Pierluigi Paganini February 03, 2020

The Apollon market, one of the largest marketplaces, is likely exit scamming after the administrators have locked vendors’ accounts.

The Apollon market, one of the darknet’s largest marketplaces, is likely exit scamming, vendors and customers reported suspicious behavior of its administrators.

Users on Reddit are reporting that vendors can’t withdrawal funds nor sign into their account, only buyers are still able to sign onto their accounts.

Apollon (http://apollonujscjrlng.onion) is a classic escrow market founded in March 2018 with a total listing of more 54,000 items as of January 2020.

On January 28, just after the Dread (a Reddit-style forum on the deep web), an attacker started launching massive DDoS attacks against the Dread, Envoy, The Hub, and other forums. Many black markets were taken down and access to their platforms has been limited. The administrator of the Dread market speculates that Apollon is responsible for “the attacks against all the forums and Empire.”

Which is the connection between Apollon and Dread?

Experts noticed that this is the third market that has exit scammed while Dread was offline for weeks. revealed last year that the Apollon market is owned by a group called Hugbunter, which owns other black markets, including the Avaris Market, the Whitehouse Market, the Versus Market, the Cannahome & Monoply Market.

Every time Dread is offline, a market exit scams, and it isn’t a coincidence because one of their owned markets shut down.

“Everytime dread is offline, a market exit scams. It isn’t just a random market that goes offline, its their owned market that exit scams, thats because people can’t report the exit scam in its early stage to avoid getting less than expected returns.” continues Darknetstats.

“Since the downtime we’ve had some reports of problems with Apollon.” wrote SamWhiskey, one of the Dread moderators. “Apollon market is paying for DDOS attacks against dread, avengers, the hub, envoy and empire. Most likely to cover up an exit scam.”

Some vendors on Apollon Market reported their problems in using the platform Darknetlive.

“I can confirm that when I try to sign into Apollon I get the following: The username and/or password you entered is invalid.” reported the vendor SteroidWarehouse. “This morning I could still login and then all of a sudden I couldn’t. I also had several customers who told me that their wallets have been depleted yesterday night and this morning. It might be that they’re doing a Nightmare style exist scam. If you need more details please let me know.”

The news of a possible Apollon exit scam was also reported by the Darknetstats website.

“The second largest darknet market is in the midst of an exit scam according to multiple sources that have confirmed the reports to us. Over the past week we received several reports of users deposits not getting added to their accounts and today they locked all vendor accounts which leads to the conclusion that they are now actively scamming users of their funds.” reads a post published on the Darknetstats website.

“The conclusion is clear. We will see a powerful shilling in favor of Avaris Market and everyone will be asked to join Avaris (and whitehouse too) on Dread. The accounts that will do the shilling can be easily identified by experts but new users will definitely fall for this trap and will join this market and get scammed again. Our advice will be to stay away at all costs from the markets mentioned above.”

Pierluigi Paganini

(SecurityAffairs – Apollon Market, exit scam)

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