AlphaBay, Biggest Online Drug Bazaar, Goes Dark, and Questions Swirl

SAN FRANCISCO — The largest online black market for drugs, AlphaBay, has been down for nearly two days, raising questions about whether it was seized by law enforcement authorities or taken down in a swindle.

The administrators of AlphaBay have posted on the social network Reddit that they are doing maintenance and that the site should be up again soon. But those messages were posted long after AlphaBay went down on Tuesday, leading to rampant speculation among its users.

The site is one of many so-called dark net markets that came into existence after American authorities took down the first and most famous such market, the Silk Road, in 2013.

AlphaBay has come under scrutiny most recently because of the many vendors who use it to sell the deadly synthetic opioids at the center of the nation’s overdose crisis. The site is also used as a marketplace for stolen credit cards and other financial data.

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Researchers say that AlphaBay has grown into the largest black market site by far.

The site was hosting $600,000 to $800,000 in transactions daily earlier this year, according to unpublished statistics from Nicolas Christin, an associate research professor at Carnegie Mellon University who has written many papers about the scale of such sites. Those figures would make AlphaBay about twice as large as the Silk Road when it was shut down in October 2013.

Operators of other large black market sites have absconded with user deposits and shut the sites, in what are known as exit scams.

In some cases, the authorities, in so-called honeypot operations, have taken down black market sites, then reopened them to get more information about users.

Federal authorities have not commented on, or taken responsibility for, AlphaBay’s being down. When the authorities took down the Silk Road they quickly put up a banner on the site alerting users to the operation.

AlphaBay users have flocked to Reddit to speculate about what happened and express concern about their drug supplies and deposits on the site.

“At least if it was a verified exit scam people could write off their btc as gone and plan accordingly,” one user wrote, using an abbreviation for Bitcoin. “I think it’s not not knowing that drives so many people crazy.”

The speculation escalated after Canadian news media reported on a raid and arrests in Quebec that were said to target people involved in online black markets.

The Royal Canadian Mounted Police did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

AlphaBay and other sites have gone offline before because of maintenance problems and attacks by hackers, and have then come back online. One of AlphaBay’s longtime administrators, who uses the screen name trappy_AB, wrote on Reddit that that was the case this week.

“I have been in touch with our devs and admins and they are working to restore AlphaBay as soon as possible,” he wrote, using shorthand terms for developers and administrators.

Users were skeptical about why the site’s administrators had been so late in posting information.

“Telling us 1 minute after it goes down would be fine. It literally took him like 28hrs,” a user named yellow_viper wrote on Reddit.

AlphaBay is only accessible through dark web browsers, which scramble the location of users and site operators, making it all but impossible for the authorities to identify the whereabouts of the servers hosting a specific site.

Users pay for goods with virtual currencies like Bitcoin, which cannot be easily tracked by financial institutions or law enforcement.

The authorities took down the Silk Road because its creator, Ross Ulbricht, accidentally revealed his real email address in an early online post about the site. Mr. Ulbricht is now serving a life sentence in prison for his role as the kingpin of the worldwide digital drug-trafficking enterprise.

AlphaBay operates much like eBay, hosting vendors who offer their wares and pay a commission to the site on each purchase. Customers deposit money with the site before making purchases. This is the money the operators could have stolen.

In 2015, the operators of the marketplace known as Evolution closed the site and took millions of dollars of users’ money.

Other sites have been taken down by law enforcement agencies in various countries using sophisticated techniques to unmask the operators’ anonymity.

In recent months, authorities in the United States have arrested several large vendors on AlphaBay who had sold synthetic opioids like fentanyl and U-47700.

In April, police arrested a couple in Greenville, S.C., who were allegedly connected to a popular vendor on AlphaBay known as PeterTheGreat. An 18-year-old in Portland, Ore., died after taking U-47700 that she bought from PeterTheGreat on AlphaBay, the authorities said.

When large dark net markets have gone down in the past, the transactions have quickly moved to other sites. AlphaBay currently has many large competitors, including sites like Valhalla and Dream Market.

Luke Rodeheffer, a cybercrime analyst with Flashpoint, said that criminals around the web were buzzing about the problems at AlphaBay.

“Given that a number of Eastern European cybercriminals use AlphaBay as a marketplace, the down status is already being discussed on top-tier Russian forums,” he said.

“No one has any particular insights into the cause,” he added.

source : https://www.nytimes.com/2017/07/06/business/dealbook/alphabay-online-drug-bazaar-goes-dark.html