Is the deep web real?

[Andy]

I mostly want to know is the silk road, the hitman sites, the sites that sell guns, people, slaves, animals, credit card information, fake IDs, passports, drivers liscences, U.S. citizen papers, PayPal accounts, counterfeit bills, buttery bootlegging, the underground fight to the death tournoments, the gore videos and all of the stories on the deep web forums, and the stories about the deep web and any other tor services/sites you can think of I'm having a hard time believeing that these are all legitimate. I think that they're all scams. Are they scams, I was just wondering, also if they are scams why would the people spend all of the time and effort to put up all of those sites for nothing? Why does the deep web even exist in the first place? Also, what about Tesla experiments WWII experiments governemant secrets company secrets location of Atlantis, conspiracy theories and anything government related, would they actually put that stuff on the internet? What about that terrorist and the government uses the deep web, I just have a very hard time believing that they're real.

[plutonic]

My question would be
Is the real web deep?

[adaviel]

The Silk Road was a Tor onion site that got taken down by the FBI.

There are certainly carder sites where you can buy credit card numbers. I believe you have to hang around on IRC long enough to demonstrate you are a criminal before someone gives you a password.

Per the wikipedia article on the deep web, it would include private sites like the boating association I host - there's a password on the site so it doesn't get crawled by search engines, because the members don't want to get spammed and there's intellectual property that basically the association has created or paid for and don't want to give away for free. Same with academic journals, newspaper archives etc.

[Nunya]

Yes all that stuff can be sold there. Are there scams...yes. Are they all scams, not likely. There is no governing body so if you were to pay for somethings, it either may be legit or not. It could even be a police sting, no way to know.

Why does it exist? Simple answer, people want anonymity. So they block normal search engines from scanning their websites hence no search engine will find them. Also the requirement for registration on many of the websites prevents bots from looking into them.

[Irateboy355]

Legitimate, of course not. Why would you think something with a criminal element would be legitimate? Scams, of course there are scams. they look for suckers there as well as on the regular net.
~
Ever been to "the bad part of town" in a big city? Does it exists if you've never been there? The Deep Web is the bad part of town but on the Internet.