Sixty seconds with the address

The address is the whole lock. There is no separate “official” domain to be redirected to, no brand name the browser will check for you. A .onion address is 56 characters long, and one swapped character does not raise an error. It routes you to a different site that may look exactly the same.

Black Ops Market addresses

The last six characters of each address are the tail you check against the address bar.

• blackops5l63qnwnmlnsfvtlu66md3x3vp3fdtpna42eq7ozujr67hid.onionCopy
• blackops6kignp3eddmvqcfkjzf6qr6haxbmkypc2xtqlnhuu4ak4dqd.onionCopy
• blackops27m32abqvbhnyswgazqawxqbznbzkkkv5sjo7gve2ndpsdad.onionCopy

Three checks, in order

1. The prefix

All three current addresses start with blackops, and nothing is inserted between that and the rest. An address that starts with blackopz, blackopshub or b1ackops is not one of them, no matter how much the page behind it resembles the market.

2. The length

56 characters before the dot, 62 including the .onion. Select the text in the address bar and count once. It is slow the first time and a reflex after that. Addresses that are 53, 57 or 60 characters long are not from this market, period.

3. The tail

The last six characters, the red part in every address above. After the mirror finishes loading, read them off the address bar and compare. This is the check that catches look-alikes, because a fake that got all of the first fifty characters right still has to invent the last six, and that is where the invention shows.

Never through a gateway

If the address bar shows your onion inside a longer domain, blackops…onion.watch with a .to or .com tail after it, a clearnet gateway is standing between you and the market. A gateway is a middleman: it carries your traffic, so it can read all of it, password included. The page may render perfectly and still be the worst version of the market you can reach. Close the tab, open Tor Browser, paste again.

All three addresses on these pages pass the test above, and they are equal in every way that matters. If an address from somewhere else is in front of you, run the same three checks on it before you trust it with a single keystroke.