The Dark Web Market ‘Outlaw’ is Shut down due to hack but feared it could be an exit scam. Markets in Dark Web undergoing issues such as controversial products or leaked databases of popular online platforms are not new to the dark web community but if you take “Exit Scam” it doesn’t happen often just like that.
The marketplace was founded back in 2013 was not very popular among the cyber criminals but it had its own steadily growing user base but on last Tuesday it went offline without any notice and admins claimed that it was due to a hack.
Soon after Ross Ulbricht was captured and Silk Road went offline outlaw flourished by selling the regular illegal products, drugs, weapons, and the usual data dumps.
Outlaw had a feature called “Dead Drop” which is unique that would make the clients get the stuff directly from the seller or from a predefined spot.
The site went offline with the message on the front page of Outlaw Market.
This website has been hacked, the wallet stolen. it’s over. goodbye outlaw market…
One of the admins posted on Reddit as well as Pastebin regarding the incident which happened on May 16. The Message is posted below,
Hi all
As many of you have seen or heard, OUTLAW was recently hacked.
Many of you will think that 'the admins ran off with the coins',
something I personally think is absolutely not the case. We were
always as honest as possible, however apparently it couldn't last.
I myself haven't been in contact with the main admins after the
site got taken down, so I do not know any specifics. Unfortunately
they are very hard (read: impossible) to reach outside the market.
For those of you who lost funds, we apologize. Our new TLCE system
paid funds out almost as FE, so that might have reduced the amount
of funds that were kept on our site. If you set up auto-payout, customers
shouldn't have had any funds on the site either.
I'm not sure whether EVERYTHING was stolen, and if not,
how the admins would be planning on refunding.
If anyone stored the OUTLAW BitMessage addresses, please inform me!
I guess now's your time to ask questions on how things really went down
behind the scenes...
Kind regards
The lower level admin pointed out in an interview that the market was hacked and it couldn’t be an exit scam because they couldn’t have taken more than $20,000 since it never actually stored funds.
The Admin said,”Last thing I knew on the market was that over $20k that was stuck over that weekend was just released and paid out. They’re either the dumbest exit scammers I know of, or it was not an exit scam at all.”
He further added, “Last weekend the main admins worked hours and hours to solve an issue with the [Bitcoin] mixer which caused many payouts to be stuck. That’s not something you’d do if you were planning on exit scamming. The only possible thing that could have happened is that they were somehow doxxed and thought by themselves ‘[expletive] everything, we’re done’.”
One of the Reddit users commented on this that, “Sounds like Bitcoin [price] got high enough and they wanted to get paid”. Because Bitcoin saw the hugest raise of $1800 ever and almost over $2000 this weekend.
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