Threat Intelligence & Darknet Monitoring Platform

Black Ops Darknet Market – Mirror 3 Under the Microscope

Black Ops has quietly become a fixture in the post-Hydra landscape. While larger markets grab headlines, this mid-size bazaar keeps ticking along, sustained by a narrow but steady product mix and a rotating set of Tor mirrors. “Mirror 3” is the current stable endpoint users pass around once the primary onion is down—a situation that happens often enough that experienced shoppers bookmark all three versions and still check dread for fresh addresses every few days.

Background and short history

The market surfaced in late-2022, shortly after the takedown fever that removed Hydra, ASAP’s original domain, and Cocorico within months of each other. Early chatter on /d/DarkNetMarkets described Black Ops as a “veteran reboot,” because several long-time vendors claimed staff had previously operated smaller shops in the 2019-2021 era. No hard evidence was offered, but the codebase re-used several UI quirks—identical PGP key import workflows, the same “finalize early” slider—that were popular on the now-defunct Dark0de. Whatever its origin, Black Ops spent most of 2023 under the radar, peaking at ~4,000 weekly active accounts according to independent scrapers. Mirror 3 went live in April 2024 after a six-day outage triggered by a DDoS campaign; since then it has served as the main gateway, with Mirrors 1 and 2 relegated to backup status.

Feature set

The market runs on a customized fork of the v4 Monopoly engine. Features that matter to shoppers include:

  • Escrow wallets for every order, with a 14-day auto-finalize clock that pauses automatically when either party opens a dispute.
  • Optional “half-FE” for established vendors (50 % released at shipment, 50 % after delivery).
  • Built-in coin swap: deposit BTC or XMR and toggle between balances at the current rate minus a 1 % fee.
  • 2FA login via PGP, plus a six-digit PIN required to withdraw or change security settings.
  • “Stealth mode” UI that strips product photos and converts prices to the user’s fiat of choice, handy for screen-record OPSEC.
  • Dead-drop filters for larger EU cities; physical listings show radius maps once the buyer shares a postcode hash.

One welcome carry-over from older code is the “vendor note” field that stays attached to each order thread. Veteran buyers use it to drop temporary drop addresses or rotation keys without starting an unencrypted chat.

Security and escrow model

Black Ops sticks to the traditional centralized-wallet setup. When an order is placed, funds move from the buyer’s market wallet into a per-order multisig address controlled by the site; release requires two of three keys (buyer, vendor, market). Multisig is technically implemented, but in practice most transactions still rely on the market’s key because newcomers never provide their own public key. The staff insists they will sign a transaction if the market disappears—standard exit-scam insurance language that should be treated as marketing until proven otherwise.

PGP encryption is mandatory for addresses; the site encrypts locally in the browser before anything hits the server. A small but telling detail: the JavaScript PGP library is loaded from the server, not a CDN, reducing the chance of an external tampering event. Disputes are handled by a rotating group of five moderators; turnaround averages 48 h and, judging by dispute threads, staff usually asks for a tracking photo or a re-ship agreement rather than diving into blockchain analytics.

User experience

Mirror 3 loads noticeably faster than its predecessors thanks to the switch from MySQL to PostgreSQL and the removal of the auto-playing promotional banners that plagued Mirror 2. The category tree is shallow—Drugs, Fraud, Digital, Paraphernalia, Services—so depth filtering (e.g., benzodiazepines → etizolam) is done through tags. Veteran users exploit the “search within results” box to filter by shipping origin, accepted coins, and escrow type all at once. Mobile access works through Onion Browser on iOS and Orbot on Android, although the PIN-pad can be cramped on smaller screens. Vendors complain that the order-export CSV omits buyer PGP keys, forcing them to scrape each ticket manually; buyers, on the other hand, appreciate the one-click delete button that purges messages older than 30 days.

Reputation and trust signals

Trust here is vendor-centric: no vendor bond is listed publicly, but new sellers must pay a refundable 0.05 XMR deposit and provide a key-signed Jabber or Session ID for staff verification. Feedback is split into “Product,” “Stealth,” and “Communication” scores, each 1-5. Anything below 4.7 overall turns the rating badge yellow; below 4.3 and the listing is hidden from the default search. Large vendors usually maintain parallel presence on Bohemia and Incognito, so cross-checking their PGP keys across markets is straightforward. The forum section is minimal—no off-topic boards, just vendor ads and market updates—so most reputation chatter happens on Dread. A search for “BlackOps exit” returns mostly uptime complaints, not loss-of-coin horror stories, which for 2024 standards counts as a positive signal.

Current status and reliability

Mirror 3 has stayed online for 92 % of the past 60 days according to freshonion stats, a figure that beats several headline markets but still lags behind Tor2Door’s current run. Scheduled maintenance windows are posted 24 h in advance, a courtesy many competitors skip. Withdrawals process in under two hours for XMR and under six for BTC, although blockchain congestion occasionally pushes the BTC queue to 12 h. Phishing clones surface every couple of weeks; they reuse the real login page but swap the onion key. The safest verification method is to match the PGP-signed mirror message posted by the admin key “0xBOps19” on Dread; if the signature validates, the link is genuine even if the URL looks unfamiliar.

Practical OPSEC notes

If you decide to visit, run Tails 5.x or later, create a persistent volume only for PGP keys, and fund wallets with XMR sourced through a non-KYC swap. Disable Javascript globally, then whitelist only the market domain; the PGP encryption routine still works with JS off, but the nicer UI flourishes disappear. Never reuse credentials across mirrors, and always cross-verify the market’s own PGP key—failing to do so is how the last phishing wave snagged 40+ accounts in a single weekend.

Conclusion

Black Ops Mirror 3 is a competent, mid-tier market that does the fundamentals well: multisig escrow, XMR support, fast dispute turnaround, and a codebase that has shed the worst bugs of its ancestors. Its smaller user base limits choice—don’t expect the SKU variety of Kraken or the advanced search of Versus—but also keeps heat low. Uptime is solid, not stellar; exit-scam risk is unknowable but presently muted; phishing risk is average. For buyers who prioritize function over flash, and for vendors comfortable with a lower volume but steadier moderation, Black Ops remains a workable option in late-2024. Keep your PGP tight, verify every link, and treat the 14-day auto-finalize as a hard deadline rather than a suggestion.