 If you've been hanging around on the dark web for a while, chances are you've taken a look at at least one hidden marketplace. Now different hidden marketplaces that have used cryptocurrency for payments have existed on Tor and I2P since 2011. But one thing that has remained pretty consistent with these hidden marketplaces is that they have a relatively short lifespan. Most of them don't even last a year before they get hacked, busted, or the owners of the hidden website end up exit scamming. Now the way that these exit scams work is by first building up a lot of trust among both the vendors and the customers in the hidden marketplace, but specifically in the escrow service that the hidden marketplace uses. You see since everything is being paid for in cryptocurrency there's no way to cancel any transactions once they're sent. So in order to keep the vendors from scamming the customers, the customers will usually put the crypto that they're paying for these products into escrow that doesn't get sent to the vendor until the customer has received their package and confirmed that they've received their package on the hidden marketplace. So the exit scam happens when the admins of the hidden marketplace obviously no longer want to continue running it because an exit scam ruins its reputation and so they wait for a good chunk of change to go into the escrow which is basically just crypto wallets that the administrators of the hidden marketplace control and sometimes they'll even post some stuff on the forums telling people that there's some small technical issues that are causing problems with the escrow usually causing problems with vendors withdrawing their funds from the escrow into wallets that they control, but everything is working fine. Keep on placing new orders and putting more money into the escrow account. Vendors keep on posting new products that you have to sell so that customers continue putting money into escrow and then one day poof the admins run away with the money never to be heard from again or maybe they are heard from again under a different identity because that's the thing with anonymous people doing illegal stuff on the dark web. They can always burn an identity and then create a new one which is actually standard procedure for this kind of stuff burn an identity once you are done using it. All hidden marketplaces will come to an end one day it's really just a matter of whether that end is on the criminals term or if it's on law enforcements term so if a person is going to voluntarily retire from this online criminal life it's not surprising at all that they would do it with an exit scam for one last big payday. Now one of the most recent dark websites to exit scam is incognito market but this exit scam stands out a bit because of the extreme lengths that the market admins are going through to try and milk as much money out of their customers and especially out of their vendors as possible. So the scam is believed to have started on February the 19th when bitcoin deposits and withdrawals all of a sudden stopped working on incognito market. Two days later incognito fixed the issue which made users think that this was just a standard maintenance issue that caused a bug in the system. Then on February 28th vendors said that withdrawals from the market still hadn't completed after two whole days despite saying that they had been completed in the website's vendor panel and the marketplace was also providing transaction IDs for those withdrawals that didn't show up in the blockchain at all they were bogus transaction IDs and the staff responded to this by saying that funds are spread too thin since we implemented unique permanent addresses our system has a guard that prevents blockchain fees from eating up more than 10% of your withdrawal it automatically rebroadcasts and wait until a good transaction fee per byte before reconstructing a new transaction hence the transaction ID changes until it is confirmed. Some people accepted this word salad from the administrators as an excuse but others were starting to get skeptical of the site. Withdrawal issues continued for four more days and then on March 2nd incognito announced that they were adding ethereum and dye as payment options in the market which was supposed to be an excuse for the missing withdrawals and all the other issues that the market was facing but then another five days passed and more people are reporting issues with withdrawing both bitcoin and manero at this point and several other market features such as sending messages, deleting listings, activating vendor vacation mode and editing vendor profiles were also disabled however creating new accounts into depositing funds still worked fine so at this point we've got a pretty clear sign of an exit scam money can be put in but it can't be taken out. While this was going on incognito staff were responding with different excuses about why the funds couldn't be withdrawn ferro one of the market's main admins was also posting on dread telling people that they were working on the issue and they were not scamming you pinky promise we're not scamming you funds are seifu then one day later hug bunter the lead administrator of dread made a post titled incognito 100% exit scam avoid now and in the body of the post he explained how ferro tried to bribe hug bunter to delete all the posts that were talking about incognito market or to just just take tread offline all together for a little while you know you guys are getting d dosed all the time you know people understand it happens the heck an onion site goes down just just you know make that happen for a little bit while we continue scamming people hug bunter also wanted to acquire dark net live a dark net news and information site that incognito owns so that it wouldn't be used maliciously but instead the incognito team just decided to disable comments on that news site to try to prevent the spread of warnings about the exit scam that they were doing and they also published a new article on that site titled hug bunters attempt to smear two birds with one stone where they're claiming that all of this exit scamming stuff is just fake news and that hug bunter is just trying to smear the incognito team's name and people's trust in their news site and their hidden marketplace and their anonymous online email service and all that now so far all of this is pretty standard procedure as far as exit scams go right you let the money build up in the escrow wallets you make excuses the whole time for why the funds can't be withdrawn and I guess if you've got the cash to buy dark net news sites you're going to use those to try to keep the scam going and you might even try to bribe the admins on dread as well but recently the admins of incognito have decided to try and extort the vendors of the hidden marketplace the people who are actually selling stuff to the other people on the dark web when vendors logged into the incognito sites starting yesterday they would see this message on the front page saying expecting to hear the last of us yet we got one final little nasty surprise for y'all we have accumulated a list of private messages transaction info and order details over the years you will be surprised at the number of people that relied on our auto encrypt functionality oh no oh no they trusted the insight encryption please tell me that they're just bluffing and people are not still trusting insight encryption in the year of our lord 2024 and by the way your messages and transaction IDs were never actually deleted after the expiry yeah surprise surprise about that literally says surprise surprise anyway if anything we're to leak to law enforcement I guess nobody never slipped up will be publishing the entire dump of 557 000 orders and 862 000 crypto transaction IDs at the end of May whether or not you and your customer's 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 and down here we've got a list of prices to purge the vendor's records depending on what level they were at starting at $100 for a level one vendor and ending at $20 000 for a level five vendor now the thing about this that's so wild to me is that out of all the people that are involved with hidden marketplaces I think that the vendors would be the most dangerous ones they're the ones that are actually selling illegal products that in some cases you'd probably need some connections to some really scary people to get or they might even be the scary person themselves there is a non-zero chance that cartel dudes who have participated in no less than five beheadings have figured out how to use tor and created accounts on these dark websites to create new revenue channels for their business those are not the kind of guys you want to try and be extorting especially when a lot of people on the dark web are actively trying to dox the administrators of incognito specifically ferro the one that tried bribing dreads administrators now for customers and vendors that encrypted messages themselves with pgp as you should you really shouldn't have anything to worry about with you know these guys trying to release your docs to the public or to law enforcement or whatever but if you didn't then there's a good chance that you're going to get investigated if incognito admins do hand this over to law enforcement the order info would really be key to that investigation because the addresses would obviously tell police where the customers are but there's also a good chance that the police could trace packages back to where the vendor is mailing them from do a control by and then bust them at the post office when they go to ship that package any onsite or in platform encryption is never to be trusted because law enforcement could raid the site and get all the messages that way hackers could take over and read all the messages while they control it and now the admins themselves might threaten to submit the messages to law enforcement unless you pay them an extortion fee handling encryption on devices that you control is absolutely fundamental to good opsec if you enjoyed this video please like and share it to heck the algorithm and check out my online store based dot when where you can get awesome merch like the come and find it short sleeve t-shirt made from 100% cotton perfect for those warm spring and summer days that are coming soon and as always you can save 10% at checkout on based dot when when paying in Monero XMR have a great rest of your day