Mars MarketTerms
Legal notice
This page states what the project is, what it deliberately withholds, how its material may be used, and where its answers stop. It is written to be read, not to be skimmed past.
Purpose in one sentence
To help people recognise fraud before they lose money, and to document the published record of what happens to funds once lost.
One
Purpose and character of this site
This website is a public-interest educational resource and a consumer-protection warning. It describes fraudulent patterns so that readers can identify and avoid them, and it summarises publicly documented information about the closure of illegal marketplaces.
It is not a marketplace, a directory, an introduction service, a broker, an intermediary, a recommendation engine or an advertising channel. It has no commercial relationship with any marketplace, vendor, exchange, recovery service, security vendor or analytics firm. It earns no revenue from any link, referral, code, placement or sponsorship, and it carries no affiliate arrangements.
Two
Deliberate omissions
Certain categories of information are withheld on purpose and will not be supplied in any form, including privately, in response to a message, or in a correction. Specifically: network addresses of any kind; links, redirects or partial strings that could resolve to one; mirror lists, availability trackers or status indicators; rankings, ratings, comparisons or recommendations of marketplaces; guidance on obtaining, storing, transporting or concealing controlled substances or other illicit goods; escrow, encryption or transaction procedures intended to defeat detection; and technical descriptions detailed enough to be reproduced as an attack.
Requests for any of the above will be declined, and no disclaimer elsewhere on this site should be read as softening that position.
Three
Accuracy, sources and uncertainty
Material is compiled from court records, law-enforcement releases, published analytics research and institutional studies, as set out on the method page. Several figures are estimates produced by third parties using clustering methods with inherent uncertainty; they are presented as estimates and are not accounting totals.
Where the public record contains no evidence for a proposition, this site says so and does not fill the gap with inference. An absence of evidence is reported as an absence of evidence, not as proof that something does not exist.
Information about illegal marketplaces becomes stale quickly. Nothing here should be relied upon as current beyond the review date shown at the foot of each page, and no statement here should be taken as a description of what any platform is doing today.
Four
Permitted use
You may read, quote, cite, link to and redistribute this material for educational, journalistic, academic, policy or consumer-protection purposes, provided the meaning is not altered and the source is attributed. Reproduction for the purpose of facilitating illegal activity, of promoting a marketplace or of building a competing access page is not permitted.
Quotation of a passage out of context in order to present this site as endorsing any marketplace, vendor or product is a misrepresentation of the material.
Five
No advice, no warranty, no recovery
Nothing here constitutes legal, financial, tax, medical, security or professional advice, and no advisory relationship of any kind is created by reading it. Guidance on wallets, account security and evidence preservation is general in nature and cannot account for your individual circumstances, jurisdiction or threat model.
No outcome is promised or implied. This includes outcomes relating to the reporting of a loss, the investigation of an offence and the recovery of funds. Recovery of transferred cryptocurrency is uncommon and slow; where it occurs, it is the work of law-enforcement agencies and asset-recovery professionals, not of intermediaries who solicit payment from victims.
This site is not affiliated with any recovery service, and it does not endorse or recommend any person or organisation offering recovery services. Readers are advised to treat inbound offers of that kind as a further fraud risk.
Six
Legal exposure and substance use
Purchasing, possessing, importing, supplying and selling controlled substances and other illicit goods are criminal offences in most jurisdictions, and the penalties do not depend on how the transaction was conducted. Blockchain transaction records are permanent and have been used in prosecutions years after the events concerned.
This site documents those risks because they are part of the picture a reader is entitled to see before making a decision. Documenting a risk is not a licence to take it, and nothing here should be read as encouraging conduct that is unlawful where you are.
If your interest in this subject is connected to substance use, help exists and is confidential. Contact your national health service, your doctor, or a local substance-use support organisation. If you are in crisis, contact your local emergency number.
Seven
Corrections and contact
Corrections accompanied by a source in one of the four categories listed on the method page are welcome and are published on the page they affect, with a dated note. Requests to add addresses, links, mirrors or marketplace listings are refused without exception and need not be answered.