I Spent 48 Hours On The DARK WEB

0:01 Drugs, scams, weapons. I even saw a beheading. Holy That's crazy. I guess the only thing I'm worried about is I don't know. How do you think Aina's going to take it? Let's see. Do you have a minute? Mom. What is this? So, uh, we had a wild idea for the next AV video. We were thinking that they could send you off into the dark web. You know, have you explore it for like 48 hours and show the audience what's out there. Is that even legal? It's legal. I mean, I guess as long as you don't do anything illegal, basically. But, like, don't do anything like just don't

0:46 do illegal What if we this video and influence our audience to go to the dark web and they end up in places we don't want them to? Then I don't know. I don't know. These kinds of educational videos, they usually have the opposite effect. So, maybe we could take the risk. And uh I don't know. Just I I don't think our audience is dumb enough that they're going to go to the dark web and get themselves into trouble. Okay. I don't mind doing the video, but are we sure they won't? All right, I want you to try something out, okay? Go to your Google account settings and look for the option that

1:32 lets you monitor your security breaches cuz chances are your information has been leaked somewhere in the dark web. And if your data indeed was breached like my information was, then you have to watch this video till the end. You see, for the longest time, I've been very fascinated by the concept of the dark web. And by fascinated, I also mean a little bit unsettled because all I have heard is that the most terrible bits of humanity can be found neatly organized within the strands of the dark web. Drugs, weapons, human trafficking, God knows what else could be down there. We'd been told that it's definitely a place to stay away from and naturally that made all of us all the more

2:18 curious. So we did our thing, dove deep into it and what we learned was that we knew very little about all this. You see the most inaccessible and unexplored territories known to man are space, the oceans and also the internet. It is literally so unbelievably vast and filled with so many interesting tidbits. And today we're going to take you through all of it from what the internet really is to why this sinister dark web was created in the first place. And finally, we are going to go as far into the dark web as we legally can so that you never have to. So, when we started to go down the

3:04 rabbit hole, the very first door was just, "What the hell is the internet?" Like, have you guys ever wondered where the internet exists or how your floating little phone can somehow send a text message to someone all the way in Japan? It's pretty simple, actually. Stay with me. So, your phone has a Wi-Fi chip in it, and its main function is to decode the radio waves coming from the router. The router then connects to a few other devices in your house. Maybe your laptop, your smart TV, and even other computers. Together, they form a local area network. Easy stuff, no? But now, this router connects to a modem which transmits data through cables or airwaves to your internet service provider. Suddenly, you're part of a regional network with thousands of other

3:49 computers doing the same thing. Your ISP then plugs into something much bigger. That's the national backbone. Just picture massive fiber optic cables stretching across the country carrying data at the speed of light. These cables connect every ISP in the country creating a nationwide web of smaller regional networks all talking to each other. Zoom out one more time and you'll see that this national network of ISPs rely on submarine cables lying on the ocean floor and satellites orbiting overhead to link globally. They basically do so by connecting to global exchange points which are called internet exchange points or IXPS. That's how your phone connects to this global network and lets you send a message to someone all the way in Japan. And that's the internet. But you know what's really

4:37 insane right now as you're watching this? You think you're using the entirety of the internet, but you're not. You're using maybe 4% of it. The Google searches, the Instagram scrolling, these YouTube videos, and every website you've ever visited, all of it combined barely scratches the surface. This visible part, everything you can access through a search engine is called the surface web. It's clean, indexed, and visible. But it's really nothing compared to what lies beneath, which is the deep web. And it makes up about 94% of the internet. Now, don't worry. The deep web isn't just some scary criminal underworld. It's just private. Websites that haven't been discovered and indexed by crawlers, your emails, your cloud

5:24 storage, that Google doc you set to private, your Netflix account, even your online banking, they all sit isolated in the deep web, fully functional but inaccessible to others. But then there's the dark web. And this is where things get interesting or unsettling. The dark web is not really a specific part of the internet that exists somewhere or some place. Rather, it refers to a bunch of websites hosted on various servers around the world that you cannot access without following protocol. That's all. So, how do you get access to these sites? You basically need specialized software like the tour browser which creates anonymity for you by passing you through layers of encryptions through a process called onion routing. Now this process makes everything very hush- hush

