Interesting development on Darknet. Empire Market, the largest Darknet market, has exit scammed and is moving tens of millions of dollars in bitcoins out of all wallets. This is one of the largest exit scams ever and the total amount may be over 100 million dollars in BTC total.
Conversation
Replying to
If they try to cash out the entire value, it will most likely put pressure on BTC value downwards which appears to be the case currently.
3
Replying to
A few likely scenarios in play -- LE may have located one of their datacenters in Latvia and moved to secure the servers. The admins probably raced against LE to remove the servers and cash out. If LE was able to get the servers, Empire may go back online as a "honeypot."
2
Replying to
How does an "exit scam" work? Normally, these markets bring together vendors and buyers and set up "escrow" accounts where the buyer puts money in escrow to purchase things. When the order is received, they release the escrow (finalize) and the funds are released to the vendor.
1
2
There are millions of dollars constantly in escrow in wallets owned by the market. When the market exits, they take the digital currency in all of these wallets and move them out to another wallet to eventually cash out.
1
2
Show replies
Replying to
On August 5, a security firm located one of Empire Markets servers due to a misconfiguration which exposed their IP address (hosted in a Latvia).
Quote Tweet
Empire Market has recently misconfigured one of their Tor nodes which runs at 94.140.115.23.
community.riskiq.com/search/94.140.
2