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.
One of the funniest things in the world to me is when libertarian bros, whose entire ideology is built solely on trust in non binding agreements, get destroyed when one side breaks the trust. It happens every single time and it is always funny. Non binding trust agreements can only work in a world built around human empathy, community, and mutual aid (aka: anarchism). Individualism and trust based ideology are at direct odds with each other, and yet libertarians are literally too dumb to realize this, and they fall for it every time.
I'm not saying that incognito market is a libertarian site, or that its users are libertarians, but this sort of thing is exactly what the libertarian ideal looks like. A completely unregulated marketplace built solely on the basis of trust. Every single time it happens it backfires spectacularly. It's the oldest trick in the book and people keep falling for it.
Incognito and virtually all drug black markets in general are necessarily ancapistan writ small without even being ideological on either the market's or customer's end. It's just the natural outcome of a black market that can't possibly be regulated. If the US government ever wants to stop the flood of fentanyl deaths, the only way forward is to legalize pharmaceutical heroin and distribute it for free without a profit motive to people suffering from addiction. Too bad that'll never happen.