6:10 and untraceable and hence dark. They're not inherently evil. They're just exclusive. And believe it or not, it was created by by the US government. Our goal was to uh create uh more secure uh internet communications for uh the government. It's called tour and among other uses can help people navigate the so-called dark web which is often used for criminal activity. But it's been revealed that government agencies are still sponsoring it. Eagle criminal activity. Imagine this. In the 1990s, researchers at the US Naval Research Lab had a problem. How do you communicate sensitive information online when everyone might be watching? So they

6:56 created to the onion router. The problem was if only government agents used the network, it would be obvious who was on it. all sensitive information would stick out like a sortum because that's the only traffic. So by 2002 DARPA the same people who helped create the internet made to public. The idea was to get millions of regular people to crowd the same network essentially creating a cover for military personnel. This one little decision would go on to create an insane impact in global trade and communication in all sorts of ways. And we are going to cover the good, the bad, and the ugly of the dark web. What are you guys doing? Okay, let's do it. Let's go to the dark

7:42 web. Come on. So, what do we need? What are you guys doing? We don't need any of this. We just need a laptop and VPN. Wait, that's it? Yep. Just one last thing.

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10:16 People discussing national issues. There's also a lot of memes. I wonder get arrested for posting these. Now, despite its sinister reputation, the dark web also quietly empowers people fighting against oppression, censorship, and surveillance around the globe. In fact, some of the bravest acts of modern journalism and activism have been made possible solely because of the anonymity the dark web provides. Let me take you back to 2010. The Arab Spring is erupting across the Middle East. Protesters in Tunisia, Egypt, Syria, they're facing governments that will kill them for speaking out. traditional internet completely monitored, but to that gave them a lifeline. Now jump to

11:04 2013. Edward Snowden is sitting in Hong Kong hotel room with a bunch of documents that would expose the largest surveillance program in human history. How did he safely communicate with journalists without the NSA, his former employer, tracking him down? tour. This anonymity has often acted as the backbone for a lot of journalistic intentions. So, you don't want people using the dark web because drugs, weapons, whatnot. But

11:50 you also do cuz free speech. Yeah. Irony is the defining trait of the dark web. Just look at to the US government built it for interpersonal communication. Except who uses it? Drug cartels, criminal organizations like whistleblowers, journalists and often times these people are using it against the governments that built the thing. Yeah. Ironic. Yeah, that's ironic. Yeah. So if you shut it down, you're actually risking destroying all of these legitimate users. Yeah. I mean I mean after all this research it it really feels like the dark web as a place is I mean it's not as bad as people have made it out to be

12:44 Jesus Christ. Oh It has everything. The anonymity of the dark web protects whistleblowers and dissident from oppression. Yes. But it also incidentally protects some truly horrifying stuff. You know, about 57% of dark web content is illegal and most of that are just drugs and weapons and whatnot. And the scale of all of it is staggering. Have you ever heard of the Silk Road? It was kind of like Amazon but for all the illegal stuff. It was created in 2011 by a guy who called himself Dread Pirate Roberts, but we'll call him by his real name. That's Ross Albert. So, in just 2 years, his site generated around $9.5 million bitcoins

13:32 in sales. That's nearly $200 million made in illegal trade, most of which were from the sale of drugs. Luckily, law enforcement wasn't just sitting around watching this happen. The takedown of Silk Road actually reads like a spy thriller. So in mid 2011, the Department of Human Services in Baltimore received a tip about the Silk Road. This led to the formation of a multi- agency task force called the Marco Polo, which included the FBI, the DEA, the IRS, and many more. For months, these FBI agents poses buyers brandishing large orders in order to map the site's operations. Through this process, they got introduced to all the Silk Road admins and that led to the arrest of username Chronic Pain, real

