Dread (forum)

Dread is a popular community hub which has been described as a "Reddit-style forum" and the successor of the seized DeepDotWeb for discussion around market law enforcement activity and scams.^[2][3] It came to prominence in 2018 after Reddit banned several darknet market discussion communities, rapidly reaching 12,000 registered users within three months of being launched, and 14,683 users by June 2018.^[4] In September 2019, HugBunter's dead man's switch was triggered,^[5] accompanied by a weeks-long absence, signifying the temporary loss of control over the site. The site would be reinstated in November,^[6] with a revamped user interface, and remains active as of September 2025. It became known that the cause of the outage was a server failure, according to HugBunter,^[6] despite rumors^{[by whom?]} concerning a potential compromising from a third party or law-enforcement authority.

In May 2019, a moderator of Wall Street Market posted its hidden IP address to Dread, potentially leading to its exit scam and seizure shortly after.^[7][8][9] Stolen data is sometimes sold via Dread.^[10] The site features in-depth guides around manufacture of illegal drugs.^[11] The shutdown of Dream Market was announced on Dread in March 2019.^[12] Major denial-of-service attacks have been launched against Dread and other markets exploiting a vulnerability in the Tor protocol.^[13]