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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.
In June 2026 security researchers documented a Reddit advertising campaign impersonating the BBC, Financial Times, and The Guardian to funnel users into fake AI-powered crypto 'investment' platforms promising outsized returns.
Alan Bill, a Slovakian national, admitted helping run the Kingdom Market darknet marketplace and creating its promotional forum pages on sites including Reddit and Dread; charged in 2023, he pleaded guilty in 2026 and was sentenced to 200 months in prison.
In the December 2025 investigation into deadly shootings at Brown University and an MIT professor's home, a bystander's Reddit post about a suspicious car gave police the break that identified the suspect.
Isaac Sissel created Reddit accounts and posted, days before the 2024 election, that he would carry out an attack; he pleaded guilty to transmitting interstate threats and was sentenced to 30 months in 2025.
A recurring Reddit-specific scam sees criminals impersonate moderators or the 'admin team' via private messages and chat, sending fake 'verification' or 'suspension appeal' links to phishing pages that harvest credentials and 2FA codes for account takeover — and sometimes payment.
A 404 Media investigation documented a commercial industry built to covertly promote products on Reddit — buying aged high-karma accounts, deploying bots like 'ReplyGuy' to plant product mentions, and exploiting Reddit's Google ranking through 'parasite SEO.'
Jonathan Zheng, an expelled University of Illinois student, was arrested in Florida in May 2023 after posting on the UIUC subreddit that he would shoot up the school; a Reddit user reported it, leading police to trace and arrest him.
As FBI warnings described a surge in financial sextortion of teenagers — much of it driven by Nigeria-based 'Yahoo Boys' — Reddit became both a place victims sought help and one of the mainstream platforms implicated in the wider abuse ecosystem.
As 'pig-butchering' romance-investment scams drained billions from victims worldwide, Reddit's r/Scams and related communities became a major venue where victims sought help — even as scammers also surfaced on the platform.
On February 5, 2023, a targeted phishing attack stole an employee's credentials and 2FA token, giving intruders access to internal documents, dashboards, source code, and employee and advertiser data. In June 2023 the BlackCat/ALPHV ransomware group publicly claimed it had taken roughly 80GB of data and demanded a $4.5 million ransom.
Moderators of the 6.9-million-member r/CryptoCurrency dumped roughly $150,000 worth of the community's MOON token minutes before Reddit publicly announced it was shutting down the program that gave the token value — and were removed for what users called blatant insider trading.
Security researchers documented that the handwritten verification selfies users post to NSFW subreddits such as r/GoneWild were being scraped and manipulated by fraudsters to defeat identity-verification (KYC) systems and build synthetic identities.
The influencer-promoted 'Save the Kids' charity token, exposed as a pump-and-dump, was partly organized through Reddit — where YouTuber Sam Pepper promoted the project, built its moderator team, and reportedly handled the presale.
r/CryptoMoonShots, a subreddit dedicated to surfacing tiny new tokens, became a recurring funnel for rug pulls and 'honeypot' contracts — including the notorious SQUID token — where promoters used bot-driven engagement to lend fake credibility.
In 2018 Dylan Jarrell of Kentucky used an anonymous Reddit account to post statements signaling a planned school shooting; he was stopped while equipped to carry one out, pleaded guilty to federal charges in 2019, and was sentenced to 120 months in July 2020.
Vermont's Samuel Bent, a multi-marketplace darknet drug vendor and participant in Reddit's r/DarkNetMarkets community who later helped run the Reddit-style Dread forum, pleaded guilty and was sentenced to five years in 2019.
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.
In January 2019, Reddit forced the ~425,000-subscriber r/soccerstreams — a hub for illegal live match streams — to cease user activity after repeated copyright complaints, amid intensifying Premier League legal action against piracy.
Brian Parker ran internet research-chemical operations selling synthetic opioids and used a Reddit presence for customer contact; after a 2016 shipment of U-47700 was tied to an overdose death, he and a co-defendant were charged in 2017 and pleaded guilty in 2018.
