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.
I don't really follow your argument. I understand how the opioid crisis in the US came to be, but just because synthetic opioids are a thing now doesn't mean that we have to accept them and fully legalize them. If someone made a dedicated effort to smuggle fentanyl to China (or produce it there) and they were successful in addicting a not-negligible part of the population (or even some cities), does that mean that the CCP would have no choice but to legalize opioids? It doesn't make sense to me.
I also want to raise two more points. First, I'm glad that you and other people have successfully battled opioid addiction with maintenance therapy, even if you're planning to be on maintenance indefinitely. However, I'm critical of the indefinite part, because pharma companies are incentivized to push for treatments like that, even though people may be able to completely ditch the maintenance dose.
Also, while reducing overdoses is a goal we should aim for, one must ask if the safe supply program has other consequences, such as more people being addicted in the long term.
My argument is that these potent synthetic opioids are killing people in large numbers, drug enforcement has done nothing to mitigate that, only having served to further terrorize marginalized communities and enslave racial minorities, and, as enforcement cracks down harder, we observe the situation getting worse as less potent opioids are replaced with fentanyl in the drug supply.
Clearly drug enforcement in the US isn't capable of dealing with opioid addiction, and that's not going to change until we've fully abolished the existing capitalist police and prison system. On the other hand, safe supply programs have not increased addiction rates in places where they have been implemented, they have only reduced overdoses and massively increased the quality of life for addicts. No one actually wants to use fentanyl, most people using it are doing so unknowingly or because it's the only option. If any regulated supply of pharmaceutical opioids existed for these people, fentanyl would absolutely disappear overnight.
Then why not argue for changing how drug enforcing is being handled, instead of trying to work around it and solve the issue with safe supply programs?
It’s not that synthetic opiods should be legalised. Heroin should be legalised on prescription, in the same manner as methadone. And an equivalent stimulant for stimulant addicts.
In combination with available rehab and mental health treatment this leads to significantly less drug users and a change in the cultural attitude to drugs.
If the aim is simply to eradicate drug use to the maximum extent, that can also be achieved via state violence. That would carry greater dangers, costs and ethical concerns, so that the cure would turn out to be worse than the disease.
Mao’s success was achieved within the context of a revolutionary society. Drug reform is possible without even needing to take on the status quo, other than relatively minor vested interests like the police. And in some theoretical revolutionary context, it’s obviously not desirable to inflict unnecessary violence, indeed that’s one of the reasons that China, the USSR and other communist states ended up becoming revisionist, because of an excess of needless revolutionary violence.