“Dark0de Reborn” Exit Scammed
Dark0de Reborn exit scammed.
According to DarkDotFail, Dark0de Reborn exit scammed. That is largely all there is to it as far as I know. It appears as if the market simply vanished. Which is fairly boring as far as exit scams go. It is worth noting that Dark0de Reborn had no relation to the original Dark0de forum which law enforcement seized in 2015.
Users of the review section on the Darknetlive marketplace page for Dark0de claimed the market exit scammed last week.
Sorry for the delays in approving reviews.
Someone on Twitter claimed that their marketplace password changed last week and they had used Dark0de’s official link.
It is obviously smart to write this kind of stuff on Twitter.
If Dark0de had some massive OPSEC failure, I do not think it was public knowledge. So it might have been a general exit scam. It has been a long time since we have had a chaotic and fascinating exit scam such as the Nightmare Market exit scam wherein someone had hacked the market and was toying with users and staff.
Someone recently pointed out to me that Dark0de seemed large due to their inflated presence on forums and websites with banner ads but actually had fewer transactions than some of the markets that do not have as much of a presence on the internet. Most markets fake the number of users and listings on their platform. One of the best metrics for comparing marketplace transaction volume is looking at the transaction counts of vendors with profiles on multiple marketplaces. This is a flawed method for obvious reasons but works for my purposes.
The website dark0demarketlink[dot]com seemed like one of the many sites set up to either direct users to phishing links or profit off affiliate links. However, all the links on the site appear legitimate and the listed address for Dark0de (which was not a hyperlink) matched the official address. The site’s hyperlink to darknetlive.com was apparently still alive in February 2022 but it is now offline. (archive.org) I have no idea if the site is connected to Dark0de at all. It resembles many fraudulent sites but appeared to provide only accurate information. In fairness, from what I have seen, market administrators running clearnet sites make more mistakes when operating unrelated projects from the same server. Or, even when running them from different servers but using the same parts of a stylesheet. Partially custom and partially copied from some random project on Github.
DDF Tweet (nitter): archive.is/onion
I really have nothing here. What a boring exit scam.