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News that won’t make the news: One of the largest illicit marketplaces on the dark web, Incognito Market, has begun a mass exit scam/extortion campaign, seizing 10s of millions of $ in cryptocurrency (hexbear.net)

submitted 7 months ago* (last edited 7 months ago) by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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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.

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[–] [email protected] 76 points 7 months ago* (last edited 7 months ago) (6 children)

This already happened in Grafton, New Hampshire as a result of the so-called “Free Town Project” and the town got so overrun with management issues, including an infestation of black bears and other beasts of the forest, that even the libertarians who lived there determined the project had to be abandoned. Not an exaggeration. Here’s a brief section from the Wikipedia article about it:

In 2004, Grafton became the focus for Libertarians as part of the Free Town Project (a single-town version of the Free State Project). One of the goals was to advocate for legal changes. Grafton's appeal as a favorable destination was due to its absence of zoning laws and a then-low property tax rate. John Babiarz, a Grafton resident and prominent member of the Libertarian Party, encouraged libertarian people to move there.

During this time, the town's population grew by about 200 people (about 20%); nearly all of the newcomers were men. Project participants did not find themselves as welcome as they had hoped, but they voted in changes including a 30% reduction in the town's already-small budget. This resulted in eliminating funding to the county's senior-citizens council, town offices going unheated during the winter, poorly maintained roads filled with potholes, and inconsistent basic services, such as trash collection. The libertarian newcomers additionally increased the town's costs by filing lawsuits against it in attempts to set various legal precedents.

Some libertarian newcomers to Grafton refused to buy bear-resistant containers. The project has been associated with an increase in the number and aggressiveness of black bears in town, including entering homes, mauling people, and eating pets. A single, definitive cause for the abnormal behavior of the bears has not been proven, but it may be due to libertarian residents who refuse to buy and use bear-resistant containers, who do not dispose of waste materials (such as feces) safely, or who deliberately put out food to attract the bears to their own yards, without caring how this affected other people.

After a rash of lawsuits from Free Towners, an influx of sex offenders, an increase of crime, problems with bold local bears, and the first murders in the town's history, the Libertarian project ended in 2016.