TRM Labs said that in early July, ABACUS Market users, which controlled about 70% of the Darknet-trade market of North America and Western Europe, began to complain about maintenance problems and difficulty with the withdrawal of digital assets.
Initially, the administration of the darknet platform explained the problems with the withdrawal of bitcoins with technical failures and DDOS attacks. However, then she stopped responding to incoming requests, after which the site and its mirrors stopped working.
According to TRM Labs analysts, the site operators probably assigned the client $ 12 million in cryptocurrency.
“Such behavior is typical for exit scams, when administrators reassure users to win the time to withdraw funds,” said TRM Labs specialists.
Users of the ABACUS darknet market, who suffered from the scam, are unlikely to be able to return funds, as such sites operate outside the legal field, explained in TRM Labs.
TRM Labs experts suggest that the dominance of the ABACUS by the volume of transactions and the number of users, as well as its reputation, probably caused what happened. The sites reaching the heights of the ecosystem often attract the attention of law enforcement officers, as happened with the recently closed Archetyp Darknnok.
Source: Bits
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