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Drug market Abacus experienced a sudden boost of users following the seizure of rival market Archetyp – and now it’s gone.
Just weeks after an international law enforcement operation led to the arrest of individuals and the seizure of infrastructure linked to the popular darknet drug market, Archetyp, one of the last markets standing, has gone suddenly offline.
Many of Archetyp’s users flooded the darknet market known as Abacus in the weeks following the former’s seizure, and the prevailing wisdom is that Abacus’ administrators saw the writing on the wall and decided to perform an exit scam, stealing funds held in escrow and shutting down the site.
At the height of its operations, Abacus hosted more than 40,000 product listings for street drugs such as heroin and amphetamines, alongside fraud services and counterfeit goods.
According to blockchain intelligence firm TRM, users first started reporting withdrawal issues in late June. Speaking on popular the darknet market forum, Dread, one of Abacus’ market’s admins claimed the slowdown was due to users migrating from Archetyp to Abacus.
“Lot of traffic these days coming after Arch market died,” a forum user called Vito said at the time.
“But everything is fine, between DDoS and plenty [of] new users using the market, we need some adjustments.”
The market’s users, however, could feel something was wrong, and deposits to Abacus slowed dramatically. Then, a week ago, the admin of Dread forums declared the market – now the largest of the darknet markets still accepting bitcoin, rather than the more private cryptocurrency, Monero – officially “gone”.
“It’s up in the air what the truth is on this one, I am mostly inclined to an exit scam, based on funds being locked up for a whole day before everything went offline,” Dread admin HugBunter said.
“At the point the servers went down, it matched the same time that Admin went offline on Jabber. There was also a post showing that around 220k moved out of the hot wallet where all deposits were directed to on that day.”
On 28 June, more than US$320,000 was withdrawn from the market’s hot wallet, and while HugBunter points out Abacus’ disappearance could be the result of a hack or even a seizure by law enforcement, the most likely answer is an exit scam. Two other Abacus admins have gone quiet, alongside Vito.
“This could also be that they are simply complicit in an exit scam,” HugBunter said.
“The movement of funds is another reason I don’t believe it to be LE behind this, from what I saw a lot of this was sporadic with another 7k moving out of one of the hot wallets after the other large transactions.”
Whether the admins behind Abacus simply saw the sudden influx of new buyers – and more money being held in escrow for illicit purposes – as a perfect opportunity to exit scam with their wallets full, or were simply nervous following the takedown of their major competitor, one thing is known for sure.
It’s getting harder and harder for criminals to do business on the darknet.
David Hollingworth has been writing about technology for over 20 years, and has worked for a range of print and online titles in his career. He is enjoying getting to grips with cyber security, especially when it lets him talk about Lego.
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