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.

  • SerLava [he/him]
    ·
    edit-2
    3 个月前

    I'm so stoked, a couple years ago I was about to buy a space heater for my office before someone pointed out I could just use my and my SO's new 3080s as a space heater. So I got a mining program thing and ran it when I wasn't using the computer, and made like 800 dollars over the winter. The mining rate plummeted later and is still extremely low (can't make hardly any money on it anymore). The price also plummeted to like 300 dollars. Now just the other week I figured out how to sell the Bitcoin and got 1000 dollars... (Minus 25 to convert... Minus another 25 for wire transfer to avoid giving some shady company literally ALL of my bank information, minus 10 dollars from my fucking bank for getting the wire transfer....)

    So I got 940 dollars right at the very peak of the Bitcoin price a couple weeks ago and it's still down way below that. It might go up more later but it's not going to quintuple, there isnt enough money out there unless some more countries get taken over by Bitcoin nutjobs. I'm glad I could contribute just a little bit to the price crashing

    • Alaskaball [comrade/them]M
      ·
      3 个月前

      Wait a minute would you think it would be cheaper to heat your house with bitcoin miners computer towers that will spike your electricity bill but let you turn down the thermostat or keeping with the status quo of heating your place with the in-built natural gas powered HVAC system

      • SerLava [he/him]
        ·
        3 个月前

        It wasn't an issue of total heating or I would have just turned up the thermostat. The heat just wasn't getting to the office properly, so if I wanted it to be comfortable in there it had to be hot as shit in some other parts of my place. Shitty old heating and ducting.