On 15th September 2024, it was announced that "Fish Market", formally known as GoFish before it rebranded in early 2024, exit scammed. The announcement was made by the markets lead moderator, 4 days after they announced the market was having technical difficulties relating to downtime.
The post addressing the downtime
Fish was a smaller market that was launched on 8th March 2023 as GoFish.
As usual, other markets were quick to accept refugees after Fish's departure.
"Retard Market", a fake market, can also be seen accepting refugees
/u/Byt3s, the lead moderators of Fish, announced the market had exit scammed in a post titled "The Fish Market is Officially Gone - A Difficult Announcement":
As I'm sure you've all noticed, the market has been down for around 5 days now. When I first saw it had gone offline, I promptly reached out to /u/GoFish (the admin) on Jabber to let him know. Initially, I suspected it might be a DDoS attack that took the main onion down, as we've been a constant target since the superlist announcement. I imagine a lot of other markets face this threat too.
However, this time was a bit different, and unfortunately, for the worse. Some time after the main market onion went down, I became increasingly concerned when the mod panel and private mirrors I had access to also went offline. This was unusual, as those mirrors are typically still accessible even during DDoS attacks. That was my first red flag. At this point, I still hadn't heard back from the admin, and I was left trying to make sense of the extended downtime.
Then I checked my Jabber and that's when I got the confirmation that the market won't be returning. The message I received was extremely vague and It felt like a final goodbye, which was shocking given the progress we’ve made recently. For operational security reasons, I don’t log any of my Jabber messages and wouldn’t feel right sharing it publicly, but the gist was that it seemed a VM server may have been compromised. GoFish mentioned he couldn’t get the volumes back online without potentially exposing encryption keys to a MiTM attack. He followed that up with an apology that it had to end this way.
Read the full, 1000+ word, post here.
Fish's subdread banner
Unrelated News
It appears Darknetlive's server has gone offline:
I chose this as my first article, after my absence, because of it's significance and fascinating nature, lol