Avior Market is Exit Scamming

Avior, a darkweb marketplace with a fairly insignificant userbase, is currently exit scamming. In early May, the creator of the market wrote that he had sold the market to a friend and that the friend is responsible for the ongoing exit scam.

KingArcherTheMagnificent (aka PrivateArcherAnthony and another dozen aliases), the creator of Avior, posted the below message in a thread titled “Warning: Avior Market is exit scamming.”

Hello Everyone,

So as many of you know I ran avior for about 8 months and decided to offically sell it to one of my mates who i thought I could trust. But yes, it is true the new admin is locking every vendor out and has deleted most of the avior accounts including my main which i actually gave him I didn’t expect it to go this early with over 30,000 users I thought it could live on much more. I warn all users to not deposit nor use the site as the new admin has fully taken over everything and is trying to cash out as much as possible.

I must admit, Avior was somewhat of a mess that is why i assumed he did so. Even though he is very rich and could’ve made avior way bigger he has decided to not put any of the work in and take a shortcut.

I wanna apologize to everyone who has lost funds in this process, I wanna say I’m sorry I could not continue running avior. It was a mess which now ended even worse then it started. It got too much at one-point and I wanted to focus more on family so i figured selling it to my mate was a good option but I am clearly wrong.

Users are skeptical of the claim made by KingArcherTheMagnificent (Archer) that passed some of the blame to an unidentified party. Users have no reason to believe the statement is true.

It appears as if some of the claims made by the (former?) Avior administrator only hours before the above message directly contradict the transfer of ownership story. One comment, posted in a thread titled “Avior was sold and vendors are now locked out,” explicitly denies these claims. The Avior administrator wrote, “This is completely false. I am still in full control of Avior.”

True or not, the result of the exit scam for the few Avior users who had money sitting in escrow is exactly the same.

It seems unlikely that someone with money would spend between $15,000 and $20,000 * on an insignificant marketplace. To Archer’s credit, there is some evidence that Archer had approached other market administrators about selling the market. DNL has no evidence that any sale actually transpired. The Avior creator also has a history of selling his creations. Before Avior, Archer created the Tape news site as well as a number of similar services.

On April 1, Archer wrote:

I don’t own tape anymore mate, that’s why no stories are posted by “PrivateAnthonyArcher” Anymore, It was sold to hotmilk months ago take it up with him as i have nothing to do with tape.

The part of Archer’s comment that described the mechanics of the exit scam seem accurate, however. The market’s subdread is filled with posts from vendors about account lockouts.

And finally, Dread administrator Paris stickied a post titled “Avior Is Now Marked As EXITED” in the Avior subdread. The post refers to the red warning in the subdread’s sidebar that reflects the current status of the market. Paris wrote, “Let this be a lesson to all market admins. Someone you might think is good to take over might very well crash the ship you built.”

OnionTree.org has marked Avior as “dead” and Onion.Live has added a similar warning on their platform.

* At least one market administrator verified that the owner of Avior had offered to sell the market for no more than $20,000. back