AlphaBay Market has been down since Tuesday and while site maintenance is not uncommon, silence from its admins and a sizeable $3.8 million withdrawal from the site’s accounts have drawn suspicion.
AlphaBay Market is an online darknet market that provides those looking for items that might not be found at your local Target or Walmart like illegal drugs, guns, and other less appropriate items. The site has been in operation since 2014, and has appeared many times in the news from selling stolen Uber accounts to private TalkTalk data. While there might be a thirst from some for these items, there is always a catch, with it being that, generally, you can’t just head to the site and head to the checkout with your PayPal account.
Although every site is different, a majority of these types of destinations accept cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin, which is preferred, since it is a bit more anonymous and is difficult to trace back to its origin. While this might be the case, there is always a danger when dealing with sites not backed by a proper institution and that has now manifested with the abrupt outage of AlphaBay Market, leaving some to speculate that something nefarious has occurred.
While site outages are not uncommon for such things as maintenance activities, the website has been offline since Tuesday and without comment from the site’s administrators. What has led to the suspicion that something might be wrong is the massive withdrawal of cryptocurrency from the site’s account. This has led many to believe that the site will be shut down for good, with the admins leaving users high and dry, taking roughly $3.8 million with them. Although this could be possible, this remains speculative at this point, as there has been no comment or confirmation from an official source.
Source: The Verge | Image via AlphaBay Market
