AlphaBay Offline Update: Massive Amounts of Bitcoin Leaving Site Accounts?
AlphaBay Market, one of the more popular sites on the "dark web" notorious for dealing in drugs, guns and other illicit items, has been inaccessible since Tuesday, July 4. As reports surface about massive Bitcoin transfers from what could be AlphaBay's accounts, users begin to fear that the site administrators could be pulling a heist on their clients.
The anonymous trading site often cited as the new Silk Road have gone offline since Tuesday, and users took to online discussion groups and social media to wonder if the AlphaBay Market is gone for good.
An update posted on Wednesday by Reddit user Big_Muscles, a source widely believed to be associated with the dark net marketplace, claimed to have news that "[s]ervers are under update" and "[w]ill be back online soon," as quoted by The Next Web.
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At the same time, rumors have circulated that a huge Bitcoin transfer could be headed to an unknown recipient from what is believed to be AlphaBay's Bitcoin accounts. The transaction, which involved 1,479 Bitcoins, is valued at more than $3.7 million.
Transfers done using the cryptocurrency Bitcoin are designed to be anonymous, with measures in place that obscures the identities of the parties involved. Even so, some users were suspicious of the transfers that coincided with the shutdown of the site.
These "Exit Schemes," as they are commonly known in the dark web circles, involve market owners suddenly closing shop and taking off with the Bitcoin stored in the accounts of their users. One such case involved the Evolution marketplace in 2015, which was branded as a Silk Road alternative at the time, according to The Verge.
That year, the Evolution marketplace administrators closed down the trading site, making off with more than $12 million of their users' money. With AlphaBay still down, users have become concerned about a similar scenario playing out in the near future.
