AWazonmirror directory
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Sixty seconds to know an address is right

Anyone can paste a 56-character string into a forum post and call it the market. The check below takes a minute and catches every fake we have seen, because fakes are lazy: they get the length wrong, they use the wrong characters, or they drift one or two letters from the real thing.

The five checks

  1. It ends in .onionNot .onion.to, not .onion.ws, not .com with a tor in the name. The real market exists only as .onion, full stop.
  2. 56 characters before the .onionCopy the part before the dot into a plain text note and count. Every genuine onion address is exactly 56 characters, no exceptions, because that is how the format is built.
  3. Only the right charactersLowercase a to z and the digits 2 to 7. No 0, no 1, no 8, no 9, no capitals, no underscores, no dashes. A single 8 in the string and the address cannot be real.
  4. The awazon prefixAll current mirrors of the market start with awazon. If a claimed mirror starts with awaz0n (a zero), or awazonmarket, or amz, it is a lookalike wearing a costume.
  5. The tail matchesCompare the last six characters against a copy from this directory, letter by letter. This is where typos live, and where typosquatters plant their one wrong letter. If the tails match and everything above held, open it.
Why the last six, specifically?

Reading 56 characters top to bottom feels like it should catch everything, and it does not. The human eye skims the middle of a long string and trusts the familiar prefix. The final six characters are short enough to actually compare and long enough to be unique. Compare them properly, twice if the stakes are your account.

The same address, everywhere

An onion address does not change with your country, your browser, or the time of day. It is a fixed string: the same 56 characters on your phone as on your desktop, today as next month. So when two sources disagree about the address, at least one of them is lying, and the disagreement itself is the tell. A mirror rotates occasionally and the old string stops resolving; that is an address that stopped working, not one that varies.

When an address verifies, open it

Passing all five checks means the string is structurally an onion, it wears the market’s prefix, and its tail matches the verified list. For the strongest guarantee, check the list against the market’s PGP signature on the PGP page. For daily use, the five checks are enough, and they are enough for most days.