A 2018 Vice investigation detailed a for-hire Reddit astroturfing operation run by a user called 'Aaron,' who orchestrated paid upvote campaigns and networks of dummy accounts — each on its own proxy IP — to artificially pump cryptocurrency projects on r/CryptoCurrency and beyond.
A 2018 academic study analyzed 7,426 paid campaigns and over 1.8 million microtasks on a crowdsourcing marketplace, cataloguing an industrialized trade in bought upvotes, fake comments, and vote manipulation across social platforms including Reddit-style voting.
BitConnect, a ~$2.4 billion cryptocurrency Ponzi scheme that promised guaranteed returns from a fictitious trading bot, was heavily promoted within an active Reddit community (r/bitconnect) until its January 2018 collapse; U.S. authorities later indicted its founder and convicted its top U.S. promoter.
After Reddit banned its deepfake-pornography community in 2018, the activity migrated off-platform and coalesced into MrDeepFakes, which grew into one of the largest deepfake-abuse sites before its 2025 collapse — a case study in how a ban can displace rather than end harm.
Reddit shut down r/DarkNetMarkets, the platform's largest discussion-and-review hub for dark-web drug marketplaces, under a new March 2018 content policy banning communities that facilitate transactions in prohibited goods.
Reddit removed r/shoplifting, a community of roughly 80,000 members dedicated to discussing theft techniques and posting stolen-goods 'hauls,' as part of its March 2018 content-policy crackdown.
On March 21, 2018, Reddit revised its content policy to prohibit transactions involving firearms, ammunition, and explosives, banning subreddits including r/GunsForSale, r/GunDeals, and r/AKMarketplace that connected buyers and sellers.
The subreddit r/deepfakes coined the term and pioneered AI face-swapped non-consensual celebrity pornography before Reddit banned it and related communities in February 2018 under its involuntary-pornography policy.
Days after fatally stabbing his ex-girlfriend Melinda Vasilije in Kitchener, Ontario, Ager Hasan posted an account of the killing to Reddit while a fugitive; he was arrested in Texas, extradited, and convicted of second-degree murder in 2023.
Federal prosecutors convicted four men — Ryan Collins, Edward Majerczyk, George Garofano and Emilio Herrera — for phishing schemes that compromised celebrities' iCloud and Gmail accounts; the stolen nude photos were mass-distributed on Reddit's r/TheFappening in 2014.
Tyler Barriss's fake hostage 911 call — arising from a Call of Duty wager dispute coordinated online — led police to fatally shoot uninvolved Wichita resident Andrew Finch in December 2017; Barriss was sentenced to 20 years in 2019.
Joshua Ryne Goldberg, a prolific Reddit troll who created and moderated racist subreddits including r/CoonTown, was arrested by the FBI in 2015 after, posing as an ISIS supporter, he supplied bomb-making instructions for an attack on a Kansas City 9/11 memorial; he was sentenced to 10 years in federal prison.
Indonesia blocked Reddit in 2014 over nudity, and Russia's Roskomnadzor blocked the entire site in August 2015 over a single post explaining how to grow psilocybin mushrooms, illustrating how individual content disputes triggered nationwide bans.
In August 2015 Russia's media regulator Roskomnadzor blacklisted all of Reddit over a single post containing a guide to growing psilocybin mushrooms, then lifted the block a day later when Reddit restricted the content.
Reddit confirmed it had globally banned several moderators of large adult communities, including r/nsfw, after they accepted bribes from a spammer to approve content — one of the company's clearest admissions of mod pay-for-play.
Reporting in 2014 documented Reddit's r/fakeid community, active since around January 2012, as an open hub where users found fake-identification vendors, shared reviews and vendor rankings, and read guides on buying and using counterfeit IDs.
The r/SilkRoad subreddit served as a public discussion hub for users of the Silk Road dark-net drug marketplace; when the FBI seized Silk Road and arrested Ross Ulbricht in October 2013, moderators briefly took the community private over identity-exposure concerns before reopening it.