On March 10th, several days after Incognito Market was assumed to be shut down or no longer be processing transactions, the site posted a message to its homepage that reads as follows:
”Expecting to hear the last of us yet? We got one final little nasty suprise for y’all. We have accumulated a list of private messages, transaction info and order details over the years. You’ll be surprised at the number of people that relied on our “auto-encrypt” functionality. And by the way, your messages and transaction IDs were never actually deleted after the “expiry”…”
”SURPRISE SURPRISE !!! Anyway, if anything were to leak to law enforcement, I guess nobody never slipped up. We’ll be publishing the entire dump of 557k orders and 862k crypto transaction IDs at the end of May, whether or not you and your customers’ info is on that list is totally up to you. And yes… YES, THIS IS AN EXTORTION !!! As for the buyers, we’ll be opening up a whitelist portal for them to remove their records as well in a few weeks.”
”Thank you all for doing business with Incognito Market”
Exit scams are not uncommon on dark web markets, but this one is particularly large and openly threatening compared to most. Incognito Market requires the loading of cryptocurrency to a site-based wallet, which can then be used for in-house transactions only. All cryptocurrency on the site was seized from user’s wallets, estimated to be anywhere from $10 million to $75 million. After seizing the cryptocurrency wallets of all of the marketplace’s users, the site now openly explains that it will publish transactions and chat logs of users who refuse to pay an extortion fee. The fee ranges from $100 to $20,000, a volume based 5 tier buyer/seller classification.
Incognito Market also now has a Payment Status tab, which states ”you can see which vendors care about their customers below.” and lists the some of the market’s largest sellers. Sellers which have allegedly paid the extortion fee to not have their transaction records released are displayed in green, while those who have not yet paid are displayed in red.
Additionally, in a few weeks the site claims it will have a “whitelist portal” which would allow buyers to wipe their transactions and re-encrypt chat records.
Whoever is behind the website must be extremely, extremely confident in their anonymity, already working with government agencies, or both, because a bounty on this person is likely worth millions.
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There was one market that packed up and left gracefully without exit scamming: Agora.
The administrators announced it was shutting down in 2015, I recall their reasoning was they found a security vulnerability and decided maintaining the place wasn’t worth the risk. They gave everyone a couple weeks to withdraw all funds before going offline for good, and that was that. Absolute legend of a market, probably the best there ever was. It kind of boggles my mind that someone in the position of those administrators running an illegal drug market would do this out of the kindness of their hearts when they could have just as easily taken the money and ran.
I smoked weed for my very first time after buying it from a vendor on Agora before my state legalized. I’ll never forget it.
Tbh it seemed like the writing was on the wall at the time that weed is going to be legalized in what used to be the biggest underground market for it. I bet they thought it was the perfect time to cash out and be set for life right when the feds might stop caring about what you did forever. Make no enemies on the way out and then live a life of comfort relatively worry free.
Important to note here that Agora wasn’t just a weed market, it also had vendors selling meth, heroin, coke, and fentanyl just like any other DNM. That makes it all the more surreal how they shut down so gracefully.
They’re all exit scams eventually, but this one is wild lol. Genuinely so funny the way this feels so unhinged compared to just disappearing one day with all of the user data/money. Tbh I think it’s a great ploy though. It really serves its purpose to make users think those behind the site are crazy/stupid enough to actually go and act in good faith regarding the extortion payment instead of acting in their own best interest and just hiding.
They’ll probably squeeze another few million out of the user/seller base and then turn the data over as obvious self-incrimination to the feds if they haven’t already.
pgp’s pretty good
pretty good for privacy