The login screen, and what to check before you touch it

Step one: the front door

Paste one of the three addresses into Tor Browser and press enter. What loads is not the login form. It is a small check page, "Checking Your Browser", that waits a few seconds and reloads itself. It is doing its job. Leave it alone.

If it is still standing there after a full minute, the circuit is the problem, not the market. Rebuild it (Ctrl+Shift+R on desktop) or open a second address from the list at the top of this page. One dead door is not a locked building.

Step two: the two-second check

When the login screen finally appears, do this before anything else: read the last six characters of the address bar, then read the last six characters of the copy you made when you left this site. Match, one by one.

Why the tail and not the whole string? Because the tail is short enough to actually verify, and because that is where the address bar and your copy are most likely to have drifted if something went wrong with the paste. A clone can copy the design, the logo, the fonts. It cannot sit at your address.

Note The check costs two seconds and it is the entire defence. Every account loss we have read about in this niche started with a skipped two seconds.

Step three: the account itself

Username, password, and a second factor if you set one up. The plain rules that pay for themselves:

• A password that lives nowhere else on the internet. Not your email, not your bank, not your other market account.
• A second factor you can actually use offline. An app on a phone you trust is fine. A screenshot of the code stored in that same phone's photo app is a password with extra steps.
• If the machine is shared, the session should die with you. Tor Browser has a "New Identity" and a clear-site-data option; use both when you are done. The next person at that desk should not inherit your logged-in market.

What a wrong login screen looks like

Nothing, visually. That is the uncomfortable part. The clone loads the same design, the same logo, the same fields, and the "remember me" box, because the design was handed out to whoever wanted it. The only difference is in the address bar, which is why the check above is not paranoia but arithmetic.

There is one more tell, worth knowing: a real BlackOps login is reached through the short check page first. A clearnet page that serves you the login form instantly, with no check and no Tor, has already told you who is on the other side. The full set of tells is on the clone page.

Locked out, and the "recovery" trap

Forgetting a password is a market problem, solved on the market: account settings, the recovery flow, your own keys. That is where real recovery happens, and it happens on Tor, at the address you already trust.

The trap looks like help. A forum reply, a Telegram bot, a "priority recovery portal" on an ordinary domain, all appearing within the hour of your complaint, all offering to check your account for a fee or a deposit. They cannot see your account. They are selling the feeling of being able to. The rule is short: no recovery that requires you to enter your seed or your password on a page you did not check.