Fake Nexus Market Links

Fake links survive on one thing: you are in a hurry and you do not double-check. You found the name in a search, your thumb is on paste, and the address looks close enough. "Close enough" is the whole game. A copycat does not need to beat the real thing, it only needs to be the thing you open first. So before you paste anything, slow down for about thirty seconds, because that is the entire window where you can still save your coins.

The prefix is the whole trick

All three real addresses start with the letters nexus and end with .onion, and the part before .onion is 56 characters long. Every one of them, same length. If the address is shorter, or longer, or has a hyphen, or a space, or a capital letter in the middle, it is not one of the three. You do not need to memorize the string, you need to count. 56 characters before the dot, lowercase, no gaps. That single check kills most fakes before they load.

Proxies that are not the address

.onion.to, .onion.ws, onion.watch, tor2web. These are not the address, they are a doorway to it. A plain .onion opened in the Tor browser keeps your route inside Tor. A proxy puts a middle server between you and the market, and that server can see your requests and your exit, which defeats the reason you are using Tor in the first place. If the bar shows anything after .onion, you are not in the network, you are in front of it.

The page that asks for your password before you are in

The market does not know your password until you have made an account inside it, and nobody else should know it either. The login screen shows up after the market interface has loaded, not on a landing page that greets you with an address and a password field. A page that wants your password before the interface is even up is collecting it, not checking it. If you typed it there, it is already out. The real first screen is the loader with the NEXUS mark and the red bars, the one described on the first visit page, and it never asks for a password.

Ranking words that do not exist

"Main mirror", "official only", "backup", "mirror 1/2/3". None of that is real. The market has three equal entrances and no hierarchy between them. There is no main and no spare. The moment someone starts ranking the addresses, they are selling you a reason to trust one over the others, and the one they point at is usually the one they control. Equal means equal. The three real ones are listed, without any such labels, on the address page. Do not let a label change that.

Freshness is not proof

A page that swears the addresses are "verified today" can swear the same thing any day it likes, and the stamp means nothing if you do not check the address itself. The date is decoration. The address is the fact. Compare the string to the real one, character by character, and stop caring what day the other page claims to have checked it.

Thirty seconds, start to finish:

1. Copy the address and paste it into a plain text field first, so you can look at it without the browser doing anything.
2. Count the characters before .onion. It must be 56, and it must start with nexus and end with .onion.
3. Make sure there is no hyphen, no space, no capital, and nothing after .onion.
4. Open it in the Tor browser, not a normal browser, not a proxy site.
5. Wait for the loader: dark screen, the NEXUS mark, red bars, the line about checking your browser.
6. Glance back at the address bar and confirm it still reads exactly what you pasted. If it changed, leave.

Do that and a fake link has to be a lot better than "looks similar" to get you. Hold the real one in front of you, say nexusb2l7njnf2i5dm3ushgrwayuicpofzcs4bkknpzfdwwbwbgqwtyd.onion out loud if it helps, and compare. Most fakes do not survive the count.