The fakes are better at looking real than you would think
There is money in a market that only opens through .onion addresses: anyone who can convince you that a fake is the real one gets to sit between you and your account. The fakes below are the ones that actually show up. Learn the pattern and they stop being scary.
The .com problem
The market has no clearnet home. No awazonmarket.com, no awazon-market.org, no “official web portal”. A page on any normal domain that greets you with the Awazon logo and a login form is a costume. Some of them are genuinely well made, with the right blue, the right layout, and a captcha. The domain is the whole tell, and it is the check you should do before you type anything.
The queue page imitation
A slightly better fake copies the access queue: the white page, the spinner, the “please wait” line. It lets you sit in the queue, builds your trust with the wait, and then hands you a login page that is no longer on an onion. The check: after the queue, the address bar must still end in .onion. If the “forwarding” lands you somewhere else, you were forwarded, not forwarded to the market.
The proxy and the guest portal
“Access without Tor” services load the mirror through their own server. You can see the market, but so can they, and so can the ads, and so can whoever runs the proxy. What you type into a login seen through a proxy is a password typed in front of a witness. Fine for a quick peek at prices. Wrong for logging in.
The PDF, the screenshot, the private message
“Here is the official address, save it” arrives as a PDF, a screenshot in a chat, or a link from an “Awazon admin” who has never been on the market with you. All of them are just somebody’s opinion in a nice format. Run whatever they sent you through the five checks, and when it matters, through a PGP verification. The market’s real signed lists are the only ones where the sender’s identity is actually attached to the text.
One: does it end in .onion? Two: do the last six characters match the verified list? A fake that passes both is rare enough that you will have earned a second look at it. A fake that fails either is already dead, no matter how professional it looks.