14:17 name Curtis Green, the site admin. This unlocked private communication logs and Bitcoin account records linked to Ross Alrich. After following a trail of breadcrumbs, Ross Alrich was arrested on October 1st, 2013 at a San Francisco public library. And get this, okay? He was caught red-handed while logged in as an admin on the Silk Road site and talking to someone he thought was a colleague, but was in fact an undercover agent. Fun fact, on 21st January 2025, the second day of Trump's presidency, he pardoned Ross Albert. And the ethics behind this decision are quite gray, but that's not part of our story. What is relevant to our story is that busting the Silk Road wasn't the end of dark web markets. The damn thing about the internet is that it's like a hydra's

15:03 head. Shut down one side and three more pop up to take its place. So soon after Silk Road 2.0 came about. Then came all sorts of clones and finally the big bad Alphabet market that dwarf Silk Road in scale and generated over 1 billion US in sales. Keep in mind these are conservative figures. The real numbers could be way higher. But drugs aren't the only thing you'll find there. I'm guessing these are stolen, right? Fake IDs, iPhones, hacking services. $500 a week.

15:54 What the? While casually browsing through the dark web, you might come across your personal data. You know those massive corporate breaches you hear about, the data that gets stolen there all ends up for sale on the dark web. And it's shockingly cheap. Like someone sold the personal information of 2.6 million Dolingo users for just $1,500. That's less than a rupee per person. And remember when LinkedIn got hacked in 2012, Yahoo in 2016? All those passwords ended up in dark web marketplaces in exchange for just peanuts. So what happens to all the stolen data once it hits the dark web? Who's buying it really? It gets packaged into something called fulls. That's complete digital profiles containing everything about you. These bundles then get sold to

16:41 cyber criminals who hit you with a barrage of fishing scams like fake job offers and investment opportunities. But the clever ones go for loan fraud. Basically, they'll apply for an instant loan using your details. And sure, they need an OTP to greenlight the loan. However, they have a fix for that, too. And it's called a SIM swap scam. All they have to do is share your leaked KYC details and get a replacement SIM issued. The moment they activate that new SIM, yours goes dead. Now, every OTP that's meant for you flows straight to them. But criminals aren't the only buyers. Political groups also purchase this data for voter profiling and targeted misinformation campaigns. In India, with WhatsApp being the largest university with zero admission requirements, manipulating public

17:28 opinion can often be a byproduct of practices within the dark web. And if not political groups, data brokers also feast on these leaks to analyze your consumer behavior patterns and sell those insights to companies who want to nudge you toward their products. So maybe take it seriously when they say, "Hey, it's been 6 months. You should probably change your password." Oh, by the way, you can also check if you've been compromised at have been porn.com. See, safety measures aren't too hard, but it does take a certain willingness on your part. Okay, so I came across a bunch of different mafias. Mexican mafia, Besso Mafia, there's a few onion websites. I couldn't find uh an Indian mafia or a hitman site, but I'm pretty sure that if you looked hard enough, it's going to be there. I feel yeah I feel like like 90% of the dark web is probably just like

18:14 scams. I mean think about it. It's called the dark web. You know people are going to this place expecting like some dark And I feel like now that it has this reputation is just filled with a bunch like like really gullible people who are like just getting scammed. Like I found like a bunch of websites where they're selling like organs, you know? I mean just think about who needs organs, right? Like there's probably somebody who's super desperate who needs medical help. They put in a ton of money and then at the end of it it's just some fake UI. Yeah, they can't even report it cuz technically they'd be incriminating themselves. Yeah, exactly. It gets so much better or worse. I'm not sure. Like I found the cure to cancer by the way. There's like websites which are marketing like these offmarket like experimental treatments and one of them is like the cure to cancer. But there are some scams I don't have a huge problem with. There's like

19:00 good scams. What's what's a good scam? Like the Hitman thing he was saying. Uh like basically anybody who signs up for a hitman service is a criminal, right? So, uh I I read that there's like ethical hackers who keep track of uh who monitor these hitman databases and then they report their names to the cyber crime division. That's crazy. Okay, check this out. There is an important notice from cyber crime department. Your personal credential has been used on dark web continuously. If you do not report in us, we will take legal action against you. So basically last night I used my dad's laptop and I went to the dark web. Smart. Yeah. Yeah. I don't know. Uh and I I think I was on black hat chat rooms. I was just seeing what people are

