string of letters and numbers.
After decrypting the message and pasting the result in the text box, then press “Save”. From the next screen, you have the option of creating a Time-based One-Time Password (TOTP) for 2FA purposes if you like. This works similar to a Google Authenticator or Authy code. If you want to enable this to make it more difficult to log into your account, then click on the “TOTP” button and follow the instructions presented.
Your account is now ready to be used to make purchases on ToRReZ.
Browsing ToRReZ Market
ToRReZ is a good-sized market that is rather easy to browse and filter. They have vendors from at least 12 other darknet markets that provide a large variety of products, including some rarer items seldom seen elsewhere.
Listings are divided into 7 categories, which are then divided into a number of subcategories. These categories, along with its number of listings and subcategories, are:
- Drugs and Chemicals (10610): Cannabis & Hash, Stimulants, Precursors, Ecstasy, Opiates, Benzos, Psychedelics, Dissociatives, Prescription Drugs, Steroids, Tobacco, Weight Loss, Accessories
- Counterfeit (733): Watches, Fake IDs, Jewelry, Money, Clothes, Electronics
- Software & Malware (753): Legit, Carded, Botnets, Trojans, Exploits, Security Software, Crackers
- Tutorials and e-books (2669): Social Engineering, Carding, Hacking, Drugs, Money
- Services (560): Social Media, Hosting & VPS, Domains, VPN, RDP, Socks, Carding, Hacking, Cracking, Social Engineering
- Carded Items (147)
- Electronics (12): Laptops, Phones
- Fraud (4964): Accounts, CVV & Credit Cards, Personal Information, Dumps & Tracks
Thankfully, ToRRez has a lot of filters available which make it easier to narrow down your search results or the listings in a category or subcategory. Filter options include product type, shipping from/to, payment types accepted, price, shipping days, and FE available. There’s also an Advanced Search option that contains all of these options and a few others. You can also use it to filter by keyword, as well. Listings displayed in search results will contain basic information about the item, such as shipped from/to, price, coins accepted, their vendor level, and a breakdown of feedbacks received.
Click on a listing to bring up its page.
From here you can see more information about the product/service and the vendor, including whether they use FE (Finalize Early — a feature only awarded to more experienced vendors), a description of the product/service, shipping options, and the item price in all of the different cryptocurrencies accepted by the vendor. Some vendors will only accept Bitcoin, and some accept all four supported by the market. You can also read about the vendor’s order placement preferences, find their refund policy, and see other listings they are currently offering.
One of the more important things to check out is the feedbacks left for this product/service, as they can often shed a lot of light on not just the quality of the item but what to expect from the vendor, as well. To do this, click the “Feedbacks” tab below the listing’s shipping options.
Another interesting feature that ToRRez has is that after clicking a product listing it will let you know if the vendor has been offline for an extended period of time. A message will appear toward the top of the listing that says “This vendor has not been active for xx days and xx hours. We recommend to contact vendor before placing an order, to make sure it will be processed.” This makes it easier to see which vendors are more active than others.
Clicking on a vendor name brings you to their profile page on the market where you can see extended statistics about their sales on ToRReZ.
You can see when they joined the market, their last login, amount of transactions, amount of feedback received, dispute statistics, and some notes to introduce themselves and let potential buyers know what they are all about. It’s a good idea to read through these to know what the vendor expects in terms of shipping information. You can also find the vendor’s PGP key in case you need to verify it against something later.
In addition to the About Me and PGP Public Key tabs, other vendor page tabs show feedbacks (divided into positive, neutral and negative), and historical feedback, which is feedback imported from other markets (each number represents another market at which this vendor was successful). Taking a good read through a vendor’s feedbacks is pretty much a must before placing an order with them for the first time. Due to the anonymous nature of darknet markets, a vendor’s reputation is pretty much everything, so consider choosing an experienced vendor over a novice when presented with multiple options.
Placing an Order
After you’ve found a product/service you wish to purchase, press the “BUY” button to get started placing your order.
