Alphabay Market – A Dark Web Marketplace Is Down And Users Suspect Foul Play

All substance listings from the cryptomarket Agora were recorded over seven time points throughout February and March 2015. Agora was chosen due to its size as the second largest cryptomarket operating and the level of detail of information provided in individual substance listings. Data were collated and the number of unique sellers selling each substance by country of origin was analysed. To date monitoring of cryptomarkets operating on the dark net has largely focused on market size and substance availability. Less is known of country specific differences in these indicators and how they may corroborate population prevalence estimates for substance use in different countries.

  • Numbers of sellers by country of origin appear to be influenced by several factors.
  • AlphaBay Market, one of the largest Dark Web marketplaces for drugs, guns, and other illegal goods, suddenly disappeared overnight without any explanation from its admins, leaving its customers who have paid large sums in panic.
  • Vendors are advised to leave their profile to public to enable customers to make a more informed decision.
  • By purchasing from vendors on our marketplace, you generate profit percentage of which is used to fund the decentralized network.
  • DeSnake claims the new market is extremely secure and has safeguards against disruptions caused by hardware failure, police raids, or seizures.
  • Ideally the decentralized network would be up making any LE near impossible to actually disrupt operations.

The authorities used the time to gather information on high value targets and identified delivery addresses for sizable orders, passing along 10,000 international addresses of buyers to Europol. Our end goal is to create a fully autonomous, decentralized and anonymous network which can support the creation of a marketplace ‘brand’ by anyone. We will create an ‘AlphaBay’ market on that network and migrate our community, giving users and vendors ability to buy, sell and trade in a decentralized manner.

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One of these, AlphaBay Market, was the most prominent and popular darknet market since the Silk Road. At its height, AlphaBay’s daily sales ranged between $600,000 and $800,000 USD across 300,000 listings for illicit goods, offered by over 40,000 vendors and viewed by some 200,000 users. Criminals use such marketplaces to buy and sell illegal products, such as drugs, counterfeit goods, computer hacking tools, firearms, fraudulent services, and stolen and fraudulent identification documents and access devices. In just three years of operations, from 2014 to 2017, criminals transacted an estimated$1 billion.

Further information on the operation against the Hansa Market can be obtained from Dutch authorities. On August 6, 2021, former AlphaBay security administrator “DeSnake” announced that AlphaBay Market had relaunched. The original AlphaBay, founded by Alexandre Cazes (aka “Alpha02”) in September 2014, was taken down by law enforcement’s Operation Bayonet in July 2017.

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But as part of “Operation Bayonet,” spearheaded by the FBI and the EU’s law enforcement agency, Europol, authorities in mid-2017 took down the site, Thai police arrested Cazes, who was later found dead in his jail cell. An average of 14,456.7 substance listings were identified across sampled days from 868.7 unique sellers. The top five countries by number of listings were the USA, United Kingdom, Australia, China and the Netherlands, collectively accounting for 61.8% of all identified listings and 68% of all unique sellers. Australia was over represented in terms of sellers per capita, while China was over represented in new psychoactive substance listings. When examined by number of listings per seller, the Netherlands and China stood out as particularly large, likely due to these countries’ role in the local production of various illicit and new psychoactive substances.

alphabay market

Developed from scratch and battle-tested for years AlphaGuard which ensures even if seizures happen on all servers, users will be able to withdraw their funds, settle disputes and leave without a cent lost. AlphaGuard and its systems can not be detected by LE to be taken down and even if they were, there are ‘sleeping cells’ which will make sure the core objectives of the program are fulfilled. AlphaBay has been relaunched by DeSnake in August 2021 with a new design but with the same admin as before, and is once again plan to become the biggest darknet market in history.

Between January 1st, 2020 and March 21, 2020, successful deliveries represented 60% to 100% of transactions. Starting on March 21 however, the share of shipments that had issues or failed increased rapidly and represented a majority of all shipments. At the peak of the market disruption, the successful deliveries represented only 21% of all transactions.

Darknet Market List

At the time of its demise in July 2017, AlphaBay had over 400,000 users. The authorities have moved quickly to seize Mr. Cazes’ significant assets, including properties in Antigua, Cyprus and Thailand; 10 vehicles, including a Lamborghini and a Porsche; and financial assets of about $18 million. On Thursday, visitors to AlphaBay and Hansa Market found messages from the authorities announcing the seizure of the sites. The site recently come under scrutiny because many of its vendors sell synthetic opioids, like fentanyl, which play a central role in the nationwide overdose epidemic. Learn how to use I2P and you will be able to find AlphaBay always online.

alphabay market

In addition we want to use our experience in counter-surveillance, counter-signal intelligence and operational security knowledge to teach users, vendors and future darknet admins what they could do to keep themselves and their lives free from Law Enforcement. Most of AlphaBays’ staff surviving the raids few years back is proof we know what we are talking about. Private sub-forums are back, this time extending to communities like hacking, carding etc. to replace the recent demise of famous underground forums. If you are a advanced/elite individual and want to share a private discussion board with other members of your statue to exchange ideas, code, data or simply to do business, any of our private, vetted and verified members only sub-communities are for you. Namely the infamous VXcode – our private malware sub-community will be restarted with a few members already in who previously survived the raids and continued operating independently, all making the argument for such communities being stronger and more vital to the scene. To make the launch of VXcode even more interesting we will be dropping an updated source code of a famous banking trojan for everyone to enjoy as well as the story of how the feds tried to pin the creation of that malware on me.

The sample consists of 591 valid self-reports that were received between January 1st, 2020 and August 21st, 2020. The descriptive market share statistics indicate that the vendor with the highest proportion of market share throughout the period of study earned no more than 3.13% of the total market. Table 7 supports this inference by illustrating the results of the HHI on the concentration of market shares for the drug market.

After almost two months of operation, the market has a handful of vendors, with only a couple of hundred listings across drugs and fraud goods. DeSnake claims there have been 15,000 user accounts created, 450 vendors registered, and over 400 listings published as of the time of writing. AlphaBay reportedly launched in September 2014, pre-launched in November 2014 and officially launched on December 22, 2014.