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“The biggest reason I am returning is to make the AlphaBay name be remembered as more than the marketplace which got busted and the founder made out to have committed suicide,” DeSnake writes. Cazes was found dead of an apparent suicide in a Thai jail cell a week after his arrest; like many in the dark web community, DeSnake believes Cazes was murdered in prison. He was driven to rebuild AlphaBay, he says, after reading about an FBI presentation on the circumstances of Cazes’ arrest that he deemed disrespectful.
AlphaBay is noteworthy in the world of darknet markets for accepting another cryptocurrency in addition to bitcoin; support for Monero, supposedly more anonymous, was implemented at the end of August 2016. Additional language analysis reveals other questionable inconsistencies. AlphaBay now only accepts the cryptocurrency Monero, and heavily promotes that users access it via I2P instead of Tor, calling their Tor services “mirrors” to the main I2P eepsite. DeSnake’s detailed instructions for installing I2P on Dread fail to mention the potential risks of peer discovery and de-anonymization through known techniques like Eclipse and Sybil attacks in conjunction with flood-fill takeovers. Interestingly, the last known Monero-I2P-centric market was Liberitas, which went offline in June 2019 after a very short stint on the I2P network.
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In the past we have seen multiple times users do the same thing over and over and over again without any consequences. It took many man hours to deal with few individuals who continued to do things which have not been explicitly disallowed but which affected negatively the productivity of staff. Too many warning points results in account limitation, if the violation is too severe an outright ban by assigning the highest number of warning points. Administration is the same as before but all staff members have been replaced for security reasons. Trusted members have been chosen to be moderators, people which I have verified through business dealings over many years.
- “Alphabay, a #1 darknet market seized by law enforcement four years ago, recently returned,” dark.fail said on Thursday.
- DeSnake joined the conversation, creating an account with his moniker on September 12, 2021 in attempts to mitigate the marketplace’s potential reputation damage.
- DeSnake has broken this mold with their dramatic return to the public eye that included interviews with the media and identity verification through a potentially compromised PGP key.
- Let us know what you think about this subject in the comments section below.
- AlphaBay Featured ListingFour years after the market went down, the Market’s former customers and vendors got a reason to smile.
- Most of AlphaBays’ staff surviving the raids few years back is proof we know what we are talking about.
Of course, everything DeSnake told WIRED may itself be misdirection designed to help him further evade those agencies. DeSnake says his security practices—both the ones he’s applying within AlphaBay and on a personal level—go far beyond those of his predecessor, Cazes, who went by the online handle Alpha02. Cazes was caught, in part, through Bitcoin blockchain analysis that confirmed his role as AlphaBay’s boss, a trick that would be far more difficult, if not impossible, with Monero. DeSnake argues that new safeguards like these will make AlphaBay that much harder to remove from the dark web this time around. “I had given many ‘holy grails’ of anonymity, but he chose to use only certain things while he branded other methods/ways as ‘overkill,’” DeSnake writes, in his seemingly foreign-inflected and occasionally misspelled English.
The Bull from Peru, AlphaBay, & the Dark Web Marketplace
In that case, new users may feel safer in using it as well, thus causing a snowball effect. “Desnake claims there have been 15,000 user accounts created, 450 vendors registered, and over 400 listings published as of the time of writing,” Darkowl’s report finds. A certain profit percentage will be used to finance this project and bring it to life. Providing a viable alternative for the money craving marketplaces or websites created by amateurs.
The products that are most commonly listed for sale include drugs, fake documents, fraud-related items, and hacking services and tools. The prices for these products range from a few dollars to hundreds and thousands of dollars, depending on how valuable the stolen or illegal product is and on how experienced and known the vendor and platform are. CommercialYesRegistrationRequiredUsers400,000+LaunchedSeptember 2014Current statusOfflineAlphaBay is a darknet market operating both as an onion service on the Tor network and as an I2P node on I2P. After it was shut down in July 2017 following law enforcement action in the United States, Canada, and Thailand as part of Operation Bayonet, it was relaunched in August 2021 by the self-described co-founder and security administrator DeSnake. The alleged original founder, Alexandre Cazes, a Canadian citizen born on 19 October 1991, was found dead in his cell in Thailand several days after his arrest, with police suspecting suicide.
Freebies, such as pharmaceuticals for pennies, are already being offered by vendors. Even while this isn’t precisely a red flag, the market is attempting to resurrect a darknet brand name that has had a rocky start. The AlphaBay management however says they want new customers to have a great experience at the darknet market. The “Roadmap” page talks about a darknet market that isn’t controlled by anyone. Alphabay market currently down please choose another market from the darknet markets list.
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After AlphaBay’s shutdown, criminal users and vendors flocked to Hansa Market, where they believed their identities would be masked. Sign up for your risk-free 90-day trial and see how Flashpoint can provide you with the actionable threat intelligence you and your entire team need to identify and respond to threats targeting your organization. When equipped with Flashpoint Intelligence, you have access to collections across illicit online communities ranging from private forums and illicit marketplaces to encrypted chat services channels to gain insight into threat-actor activity on a global scale.
That’s why when we first read about DeSnake’s intention of recreating AlphaBay, we initially thought that this platform could become a safe haven for ransomware operators to differentiate itself from its competitors. The beat-by-beat tale of the takedown of AlphaBay, then the largest dark web market in history, is perhaps the book’s most memorable story. This was key because the agents were worried they wouldn’t be able to get evidence from it if it was shut down and encrypted. In early July, multiple computer servers used by the AlphaBay website were seized worldwide, and the site’s creator and administrator—a 25-year-old Canadian citizen living in Thailand—was arrested.
AlphaBay Is Taking Over the Dark Web—Again
When the site went dark that summer four years ago, thousands of AB users flocked to both Hansa and Dream DNMs. Little did Hansa users know the market had been seized by international law enforcement. The focus was on vendors and buyers who were actively involved in the online trade of illegal commodities including drugs, weapons and explosives, forged documents, and cyber crime tools.
Alvey Chain Introduces World’s First Next-Generation Virtual Reality Multiverse Exchange
Silk Road was shuttered in 2013 after the FBI busted 29-year-old Ross Ulbricht, aka “Dread Pirate Roberts,” in the science fiction section of the Glen Park Branch Library in San Francisco. The Silk Road mastermind is now serving a life sentence in U.S. prison . “I am still in disbelief to this day that he had put his personal email on there,” DeSnake says. AlphaBay has long been rumored to have some sort of connections to Russia or Russians.