In Brief
Users of Dark Web Market Fear Another Exit Scam
04.25.2019

Dark web marketplace Wall Street Market seems to be on the verge of closing in an exit scam, reports ZD Net. In other words, despite their protestations of innocence, the admins appear to be running off with all the money in the site’s escrow system.

Admins are telling users that the site has had technical problems and will be fully operational again by Friday. But so many dark web marketplaces have closed in exit scams before now that users have little hope of recovering any funds in the escrow systemwhere payments waited to be withdrawn by sellers after a certain complaint-free period.

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The exit has played out over the last week. At first, the site’s admins claimed they had a problem with the servers backing up the market’s escrow wallets. They said they had moved all the funds from those wallets into new wallets, which users could not access. This was explained as a temporary move, while repairs were carried out.

Wall Street Market is the second major dark web site in recent weeks to give users a scare.

Many users have renamed their posted products on Wall Street Market to reflect their fears. For example: “Wall street is exit scamming! Find us on Tochka/Empire/Nightmare.” The site has customer support staff, some of whom have apparently been trying to help usersbut others have blackmailed users by threatening to leak their details if new bitcoin payments are not made.

Wall Street Market is the second major dark web site in recent weeks to give users a scare. The other was Dream, the oldest and largest, which announced in late March that it would close by April 30. Those circumstances were less suggestive of an exit scam, because the admins gave users more than a month to withdraw funds before closure. But they did ask users to move to a “partner” site, raising fears that they had been hackedpossibly by law enforcement trying to set up a honey trap.

If Wall Street Market disappears as expected, then these two closures will leave Tochka as the only major dark web marketplace still standing.