In messages to WIRED, AlphaBay’s new boss describes having lived in the former USSR, and he previously wrote Russian-language messages to users on the original AlphaBay’s forums. Dark web marketplaces are a platform for trading illicit products on a small and large scale. 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. Much like Silk Road, AlphaBay was hosted on the dark web, and facilitated the sale and purchase of illegal goods, mostly drugs and hacking tools.
If that AlphaGuard feature doesn’t sound aspirational enough, DeSnake says he’s also in the early stages of a long-term plan to implement a fully decentralized marketplace system, essentially a BitTorrent to the current dark web markets’ Napster. In that hyper-ambitious plan, open source programmers and server operators who independently run hundreds or thousands of servers would be paid a portion of profits for hosting markets that would form a vast dark web network with no single point of failure. While DarkOwl generally avoids engaging in or commenting on speculative darknet drama, there are several things about the re-emergence of AlphaBay and DeSnake that don’t add up. While DeSnake very well could be legitimate, the sheer fact the authorities confiscated the market’s servers and Cazes’s unencrypted laptop should bring significant suspicion whether this new darknet marketplace is legitimate, or simply another covert law enforcement operation. The new AlphaBay market’s Tor service has been unstable since its launch, with frequent 503 errors, user registration issues, and login timeouts. 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.
Dark Web App
When AlphaBay became inaccessible as a result, thousands of its buyers and vendors flocked to the then law enforcement-ran Hansa market to continue their operations. Dutch police, operating servers across the Netherlands, Lithuania, and Germany, capitalized on the eight-fold surge of users visiting the market in the weeks following. 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. The marketplaces are usually managed by an admin or a small group of admins, and the typical users of the marketplaces are cybercriminals who search for illegal products online that will help their own illicit activities. Greenberg managed to interview an impressive number of law enforcement agents, who helped him tell the story of these high-profile investigations from the inside. 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.
Camille Habel, a sergeant with the Royal Canadian Mounted Police’s high-technology crime unit, confirmed to the Journal that the unit executed a search warrant in Trois-Rivières, Quebec on the same day that Cazes was arrested in Thailand. When WIRED reached out to Justice Department officials, including one who participated in the original investigation of AlphaBay that resulted in its 2017 takedown, they either didn’t respond or declined to comment. Of course, everything DeSnake told WIRED may itself be misdirection designed to help him further evade those agencies. To avoid the risk of his PC being grabbed while he’s logged in to AlphaBay, DeSnake says he also shuts it down entirely every time he steps away from it, even to take a bathroom break. “Biggest issue in that regard is the human needs … I would say that is the biggest inconvenience,” DeSnake writes. “You make sacrifices. Though once you get used to it, it becomes second nature.”
Alphabay Onion
They’re established,” said Ian Gray, senior director of research and analysis at Flashpoint. “They were brought in because they had technical skills.” Gray said he verified the encryption key that DeSnake provided as proof of his identity. “Critics will say that as we shutter one site, another will emerge, and they may be right,” Andrew G. McCabe, the acting director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, said on Thursday.
- In October 2015, it was recognized as the largest online darknet market according to Dan Palumbo, research director at Digital Citizens Alliance.
- If that AlphaGuard feature doesn’t sound aspirational enough, DeSnake says he’s also in the early stages of a long-term plan to implement a fully decentralized marketplace system, essentially a BitTorrent to the current dark web markets’ Napster.
- However, after Cazes was held for exactly a week at the Narcotics Suppression Bureau in Bangkok, reports of his apparent suicide surfaced.
- Some of these opportunistic markets quickly shut their doors, while others were scams to take advantage of buyers looking for new places to purchase illegal goods.
Cazes is arrested in Bangkok at his dwelling at Phutthamonthon Sai 3 Road in Thawi Watthana district which is searched by the Royal Thai Police, with the help of the FBI and DEA. Cazes’ statements about the goal of the site — “launched in September 2014 and its goal is to become the largest eBay-style underworld marketplace” — helped to legally establish intent. Assets acquired through proceeds were held in a variety of accounts directly linked to Cazes, his wife and companies they owned in Thailand , as well as directly held personal accounts in Liechtenstein, Cyprus, Switzerland and Antigua. The servers contained multiple constantly open hot cryptocurrency wallets. When Cazes was arrested, he was logged into his laptop performing an administrative reboot on an AlphaBay server in direct response to a law-enforcement-created artificial system failure; furthermore, encryption was wholly absent on that laptop. At the time of its demise in July 2017, AlphaBay had over 400,000 users.
2023 Working Darknet Market
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 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.
Furthermore, there is a ban on discussions of any public or private information related to the governments, organizations, or people of Russia, Belarus, Kazakhstan, Armenia, and Kyrgyzstan. This has led to loose speculation that there is a connection between the site operators and the governments of these nations. Details of the new operation surfaced after a conversation between Wired and a user with the same verified public key as a former site administrator for AlphaBay. Using the alias DeSnake, the former vendor and self-described co-founder of the original AlphaBay now claims to operate the marketplace, placing a higher emphasis on operations security than the previous administration, stating “there is no overkill” regarding the site. 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.
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I’m very curious to see over the coming days and weeks how users react to the news. The drug community is naturally a little bit more skittish than the fraud community, and I think we will see them more openly discuss their intentions for next steps. The question now remains whether or not the vendors who were trading in non-drug related goods move on to the remaining major markets or if we begin to see a major fraud-related (not just carding-related) market take shape. As DeSnake describes it, AlphaGuard will automatically rent and set up new servers if it detects that AlphaBay’s are being taken offline.