Borrowing from the playbook of ransomware purveyors, the darknet narcotics bazaar Incognito Market has begun extorting all of its vendors and buyers, threatening to publish cryptocurrency transaction and chat records of users who refuse to pay a fee ranging from $100 to $20,000.
An extortion message currently on the Incognito Market homepage.
In the past 24 hours, the homepage for the Incognito Market was updated to include a blackmail message from its owners, saying they will soon release purchase records of vendors who refuse to pay to keep the records confidential.
We'll be publishing the entire dump of 557k orders and 862k crypto transaction IDs at the end of May, whether or not you and your customers' info is on that list is totally up to you.
The mass-extortion of Incognito Market users comes just days after a large number of users reported they were no longer able to withdraw funds from their buyer or seller accounts.
The cryptocurrency-focused publication Cointelegraph.com reported Mar. 6 that Incognito was exit-scamming its users out of their bitcoins and Monero deposits.
CoinTelegraph notes that Incognito Market administrators initially lied about the situation, and blamed users' difficulties in withdrawing funds on recent changes to Incognito's withdrawal systems.
Incognito Market deals primarily in narcotics, so it's likely many users are now worried about being outed as drug dealers.
Creating a new account on Incognito Market presents one with an ad for 5 grams of heroin selling for $450. New Incognito Market users are treated to an ad for $450 worth of heroin.
The double whammy now hitting Incognito Market users is somewhat akin to the double extortion techniques employed by many modern ransomware groups, wherein victim organizations are hacked, relieved of sensitive information and then presented with two separate ransom demands: One in exchange for a digital key needed to unlock infected systems, and another to secure a promise that any stolen data will not be published or sold, and will be destroyed.
Level 1 vendors can supposedly have their information removed by paying a $100 fee.
The past is replete with examples of similar darknet market exit scams, which tend to happen eventually to all darknet markets that aren't seized and shut down by federal investigators, said Brett Johnson, a convicted and reformed cybercriminal who built the organized cybercrime community Shadowcrew many years ago.
This Cyber News was published on krebsonsecurity.com. Publication date: Mon, 11 Mar 2024 16:25:28 +0000