Bohemia Market has gone through a number of issues during the past five months. From missing deposits and withdraws to DDoS attacks. After months of trying to fix issue after issue, users are still missing funds.
Bohemia's issues started early July when a large group of deposits started to go missing. A number of users started posting on Dread that their deposits still haven't been credited, even after 2 weeks in some cases, and market support wasn't helping either. On 1st August, one month later, Bohemia posted on Dread that they've "resolved 95% of the missing deposits". However, there were still a large group of Dread users still missing deposits.
Mid July, Bohemia changed their captcha. This caused brief confusion with some users.
Early October, 3 months after the initial issues began, the consensus was that the majority of deposit and withdraw issues were solved. Posts on Dread suggested that tickets and deposits were being handled.
On 3rd October, and numerous other occasions, Bohemia users were met with a white screen when accessing the market, or couldn't get past the captcha. After these issues were fixed, Bohemia stated "withdrawals may be slower during this period due to the predictable influx in withdrawals, however they WILL process just give them some time".
On 13th October Bohemia stated, after a week of patchy access, that they were hit with a DDoS attack and they will provide a emergency mirror soon. Hours later they provide a emergency link and posted:
Understand now that withdrawals will BE SLOW, Merchants will rush to withdrawal and so will buyers. They WILL confirm but might take a longer period of time.
Manual Approval is still required for some merchants/amounts.
As some reports of withdraws not being processed rolled in and some users missing up to $10,000, Bohemia posted:
When you withdraw the funds and it disappears from your page, just know its been queued into the system to be processed. Any higher amounts will require admin approval as per standard.
By late October, there were numerous reports of missing withdraws and Cannabia, a cannabis only market run by Bohemia, was offline. Bohemia claimed Cannabia "will be worked on as soon as we finish on bohemia".
By November there were 20+ confirmed vendors who have withdraws of up to $90,000 missing.
On 13th November HugBunter, the administrator of Dread, posted a site-wide announcement about Bohemia:
As of right now, Bohemia is still experiencing some serious issues with their Withdrawals, while the rest of the site remains functional, which means of course, money is going in and not all of it is making it back out.
Now, usually this is a sign of an exit scam and that becomes clear pretty quickly, but with how long this has been going on and with a lot of reports of large amounts of money making it back to vendors, it could go either way.
I think it is justified right now to put out this warning, so at the very least users are wary of it, but I do believe Bohemia is attempting to rectify everything.
Across Dread you can find many posts regarding missing or failed withdrawals from the market, but there is seemingly just as many posts stating they were able to retrieve their funds, it would be great if users could leave a comment below with their own experience so we can see the scope of the problems at hand.
Read the full announcement here.
On 17th November, Bohemia claimed that "we have checked a LOT of the missing deposits and they are to old addresses which we have migrated from. We will make every effort to recover them but in some cases we cannot recover them. We also acknowledge there are missing deposits to correct addresses and we will recover those". Bohemia's subdread was locked at this time.
On 19th November, in a post titled "What's Happened vs What's Happening", Bohemia posted a update explaining their lead developer had gone rogue and started to steal funds from the market.
Click to read announcement
In a shameful and disgruntled set of events, our lead developer quite simply decided to go "rogue" and choose their own path by slowly and passively withdrawing small amounts of BTC over a prolonged period of time from several accounts which had been pre-created and loaded with small BTC balances. This activity (to our knowledge after concluding our investigations, lasted for a little over a month).
Once the activity in question was brought to light and subsequently admitted by this particular developer, they were instantly terminated from the site and all operations thereafter. What we didn't know at this time was that several other accounts had been pre-created by this individual and again loaded with false BTC balances from within the database, of which the credentials were evidently retained as the accounts were accessed and emptied shortly after their departure, which triggered new security measures we had already implemented for accounts making withdraws without prior deposit / order history (as there's no plausible way for their balance to exist) . The amounts were not incredibly substantial but it did warrant an injection of funds into the site to help mitigate the losses at hand.
This chain of events, coupled with the recent price increase of BTC has been an extremely difficult situation to manage to say the least, which is the sole and primary reason why withdraws have been taking a little longer to process (hence why we've taken the necessary steps to stagger withdrawals and implement a daily withdraw limit to help balance things out). We have been processing withdrawals as quick as feasibly possible without unintentionally sinking the ship.
As mentioned by /u/HugBunter in his concerning yet completely warranted announcement post, vendors and users alike have reported that they have received their withdraws even if they've had to wait a little. Hopefully this will provide some clarity to the situation and that we are categorically NOT going anywhere.
Bohemia stated that user funds are safe and they have a plan to solve withdraw issues. Read the full announcement here.
On 22nd November, Bohemia announced their plan to disable use of BTC for a short period of time to clear the queue of outstanding withdraws and dormant balances. All BTC balances would remain untouched and outstanding withdraws will be canceled and returned to the users balance. Users have the option to exchange their BTC balance to XMR on site or wait for the re-implementation of BTC and withdraw their BTC balance when this happens. Read the full announcement here.
Fast forward to December and vendors are still missing withdraws of up to $60,000. Cannabia is back online, but times-out when accessed.
The general consensus is to avoid Bohemia until all issues are solved.
another shitty market exit scams