Darkweb, what?

You probably have heard of a dark web marketplace, it is a market you can only visit via tor where you can buy different (illegal) goods. From drugs to hiring a hit man on a person, this can all be done on a dark web marketplace.

What happened?

It all started out fairly normal, several transactions took longer than usual, crypto coins were not transferring to an account thus depositing did not work. This could certainly be a minor glitch, after all it is normal for such glitches to happen at larger dark web marketplaces, this was not the case though. The owners had in fact started an exit scam, this is a fraudulent practice in which a company or organization abruptly stops its services or operations, in doing so they often take large amounts of money from customers or investors before disappearing.

In this case it was not just a normal exit scam, they wanted to extort even more money from the sellers on their website and threaten to leak their and customers' logs if they did not pay a ransom. The mistake here was that the users and sellers did not always manually encrypt their messages with PGP, they trusted the "auto-encrypt" function and in general the market itself. This was a big mistake.

Under this announcement they had also put a list of who had or had not paid this ransom, this again to harass the sellers.

This can have a big impact on sellers but also on their customers because this is all very illegal.

Outro

This is the first time this kind of exit scam has happened, making this fairly unique. And like always we learn something from this fairly uncomfortable situation: encrypt your messages when buying illegal goods on one of the most popular dark web marketplaces.