Everyone knows that AB has been cheating with their listings number, that's old news. But, now what they did is limit the number of pages to 100 in the drug,cannabis and stimulant category ( which are the biggest ones obviously) I don't know if you have noticed but they were at 16 000 listings just before their 2 days maintenance and less than a week after they jumped to 20 000 and put a limit of 100 in the number of pages so that people can't accurately count the number of their listing. Then,when asked if they will fix the issue they go about saying they don't have time,its not a priority yet they have time to artificially increase those number every day and do shady tactics with number of pages lol
There is one thing that you should know
If the cannabis category is limited to 100 pages which it is, it means that it is technically not possible for alphabay to have more than 1500 listings in that category but they claim to have nearly 6000 cannabis listings so where the hell do they fit all the magic listings??
If you want to give your money to dishonest admins go ahead and use alphabay and if you think this market has 20k drug listings you need to see a doctor.
Either way, it's not really a big issue worth getting into. Most buyers here already know which vendors to buy from and just use the market for escrow. Inflating/deflating listing numbers doesn't really mean shit in the end.