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Dark-net marketplaces, illegal trade, and crimes planned, confessed, or facilitated on Reddit.
Reddit's scale and pseudonymity have repeatedly made it a venue for criminal activity — and, at times, for the investigation of it. For years the platform hosted communities such as r/DarkNetMarkets, where users discussed and reviewed illegal drug marketplaces operating on the dark web, alongside subreddits oriented around shoplifting, the sale of weapons, stolen goods, counterfeit documents, and other illicit trade. Reddit did not act against many of these communities until 2018, when it banned subreddits dedicated to facilitating transactions in drugs, weapons, and other prohibited goods.
Beyond markets, Reddit has been the place where crimes were announced, confessed, or planned, and where posts later became evidence in prosecutions. It has also been the launchpad for technologies with criminal applications — most notably r/deepfakes, the community that popularized AI face-swapping before being banned in 2018. This section documents the marketplaces and trading communities, the prosecutions and arrests tied to Reddit activity (including the criminal cases arising from the 2014 celebrity-photo hacks), and the recurring question of how much responsibility a platform bears when its communities are organized around breaking the law. It treats criminal allegations carefully: charges, convictions, and outcomes are distinguished and sourced to court records or official statements wherever possible.
Reddit quarantined the subreddit for IRL streamer Ice Poseidon in September 2018 for bigotry and abuse, then banned r/Ice_Poseidon and r/Ice_Poseidon2 in October 2019; the community was notorious for swatting, doxxing, and stream-sniping.