Here you can see the cost of the order, alter the quantity you wish to purchase, and find the text box in which you will paste your encrypted shipping information. A lot of vendors won’t process your order if you won’t encrypt your address, so don’t forget to do that, and keep in mind its basically considered bad form to not encrypt one’s shipping information. Stopping one step short of doing everything for you, ToRReZ provides the vendor’s PGP address below the shipping info box, which makes it easy to encrypt your information.
The final step before continuing is choosing whether or not to select Allow Finalize Early, represented by a checkbox at the bottom of the screen. Some vendors who are deemed to be reputable by ToRReZ have FE required, which means they require the Finalize Early feature to be enabled, and the vendor will be able to move the funds from escrow as soon as your item has been marked as shipped.
After you have selected the quantity desired, set your shipping preference and encrypted your shipping information, press “Next”.
Here you can review your order pricing and shipping information, and also select what type of payment method you want to use.
There are no longer account wallets on ToRRez as payment for each order is now handled through escrow, individually. You will notice that there is an “On site” payment option but this can only be used by older accounts who have coins in addresses held by the market. Instead, you will be using one of the “Direct Payment” (escrow) methods.
There are a few different ways in which escrow can be handled on ToRRez. For LTC, XMR or ZEC payments, a standard form of escrow is used where the market holds your coins until you have received your order and marked it as such.
BTC payments, on the other hand, also have a multisignature option. This means that you will be required to sign a transaction releasing funds to the vendor upon order finalization. It also means that you can sign a transaction with the market to release the funds back to you in the case of a refund, and the vendor can sign a transaction with the market to release the funds to them. It’s best to use this option when available as it means the funds are never in total control of the market or vendor, and is the best way to assure that you only pay for what you get.After you have entered a refund address, corresponding public key and set the max. number of blocks you are willing to have a refund delayed, press “Next”. You will then be brought to the order placement screen. Here you will be shown an amount to be paid denominated in the coin you are using to make a payment. After reviewing everything and finding it to be satisfactory, press “Place an Order”.
Next, you will be brought to the payment details screen:
Here you can see the payment address to which you will send the exact amount shown above it. You will have 24 hours to complete payment, which involves your payment transaction receiving at least 1 confirmation from the coin’s network. This should be no problem unless you are paying with BTC and use an extremely low fee (which is not recommended).
Once payment has been detected, the screen will be updated, and your order information will be sent to the vendor who will begin preparing your order. The vendor will marked your order as shipped after it has been sent.
After receiving your order and found it to be acceptable, don’t forget to finalize it so the funds can be released to the vendor. This is considered to be proper etiquette among darknet markets and will encourage them to do business again with you in the future. Usually, the time limit before physically-shipped orders are auto-finalized is about one week, so if your order is slow to arrive, work with the vendor to extend the time you have before the order is auto-finalized.
If you get your order and it’s not everything you expected it to be – or you never received it at all – you can always open a dispute on the order. Of course, it’s better to never get to this point in the first place, but sometimes things happen on the vendor side of the deal, and it seems like ToRReZ decides in favor of the buyer just about as often as they do the vendor.
If your package is late, it is always a better idea to wait a couple of additional days (up to 5 or even 7 business days during the holidays) before opening a dispute. The vendor would rather not have the dispute open and the market moderators would rather not have to deal with it either. Therefore, remain in contact with the vendor and ask questions to them first. A little bit of patience can go a long way in terms of resolving a problem with a vendor.
Conclusion
In all, ToRReZ seems to be a very capable operation that has managed to evade problems leading to closure for over a year now. In that time, they’ve attracted a diverse array of vendors, exploding in number of listings particularly in 2021. In some ways, ToRReZ has just about everything a casual darknet market explorer could want, in that it features a pleasant UI, easy category browsing and a good number of filter options.
While everything with them seems to be on the up-and-up, and their escrow system seems to work just fine, we recommend always use common sense and exercise a degree caution when placing an order or sending funds to ToRReZ Market, or any darknet market for that matter.