That Dark Web It is a dangerous site that users of one of the main Marketplaces for the sale and purchase of drugs are learning the hard way. Incognito. Both buyers and sellers registered on the platform They are being subjected to an 'exit scam' combined with extortion. The first, which could be translated as 'exit scam', happens when the owners or managers of a business, usually online, suddenly disappear and take customer or user funds with them. Incognito users have found themselves in this situation since the beginning of this month. But things got worse when the web administrators began to demand payments of between $100 and $20,000 under threat of making cryptocurrency transactions public made on the platform and chat records maintained.
According to what the security analyst reports on his website Brian Krebson March 6, users discovered that, although they could continue depositing money into their wallets, Incognito I no longer allowed them to be removed. Initially, cybercriminals hid the scam and defended themselves by arguing that it was a temporary problem caused by changes to the withdrawal system. After a few days, the administrators published the message extorting all their users on Incognito.
'We have one last unpleasant surprise for all of you. We have accumulated a list of private messages, transaction information and order details over the years. You will be surprised by the number of people who trusted our functionality. 'self-encrypted'. And by the way, your messages and transaction IDs They were never actually deleted after 'expiration'…. SURPRISE, SURPRISE!!! Anyway, if something were to leak to the authoritiesI guess no one has ever made a mistake,' explains the extortion message.
The information that Incógnito threatens to make public at the end of May includes 557,000 drug orders and 862,000 cryptocurrency transaction identifiers. 'Whether or not your information and that of your clients is on that list is entirely up to you. And yes, this is extortion', they add.
The extortion message includes a page with the names that the sellers use on the platform, showing their status under the message 'below you can see which suppliers care about their customers'. In green, those who have paid and in red those who have not done so yet. Scammers have established a 5-level classification to establish the payment that each person must make to avoid the leak of their Incognito activity: 100, 300, 1,000, 5,000 and 20,000 dollars, from 1 to 5.
A similar page for buyers will also be enabled 'in a few weeks', the scammers announced.
This type of scam is not rare and, according to statements from Brett Johnsonconvicted and reformed cybercriminal who built the Dark Web market shadowcrewwhich Krebs collects, is how these sites end up if they are not first closed by security forces.
'Shadowcrew was the precursor to today's Darknet markets and laid the foundation for how modern cybercrime channels still operate today. The truth about Darknet markets? They are all 'exit scam'. The only question is whether the authorities can shut down the market and arrest its traders before the exit scam occurs,' says Johnson.