Status Update from Avaris PR Staff

Avaris Market has been offline for more than four days at the time of this post. Market administrators are either unable or unwilling to provide a status update. And according to a recent post from an Avaris staff member, the admins are keeping staff in the dark too.

The market went down a little more than four days ago, according to Dark Eye. Avaris_PR, the market’s official representative on Dread, originally blamed maintenance for the downtime (March 5). “We are updating the market, will be online in a couple of hours,” Avaris_PR commented in a thread about working mirrors.

On March 6, the rep acknowledged that many users suspected the market had exit scammed. They had at least one reason to believe the market would return: the market admin(s) had apparently paid for two months of advertisements on Dark Eye, an onion uptime tracker and ad platform.

Avaris_PR:

I’ve bought the Dark Eye ad for 2 months the day before going offline and that is more than 20 bucks… Dark Eye can verify that.

I’m only telling what [admins] tell me and i’m also starting to get nervous now but why would the admin pay over 5xmr a day before an exit.. that’s the only thing why i can’t believe it’s an exit.

Avaris_PR followed up on March 7 in the comments of a post titled “Possible exit scam- Avaris Market” wherein the OP claimed that Avaris admins had kept Avaris_PR in the dark and had provided them with false information.

I confirm this post and we all just have to wait and see what happens. I truly believe this is not a exit… I worked a lot of hours outside the market to help all users, arranging all adverts and you all know that i was there for you guys.

At this time i have to same questions as ya’ll and we can do nothing else then just wait. (sig)

And today–March 9–the Avaris representative posted a thread titled “Avaris Update” that conveyed essentially the same message as the March 7 update.

There is still no contact with the Admins.
Hopefully my next post will have an explanation from them for you but until then we all just have to wait.
It’s way to early to call it a exit scam because nobody know what happened.
Could be anything?! I hope they are safe. (sig)

This is a pattern many darkweb market users have seen dozens of times now. Rarely are a market’s PR employees privy to information about their employer’s decision to exit scam. And defending the market is part of the PR job. It makes sense to defend the market until they are positive the market will not return.

At this point, it does not appear as if the market will be returning. The most obvious explanation is the most simple: the market exit scammed. Most marketplaces shut down as part of an exit scam or the result of a law enforcement operation. Avaris’ smaller user-base (compared to some of the most popular markets) limited the funds available to the market in the event of an exit scam. On the other hand, seizure banners usually show up within a day of a takedown. Regardless of the cause, users will lose (or have already lost) all funds stored in wallets controlled by the markets.

Edit: Removed a paragraph about cryptocurrencies supported by the market.

Avaris_PR PGP Key: txt asc