The sale of such drugs on AlphaBay was detailed in a front-page article in The New York Times last month. 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.
The international exercise to seize AlphaBay’s servers also involved authorities in Thailand, Lithuania, Canada, Britain and France. “The takedown of AlphaBay is significant, but it’s a bit of a whac-a-mole,” said Frank Cilluffo, director of the Center for Cyber and Homeland Security at George Washington University. The move struck a blow to an international drug trade that has increasingly moved online in recent years, though some experts thought its impact would be limited. Log in to your Bitdefender account and manage security for what matters. He said that European authorities took “covert control” of Hansa a month ago with permission of Dutch judicial authorities before AlphaBay was shut down.
Dark Web Websites
Several markets—such as Wall Street or Trade Route, which offer stolen databases and identity theft data among other goods—are experimenting in other crypto coins, such as Monero. Dark web buyers and vendors haven’t exactly flocked back to AlphaBay since its return. A few weeks into the relaunch, it has just under 500 listings, compared to more than 350,000 at AlphaBay’s 2017 peak. Those low numbers likely stem from DeSnake’s insistence on accepting only Monero, from skeptical dark web users waiting to see if the new AlphaBay is legitimate, and from a barrage of distributed denial-of-service attacks that have knocked the site offline since its launch. But DeSnake argues that dark web markets typically gain an influx of new users only when another popular market shuts down or is busted by law enforcement; neither has happened since AlphaBay came back.
DeSnake claims to be located in a non-extradition country, beyond the reach of US law enforcement. 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.
Asap Market Url
It was suspected as an exit scam; however, a few days after it had gone offline, it was revealed that AlphaBay had been seized and alpha02, aka Alexander Cazes, was caught. The marketplace has over 8,400 listings and 500 vendors who communicate in English and accept Bitcoin for transactions. Access to AlphaBay ceased at the same time as Mr. Cazes’s arrest, but the authorities did not immediately take credit for the operation, and some AlphaBay administrators said they were working to get the site back up. “With all of that said you decide for yourself whether you ride the wave with us to the top and beyond,” he wrote in a message to users on the dark web market forum Dread.
- As DeSnake describes it, AlphaGuard will automatically rent and set up new servers if it detects that AlphaBay’s are being taken offline.
- Bryan Connor Herrell, a 25-year-old from Fresno, California, pleaded guilty this week in the US to racketeering charges related to the now-defunct dark web marketplace Alphabay.
- Cazes was logged on to AlphaBay at the time of his arrest, allowing authorities to find his passwords and other information about the site’s servers, according to legal documents.
- Some users claim that mr_white and his team from WHM are to blame for last week’s DDoS while others speculate that HugBunter himself could be mr_white.
- Never share passwords and keep an eye on bank accounts for suspicious activity.
Kingdom Market is a newer darknet market that has been around since April 2021 but was only recently vetted for listing on Dread, the pre-eminent forum for markets on the dark web. It features a unique site design unlike any other market yet is still intuitive and easy to use. Conspicuously absent are some preferred features, such as the lack of per-order purchases, a multi-sig option for BTC payments, and forced PGP encryption for communications. It makes up for this with enhanced security and user safety features, helping users to assure they are not getting phished. The sites operated on the Tor network, which helps users browse the internet anonymously.
Dark Web Credit Card
As part of their compensation, certain CoinDesk employees, including editorial employees, may receive exposure to DCG equity in the form of stock appreciation rights, which vest over a multi-year period. CoinDesk journalists are not allowed to purchase stock outright in DCG. Ohio resident Larry Dean Harmon, 36, has been charged with laundering more than $300 million in bitcoin for darknet marketplace AlphaBay. A judge in Atlanta, Georgia, has sentenced Aaron James Glende, a hacker known as IcyEagle, to four years and two months in prison, followed by three years of supervised release, for selling access to stolen bank accounts and others, via the AlphaBay Dark Web marketplace.
But it’s also important to remember that law enforcement investigations take time. As it turned out, that anonymous tipster who cold-emailed a DEA agent in Fresno about the identity of AlphaBay’s founder had the right man. But the investigators still had to pull all the threads and fingerprints left on the blockchain and the internet before going after Cazes.
Furthermore, darknet users rarely draw so much attention to themselves. 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. DarkOwl could not confirm any prior darknet experience from the moderators DeSnake has installed as Staff on the market and forum. The DDoS protection and bot detection measures are excessive for a brand new marketplace. While navigating the domain manually, DarkOwl analysts regularly had to reset their Tor circuit and refresh their identity to simply view the vendor listings.
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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. DeSnake, by contrast, makes the very bold claim that his work PC could not implicate him even if seized.But all of those technical and operational protections may matter less than a simple geographic one.
A senior member from the carding community Ranklez claimed he had evidence to suggest Cazes wasn’t alpha02. Ranklez and alpha02 had a history in the carding community as Ranklez sold alpha02 fullz for conducting identity theft. They worked closely with a “security administrator” and second in command known as DeSnake, or simply “DS” for short. According to our historical darknet records, DeSnake had connections in Russia although his true identity and location was not publicly known.
Bryan Connor Herrell, a 25-year-old from Colorado, was sentenced to 11 years of prison time for acting as a moderator on the dark web marketplace AlphaBay. Additional language analysis reveals other questionable inconsistencies. In early August 2021, DeSnake resurfaced on Dread, the popular Reddit-like discussion forum on the darknet administrated and moderated by users, Hugbunter and Paris. Dread staff “vouched” for DeSnake to skeptical darknet users with DeSnake signing documents using their historical PGP key.