At the time of writing, ASAP is one of the largest markets on the dark web, selling a vast range of products from drugs to fraud related items such as as credit cards, as well as digital goods such as software license keys.
Disclaimer: By using ASAP Market for any form of transaction, you may be committing an illegal act in your country. The information provided here is for educational and research purposes and is not intended to promote any illegal activity. Any actions you choose to take are 100% your own responsibility.
ASAP Market retired peacefully in July 2023. The information here is for historic reference purposes.
After getting past the initial captcha page, ASAP grants unregistered users with full access to browse the market without the need to register an account, so you can quickly and easily browse to find what you are looking for.
PGP Two Factor Authentication (2FA) is not required at this stage, but you can activate this in your profile settings later on (this is highly recommended in order to protect your account).
ASAP also has a feature called 'Scam Hunter' which claims to be able to detect any patterns of scamming conducted by either a vendor or user, with appropriate action then being taken by market admins, which is likely to include refunds being issued to the party which has been a victim to any such scam. It is not made clear exactly how this works and to what extent it is automated or manual. ASAP also takes a zero tolerance approach to fake reviews posted by vendors in order to artificially inflate sales.
One thing to note is that by default, search results will show the most recent listings first, which can be quite frustrating as you'll end up viewing listings with very few or no reviews. It is unfortunate that ASAP does not use better search algorithms by default, as it can make finding the right product take longer than otherwise necessary.
The results are displayed is a grid view showing key information such as the product name, price, vendor, shipping from / to locations and an overview of feedback.
Feedback is displayed under the name 'a********s' which simply stands for 'anonymous'. No there's not some user with a username beginning in a and ending in s buying every product on the market as some people seem to believe. Nonetheless, it's a strange choice to display it in this way. Frustratingly, feedback is not always displayed in date order, meaning on a listing with many reviews, it can be difficult to easily check the most recent reviews without scrolling through the entire list. Hopefully this is fixed in a future update.
Unfortunately product listings only contain a single image which isn't particularly high resolution, so this can make it harder to visually analyse a product. Most markets provide a vendor with an option for several images so this is rather disappointing from a buyer's perspective.
As well as details about a specific product, you can also view more information about a specific vendor by clicking on their name (the number in brackets represents the number of sales they have completed on the market). Here you can view feedback from across their entire product range. For some vendors, feedback is also shown from markets they have previously vended on, such as Dream Market, Empire Market, Dark Market etc.
Before making a cryptocurrency deposit, be sure you're not on a phishing site (check your onion link against those listed on Torhoo or another reputable source such as Dread), then send funds to the wallet address provided in the wallet section of your account. Unfortunately ASAP does not provide any notifications of pending transactions, so you won't know your deposit has been successful until it is shown in your wallet. Just refresh periodically until it appears. This typically requires 10 confirmations for Monero or 2 confirmations for Bitcoin. Be patient as this may take a while.
Once the deposit is confirmed, you can proceed with a purchase. Select the item(s) you want from the relevant product page and click 'add to basket'. You can purchase more than 1 item from a single vendor in a single transaction, but not multiple items from different vendors.
Once you have confirmed the items you want and arrived at the checkout screen, you will first be asked to select a shipping option. Unfortunately the shipping prices are not shown prior to this, so check before making a deposit to ensure you have enough in your wallet to cover it. Next, you will select your currency (BTC or XMR), then add your address and any additional instructions for the vendor.
By default messages to the vendor will not be encrypted, but there is an auto-encrypt option which will encrypt your message using the vendor's PGP key. However, we strongly advise you encrypt these details yourself rather than putting your trust in a dark web market to do it for you. The vendor's public PGP key can be found on their vendor profile page.
Once confirmed and submitted, the order will show in your 'orders' menu. When the vendor accepts, ships or cancels the order, it will be displayed here. A notification will be shown in this section whenever there is an update. Once your order has arrived, you can then mark it as received and leave feedback for the buyer. In the event of an issue, you can also raise a dispute, which will then be reviewed by market staff. We always recommend messaging a vendor first before resorting to a dispute however.
