You said you’re trying to scan using TOR? Nmap is slow enough sometimes on its own, I can only imagine trying to use TOR with it. Also, HOW exactly are you trying to use TOR? I didn’t see any mention of it in the command you provided, did you torify your shell using . tor socks on? Or did you you use services start tor?
When you use Tor or other proxies through the command --proxies socks4://127.0.0.1:9050 you are telling the scanner to use the given proxy to connect to the target www.example.com.
Once the scanner tries to connect through Tor or the proxy it will receive a response back saying that the connection was successful. If you stop the Tor service, the scanner will try to use another random proxy to connect to the target again. This is a common feature of most scanners such as Nmap, Burp, Zap and so on.
Hmm, I’m also facing the same prob. But the thing is, you can use proxychains with Tor.
I. E. Install proxychains4, add a socks5 proxy to m the config file. Then after enabling the Tor service, add proxychains to the beginning of your command. It will be done through Tor relays