Wethenorth Independent public record & warning

Independent project. Not affiliated with We The North Market or any marketplace. No links, no addresses, no access — ever.

Public fileWTN/2021Version 1.0

We The North Market: the record and the warning

This site is an independent public record about a Canada-focused darknet marketplace — and a warning to anyone who came looking for it. It publishes no links, no addresses and no access instructions. It never will.

Compiled 19 October 2026 · Anonymous authorship · Reviewed and versioned · Sources referenced

Not affiliatedNo links · No access

Read first

If you came here to reach the market: there is nothing on this site that will help you, and that is deliberate. What this record shows instead is what has happened, over and over, to the people who did reach these marketplaces — seized databases, stolen deposits, arrests, and operators who profited twice: once from selling, and again by extorting their own users.

Start with how these markets end.

Two red sealing-tape bands across a sheet of paper, reading 'No links, no addresses' and 'No access, not affiliated', in the file's print style.
Fig. 01The standing position, in sealing tape: no links, no addresses, no access — for as long as this file exists.

The short version

  1. We The North was first described in public threat-intelligence reporting in the summer of 2021 as a Canada-focused darknet marketplace — presented in that reporting as the successor to the Canada-only market Canadian Head Quarters, which had just gone offline. [1][4]
  2. The predecessor shows where these investigations lead: in January 2022, Canada's telecom regulator announced CA$300,000 in penalties against four individuals connected to the Canadian Head Quarters case, following searches around Montreal with support from the RCMP and the Sûreté du Québec. [2]
  3. Darknet marketplaces end in one of three documented ways: a seizure (AlphaBay and Hansa in 2017; SpecTor, 2023; Archetyp, 2025), an exit scam in which the operators steal what users have deposited (Incognito, 2024; Abacus, 2025; Kerberos, 2026), or a quiet shutdown. There is no fourth ending. [3][4][5]
  4. "Anonymous" has repeatedly turned out to be temporary. After AlphaBay was seized in July 2017, its users fled en masse to its rival Hansa — which had already been under covert police control for a month. New registrations there jumped eightfold. A month later, Hansa was shut down too, and the data collected from its users fed the investigations that followed. [3]
  5. Assessment The clear-web space around a famous marketplace name is not a marketplace at all — it is an economy built to intercept the people searching for one, and to take their money in the taking. See how it works.

This site does not track or report the operational status of any marketplace — not this one, not any other. Status pages serve the people trying to reach a market, not the people trying to avoid one. That is why they are absent here.

In this file

  1. 02Case file — what is documentedWhat the published record establishes about We The North Market and its predecessor — and what this project deliberately does not claim.
  2. 03Consequences — how these markets endAlphaBay, Hansa, SpecTor, Nemesis, Incognito, Archetyp and more: the documented endings, and what they mean for the people inside.
  3. 04Canada — the enforcement recordThe Canadian Head Quarters case, CA$300,000 in penalties, and why a telecom regulator is part of this story at all.
  4. 05Phishing & clonesThe economy built to intercept people searching for a famous name — and the rules that always apply.
  5. 06Data — numbers and sourcesEcosystem figures from citable sources. No marketplace status tracking — by policy.
  6. 07GlossaryThe vocabulary of darknet marketplaces, defined without instructions.
  7. 08For researchersSourcing policy, method, citation formats and corrections.
  8. 09ChangelogWhat changed in this file, and when.
  9. 10About this projectWhat it is, why it is anonymous, and the rules it holds to.

If you came looking for access

There is nothing here to find. No link, no address, no "mirror", no invitation — not now, not in an archive, not "off the record". A site that offers to sell you access is selling you to someone else.

If you believe you have already lost money to a marketplace or to a clone of one:

A document page in the file's print style with its links and addresses blacked out under heavy redaction bars, stamped 'Withheld by policy'.
Fig. 02What this file withholds on purpose: links, addresses, access. Nothing here will ever connect anyone to a marketplace.

Common questions

Is this website We The North Market?

No. This is an independent public record and warning, published anonymously. It is not affiliated with We The North Market, or with any marketplace, vendor or "support" service, and it will never publish links, addresses or access instructions.

Can I get a working link or a mirror from you?

No — that is a standing policy, not an oversight. Any third-party page offering "official links" to a marketplace is serving its own interests, not yours.

Is We The North Market a scam?

It is, by its nature, a criminal marketplace: it sells illegal goods, it is run by anonymous operators, and those operators hold every deposit users place with it — with the power to steal all of it, as operators of other marketplaces repeatedly have (see Consequences). There is no consumer protection inside a criminal market, in either direction.

Does this site track whether the market is up or down?

No. This site does not track or report the operational status of any marketplace. Status tracking serves people trying to reach a market, so it is not published here.

Has anyone ever been arrested over these marketplaces?

Yes — and not only operators. Documented cases include vendor and administrator penalties in Canada (see Canada), 288 arrests in the 2023 SpecTor action, and 270 more arrests announced in 2025 — many of them identified through data collected when earlier marketplaces were taken down. The Consequences page collects the sourced cases.

Sources

  1. Recorded Future (Insikt Group), "WeTheNorth: A New Canadian Dark Web Marketplace". recordedfuture.com/blog/wethenorth-canadian-dark-web↩
  2. CRTC, "CRTC investigation targets Dark Web marketplace vendors and administrator", news release, 26 January 2022. canada.ca — en/radio-television-telecommunications/news/2022/01↩
  3. Europol, "Massive blow to criminal Dark Web activities after globally coordinated operation" (AlphaBay and Hansa), 20 July 2017. europol.europa.eu — massive-blow-to-criminal-dark-web-activities↩
  4. Europol, "288 dark web vendors arrested in major marketplace seizure" (Operation SpecTor), May 2023. europol.europa.eu — 288-dark-web-vendors-arrested↩
  5. TRM Labs, "Europol Leads International Takedown of Longest Running Darknet Market Archetyp", June 2025. trmlabs.com — europol-leads-international-takedown↩

Statements of fact are referenced. Assessments are labelled. Full sourcing policy on For researchers.