more than 2,600 bitcoins blocked

Since August 22, the site of the darknet Empire Market, known as the drug paradise, stopped serving its users and its administrators seem to have disappeared. There are suspicions that they misappropriated more than 2,600 bitcoins owned by customers that would have remained in their accounts.

Empire Market is one of the hidden services on the web accessed with Tor. Since 2018 it operates as one of the markets of the dark web largest in the world, which emerged after the disappearance of other similar sites such as Silk Road and AlphaBay.

Visitors to Empire can choose from a list of more than 26,000 drugs and chemicals, but it is also full of other illegal transactions such as fake passports, hacking software, or personal information that they are generally traded with bitcoin and monero.

Right now, since Empire Market has been offline, many of Reddit / r / darknet’s 129,000 subscribers are commenting on her mysterious disappearance. Many opinions agree with the Darknetstats site, where they suspect that after a denial of service (DoS) attack, which happens with this dark market is an exit scam. These occur when the administrators of a site disappear charging users with money.

Stealing user funds would not be that difficult for the operators of Empire Market, which has an “active wallet” mechanism controlled by the site. Those who want to trade in this market must first leave a cryptocurrency deposit before making a payment. This money is kept in custody, allowing managers to control the assets.

Many users may have believed that their funds would be safe in the case of a black market that had been operating for more than four years. These clients surely did not take into account that many administrators of other sites in the dark web they have disappeared with millions of dollars, after suddenly shutting down their operations and being taken offline.

Where are the bitcoins?

In his post John Marsh from Darknetstats estimates that Empire Market managers may have misappropriated some 2,638 BTC ($ 30 million), although the figure is not entirely accurate because it is difficult to estimate.

However, a user identified under the pseudonym «Se7en» manifested in the Dread forum of the Dark Net that after the closing of Empire Market there is no scam and believes that in a short time the site will be online again. Anyway, many users who leave their impressions on the mysterious disappearance of the black market do not believe in the story of Se7en and some have insisted that this user even deleted their Dread account.

Hundreds of clients of the Empire drug market claim to have lost their bitcoin funds, which were blocked in the site’s wallets. Source: cottonbro / Pexels.com

A cybersecurity expert interviewed by Bloomberg points out that when black markets disappear, as Empire Market has, there is only two possible outcomes: one is that the administrators have been arrested by the authorities, or that on the other hand the funds of the users have been stolen.

Regarding what the expert says that it may be a police operation, no evidence has been found that the authorities are behind the closure of the dark market. When this occurs, police officers often issue statements to report their operations, but after nearly a week, there are no police reports linked to Empire Market.

At least one Empire Market moderator fears the administrators have left with the funds. “I am crushed and embarrassed by my manager’s apparent decision to disappear with his funds,” he wrote, according to Bloomberg. “It is difficult to understand that this is really happening. I am in shock”. Meanwhile, users say they can no longer access their accounts.

“So they are not even giving us the grace period to withdraw our funds. I think it’s a bad idea that those markets don’t allow us to use our own address so they can’t run with the money later, ”said one user on Twitter.

Where are dark web users pointing?

In the forums and social networks, many users are devastated with the disappearance of Empire Market, there are even those who are lost. However, when something similar happened in the past and authorities shut down the Silk Road page in 2013 and jailed its creator, Ross Ulbricht, many assumed that such punishment would deter copycats.

None of that happened. On the contrary, the dealers selling drugs in that market migrated to rival sites, suggesting that this will also be the case today. About it, KELA, an Israeli cyber threat intelligence monitoring firm, reveals information about it.

The firm analyzed several forums where users of the dark web They meet and have offered some ideas about their actions. “After analyzing various posts on forums such as Dread and TheHub, we have noticed that there seems to be a consensus on the fact that most users will probably start moving their activities and communications to the following three underground sites: Versus, White House Market and Icarus, as well as the messaging app Wickr, ”says Victoria Kivilevich, a threat intelligence analyst at KELA, according to report from the middle bleepingcomputer.

On these sites, like informs CriptoNoticias, Bitcoin is still the cryptocurrency of choice. Of the 31 markets in the dark web 29 surveyed at the time used bitcoin, while only two supported Zcash, a privacy-focused cryptocurrency.