The proliferation of the Internet to the general public has resulted in a paradigm shift for a number of activities that were previously conducted via offline means. The availability of the World Wide Web has made it easier to carry out online shopping, communications and knowledge gathering. However, this also brings a shift in the illegal activities towards the online platforms. The prime example of this is the dark web, also known as the Tor network is infamous for its notorious activities. Given the amount of anonymity provided by the Tor network, the ill mined people have garnered this platform to conduct illegal activities including drugs and firearms trafficking, credit card dumps, abusive content, forged documents and many more. In the present study, we have tried perform a literature review of the existing studies on the illegal activities being carried out on the Tor dark web. We have explored existing literature on the content of the Tor network, the legality of the available content, the topological properties of the network, the supervised classification algorithms proposed for the automatic detection of the illegal activities and the law enforcement actions on the Tor network. We have considered the studies spanning nearly the period of last fifteen years. The present literature review on the dark web could serve to identify the current problems and a base for the future research.