Admins of the EVOLUTION Black market exit scamming

The Evolution Black Market, the most popular an online black marketplace appears to have vanished, it seems that admins of the website exit scamming.

The security community is paying attention to the evolution of dark markets following the operation Onymous conducted by law enforcement in November. Law enforcement in a joint effort against cybercrime seized dozens of black markets on Tor Networks, while all the underground marketplaces in the DeepWeb, including Silk Road 2.0, went down due to the operation of authorities, a new one was trying to profit of the situation, the Evolution marketplace.

According to data provided by the no-profit Digital Citizens AllianceSecurity, experts noticed a rapid growth of Evolution dark market that has more than tripled the number of the new products offered, including weapons, stolen credit card data and counterfeit documents.

Suddenly, however, the Evolution Market has vanished without a plausible reason in the last day. In time I’m writing, the Evolution marketplace and the entire Evo community, including the user discussion forum, are offline. The only trace of Evolution Marketplace online seems to be a series of post on Reddit made by volunteer moderators from its communities, they confirmed that the administrators have “exit scammed.”

The awesome amount of virtual currency is the result of the escrow service implemented by the Evolution black market to protect both buyers and sellers.

“According to chatter from the Evolution discussion page on Reddit, Evo’s administrators — who go by the handles “Kimble” and “Verto” — initially blamed the delays on an unexpected influx of huge withdrawal requests that the community’s coffers could not satisfy all at once. The administrators assured anxious vendors that the issue would be resolved within 24 hours.” reported the popular investigator Brian Krebs.

The event is not uncommon in the criminal underground, even two of the moderators of the Evolution blackmarket, “Kimble” and “Verto”, in the past had already done something similar with the Tor Carding Forum website specializing in the sale of stolen credit cards data.

“I am so sorry, but Verto and Kimble have fucked us all. I have over $20,000 in escrow myself from sales. I can’t fucking believe it, absolute scum. I am giving this warning to you all as soon as I possibly could of. Confronted Kimble and Verto about it, they confirmed it and they’re doing it right now.” reported on Reddit a user with the pseudonymous ‘NSWGreat‘.

According to security experts the event could have a significant impact also on the value of Bitcoin, which was the virtual currency accepted by sellers on the Evolution black market.

The value of one bitcoin is now 273.10, it fell -3.99% as reported by at Coindesk.com. The possible successor of the Evolution black market is Agora Marketplace, but other black markets could benefit of the event.

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Pierluigi Paganini

(Security Affairs – Black market, Evolution)

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Pierluigi Paganini

Pierluigi Paganini is member of the ENISA (European Union Agency for Network and Information Security) Threat Landscape Stakeholder Group and Cyber G7 Group, he is also a Security Evangelist, Security Analyst and Freelance Writer. Editor-in-Chief at "Cyber Defense Magazine", Pierluigi is a cyber security expert with over 20 years experience in the field, he is Certified Ethical Hacker at EC Council in London. The passion for writing and a strong belief that security is founded on sharing and awareness led Pierluigi to find the security blog "Security Affairs" recently named a Top National Security Resource for US. Pierluigi is a member of the "The Hacker News" team and he is a writer for some major publications in the field such as Cyber War Zone, ICTTF, Infosec Island, Infosec Institute, The Hacker News Magazine and for many other Security magazines. Author of the Books "The Deep Dark Web" and “Digital Virtual Currency and Bitcoin”.