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.
For christs sake:
Only ever explicitly discuss serious illegal activities in person, preferably outdoors and without any technology on you
Only coordinate meetings to discuss the above over an encrypted messaging method such as signal, and in this avoid specifics and keep this to an absolute minimum (metadata can also be incriminating, and phones out computers can be compromised)
If significant payment is involved, cash, barter or work trade are the only acceptable forms. Ever.
Don't be a fucking sucker
Any questions?
Buying drugs in person puts someone at risk of violence and death. Buying drugs on a DNM (assuming you use a very basic amount of opsec) the biggest risk is losing a little bit of crypto.
Such an ignorant and privileged thing to say.
I agree with what you are saying regarding buying drugs online being objectively safer but come on now regarding calling somebody privileged for not wanting to take the other risks associated with buying drugs a different way
"Don't be a fucking sucker. Any questions?" is what the other person said about people who choose to/have to buy their drugs online. I am calling that statement privileged. That person is the one singling out a specific way of getting drugs and demeaning it, not me. Not sure why you'd get on me about something that I'm not only not doing, but actually calling out someone else for doing.
Oh I’m sorry I think I was just tired and misinterpreted the conversation