Historical — reported exit 2020
No .onion address on file
Empire darknet market
Empire is a historical catalog entry listed as an exit scam in August 2020. It is not an active market and has no live onion address in our files. This is an editorial profile, not a marketplace listing.
Catalog facts
- Reported launch
- Reported February 2018
- Public focus
- Historical — reported exit 2020
- Catalog status
- Exit scam — Exit scam August 2020
About Empire
Public reporting dates Empire Market to February 2018, about six to seven months after AlphaBay and Hansa fell. TRM Labs later described it as a Western shop whose interface was built to resemble AlphaBay, and as the main English-language successor after Dream closed in 2019. We treat that inheritance as reported public history, not as a trust score.
In August 2020 the shop went dark. Vice reported users locked out and a widely repeated estimate of about $30 million in bitcoin left in escrow, with no seizure banner of the kind that accompanied police takedowns. BleepingComputer had covered days of downtime and DDoS/extortion talk immediately before the disappearance. Later directory and threat-intel summaries treat the ending as an exit rather than a courtroom splash page.
A later U.S. case is separate from that 2020 silence. TRM Labs reported that Thomas Pavey and Raheim Hamilton were charged in federal court in Chicago with operating Empire from 2018 to 2020, with the indictment citing about four million transactions valued at more than $430 million. Those are charging documents, not a live shop and not a verified onion.
No Official or Mirror string is stored. Historical names attract clone sites — do not treat a reused brand as a verified address.
Reported history
- February 2018
- TRM Labs dates the shop here, after the 2017 AlphaBay/Hansa actions.
- April 2019
- Dream went dark. Public write-ups describe Empire as the main English-language successor.
- August 2020
- Infrastructure went dark with no seizure banner. Vice, contemporaneous downtime reporting, and later TRM notes treat this as an exit; a ~$30 million escrow-loss figure is a secondary estimate.
- 2024–2025
- TRM Labs reported federal charges in Chicago against two men accused of operating Empire from 2018 to 2020. That prosecution does not put a live onion in our files.
Reported public features
- Historical entry only. Tags in our file: Historical.
- TRM describes a classic escrow marketplace whose look was modeled on AlphaBay. Those are reported traits of a closed shop.
- A public ~$30 million escrow-loss figure circulated after the 2020 disappearance. We treat it as a secondary estimate, not an audited filing.
- Public pieces agree there was no seizure splash page when the shop vanished in August 2020.
What this page does not claim
- This is not an active market. There is no live onion in our files.
- “Exit scam” is the contemporaneous and later-directory reading of the 2020 silence. A covert seizure was not announced.
- Fund-loss and lifetime-volume figures vary by outlet and by later indictments. We do not treat any one number as audited.
- Any “Empire is back” page is a clone risk. A vanished brand is easy to impersonate.
Public sources
How TorBible records Empire
Status, tags, and listing counts come from our catalog file. Editorial notes below the card come from open public reporting and are worded as reported when we have not verified them in-house. Treat every mirror you find elsewhere as untrusted until you check a PGP canary and a second independent source. See phishing detection and OPSEC fundamentals.