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.
And most importantly, buying on the DNM allows you to actually read reviews from other people who purchased from the same vendor. Not on the market itself, but on some of the onion drug forums set up for reviews and discussion. You have the opportunity to check if some vendor's "Heroin" is actually just fentalogues and xylazine. There is no chance to do that IRL unless you're friends with your dealer or something.
This shit is literally life and death for a lot of opioid addicts, and I'm kind of disappointed in Hexbear for this thread labeling everyone caught up in this as just another cryptobro to make fun of. In my experience, neither the vendors nor the customers are using the crypto for any reason other than to facilitate the sales without exposing anything about their identities.
I couldn't agree more. About the importance of being able to read reviews of the vendors made by the community and how much of a boon that is for buyers and their well being, something that simply doesn't exist when it comes to buying from irl dealers. But also about how disappointing it is that so many hexbears not only don't understand this but are being really demeaning towards people who don't deserve it.
The whole "no investigation, no right to speak" thing doesn't just apply to the discussion of politics. And some of the attitudes here about people who use DNMs are almost bordering on victim-blaming. You're right, the ubiquitous use of cryptocurrency on the DNMs is not because the people who use them are the cryptobros we all know and hate, it's because that's literally the only safe way for any of this to work. Most people using the DNMs would rather not have to go through the hassle of having to learn to use crypto in the first place, or deal with the small loss of funds every time they convert their real money into it, or risk losing it because they messed up somehow with their wallet address or something. The use of crypto in this case is an unfortunate necessity most would avoid if they could.