Dark web Grey Market still down, users speculate possible Exit Scam

Exit scam – Bad news for Grey Market users, one of its administrators revealed that another administrator had emptied the cold storage wallets.

According to one of the admins of the Grey Market marketplace one of the admins, ‘theiving‘, has stolen all the users’ funds the platform stored for the escrow service.

“ you can mark Market as scam exited and ban all our official accounts” reads the message published by the Market admin.

During the last week, the black marketplace was often unreachable before going completely offline.

“Different users have provided Darknetlive with different dates and it looks as if vendor mirrors worked for longer than the public mirrors. On December 27, one vendor wrote that they had lost access to the market (via vendor mirrors) “two days ago.”” reads a post published by Darknetlive. “A number of buyers complained about 502 errors since before December 25. Nevertheless, vendor mirrors completely stopped working at some point Christmas.”

Message published by the admin on Dread forum (onion address http://dreadditevelidot.onion/post/d490dcfdf772f0727121/?bt=1#c-bd155c48754571f055)

Every transaction was blocked, users were not able to finalize the orders they had received and vendors could not withdraw any Bitcoin.

Some vendors are still skeptical about the possibility of an exit scam claiming the crooks attempting to scam the users of the marketplace should never have blocked the transaction.

Some users speculate that several black marketplaces, including the Grey Market, were hit by powerful DDoS attacks. Anyway, a market administrator familiar with the ongoing DDoS attacks, told Darknetlive that Grey Market had used the ongoing DDOS attack as an excuse for fraudulent activity.

In the next days, we will have more news about the alleged exit scam … stay tuned.

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Pierluigi Paganini

(SecurityAffairs – Iran, hacking)

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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”.