19:45 speaking. What are they talking about? And 15 minutes later they kicked me out. I used to I took an extra layer of VPN and still the very next day my dad's gotten this call which I don't know. It's just Oh, still has to be a coincidence. Come on. It doesn't feel like a coincidence. I don't know. How do they get this number? Who's who's call? It's just a very odd I mean it's pretty good content for the video. Uh but was it just chat rooms or do you guys do did you find anything else? No, there's a bunch of uh things I've come across a bunch of websites that Aina can visit but yeah I got a glimpse of what's coming. Is it is it bad?

20:46 There's no way we can't show this. As troubling as stolen data and illicit marketplaces may sound, they pale in comparison to the bottom of the pit. Gore, violence, murders, snuff films, and whatn not are spread throughout the dark web. And at its absolute worst, the dark web has become a safe haven for human trafficking. To put it bluntly, there are entire forums dedicated solely to buying and selling humans. And the scale of this trade is honestly horrifying. According to the International Labor Organization, over 27.6 million people worldwide were found to be trapped in forced labor and sex

21:33 trafficking networks in 2021. And many of these transactions are brokered on dark web platforms. A chilling report by Europole found that criminals routinely exploit dark web marketplaces to traffic human beings, often children, because it allows them to await detection with devastating efficiency. Yet somehow it gets worse. The dark web hosts extensive networks for child exploitation material operating with terrifying sophistication. A 2014 study found that more than 80% of all dark web visits were to child abuse content. This study underscores deeply unsettling patterns of human behavior. With the cooperation of 32 countries, including South Korea and the United States, authorities were able to track

22:18 down those suspected of purchasing child pornography using cryptocurrency. In 2019 alone, one of the largest child abuse sites, Welcome to Video, was shut down after authorities discovered more than 250,000 disturbing videos. And it gets worse. These videos were accessed and downloaded by over a million anonymous users worldwide. That is sickening. And as expected, entering the dark web makes me wonder what kind of up world we're really in. Okay, that was predictable. Like we knew this is what we'd find, right?

23:04 Yeah. But you were the one who said the dark web isn't that bad. I mean there's good and bad both. But I don't see it any worse than the actual web or like 4chan or live leak. Yeah. But it's created a huge market for child porn. Yeah. When a market like this exists, it just propagates more of I don't know practicing this child exploitation I guess. Exactly. Creating supply which is an increasing demand which is then again increasing the supply. You know, I read about this uh police manual that exists and it's basically like a detailed report on how to investigate rape cases. Uh it goes through everything from collecting forensics to identifying suspects. Uh even like victim care. Uh guess where it ended up. So what there's like locker rooms and stuff where people are discussing this police manual trying to figure out how to not get caught. I was actually looking into the

23:49 psychology of visiting the dark web. It's surprisingly well documented. Basically people enter the dark web out of curiosity but when they end up there they find a space where the most taboo topics are normalized. So it initially really liberates them but eventually it ends up emboldening the user. Emboldening and I'm guessing in this context it's uh it just it normalizes your darkest thoughts, intrusive thoughts, impulses which then increases the brain's demand for those thoughts which then increases your brain supply of those thoughts which then sends you down a spiral. So the dark web is basically a concept that allows the most evil and the most nastiest of thoughts to fester.

24:35 Okay. But is it good or bad? Like which direction do we take it? Like we need I want to figure out what tone do we want to take for the video. Yeah. For the audience when they watch this video, what's the takeaway really? The strangest thing about dark web is that it's full of paradoxes. It's like a carnival mirror held up to humanity, reflecting our most heroic instincts alongside our darkest impulses, often at the very same time. So, take this as a stark warning. The dark web is not a playground for casual curiosity. It's not merely forbidden territory. It's

25:21 dangerous. An exposure to the ecosystem down there can actually alter your psychology. Unless you're a whistleblower or part of a network with journalistic intentions, it is not worth going into the dark web. So, please do not try this at home.