Update: Incognito Market is Extorting Vendors and Buyers
Read our article about it here.
End update
On 28th February, a few Incognito Market vendors reported missing withdraws. 6 days later, on 6th March, vendors were locked out of crucial market features and missing all withdraws. Incognito is currently online and exit scamming.
1 Week Earlier
On 19th February, just 1 week before their exit, Incognito's bitcoin withdraws and deposits stopped working. Users reported that their monero wallets on the market worked fine, but bitcoin deposits and withdraws were taking up to 30 hours to process.
2 days later, Incognito staff fixed the issue. This event was the reason some users were initially not concerned when withdraws stopped working 1 week later.
Initial Reports
On 28th February, some vendors reported withdraws missing for up to 2 days. Withdraws would be marked as completed but the transaction id provided by the market would not show up on the blockchain and funds were missing.
Incognito staff responded to the reports:
Funds are spread too thin since we implemented unique permanent addresses, our system has a guard that prevents blockchain fees from eating up more than 10% of your withdrawal. It automatically rebroadcasts and waits until a good tx fee per byte before reconstructing a new transaction (hence the txid changes until it is confirmed).
Withdraw issues continued.
On 2nd March, Incognito announced they were soon adding the cryptocurrencies ETH and DAI to the market.
It's possible this was done to create an excuse for the missing withdraws and other issues the market appeared to be facing.
Exit Scam
5 days after the initial reports, on 4th March, withdraw issues continued and reports of market features being disabled started to arise. The following market features were disabled:
- Bitcoin and monero withdraws.
- Sending messages.
- Deleting and disabling listings.
- Activating vendor vacation mode.
- Editing vendor profiles.
However, creating new accounts and depositing still worked fine.
The same day, Incognito staff responded to withdraw issues in a post titled "Atomic Withdrawal Wallets Online":
We have made changes to our withdrawal systems, crypto wallets are now running as multiple clustered servers instead of a centralized wallet. We hope that by increasing the capacity of throughput, we can handle much heavier withdrawal and deposit demand, while preparing for the launch of stablecoin and Ethereum integration.
Please note that the initial stages of this upgrade may briefly affect usability in the first few days since the servers are multitasking on both old data synchronization and new requests.
And to keep it as transparent as always in light of the ever-existing FUDs, there are currently 154 withdrawals both BTC and XMR that are in queue for processing, which is approximately 3% of total number of withdrawals submitted in the last 24 hours. Please bear with us for a moment, the coins will arrive, as they always do and always have been.
Our team aims to launch the major interface and currency upgrade before our three year anniversary.
In a post titled "INCOGNITO WITHDRAWAL ISSUES", Incognito staff responded to the withdraw issues again:
When questioned about why messaging on the market wasn't working, they responded:
1 day later, on 5th March, one of the administrators of Dread made a post titled "Incognito 100% Exit Scam - AVOID NOW":
It is well known that Incognito purchased DarkNetLive and previously I have mentioned to Pharoah that if and when he decides to shut down, it would be great if he could hand over the domain in the process to ensure it isn't used maliciously. I've been talking to him back and fourth the past few hours and got to the point where I told him a warning is going live, to which his response was to try and bribe me to take Dread down or wipe all posts regarding Incognito, in return he will hand over DNL. Big mistake, he of all people should know I can't be bought and I won't hesitate to confirm the exit.
Darknetlive's Involvement
On 4th March, Darknetlive, which is owned by Incognito, disabled comments on all articles. This was presumably done to stop users from commenting about the ongoing exit scam.
1 day later, Darknetlive posted an article titled "HugBunter's Attempt to Smear Two Birds with One Stone":
Hugbunter (Dread administrator) and the team behind DrugsHub (formerly exit scammed White House Market) has decided to launch a joint smear campaign on both Incognito Market and Darknetlive. See how Hugbunter vouched for Darknetlive after the transfer to the new team, his PGP-signed vouch below. It is easy to come to the conclusion that Hugbunter has alternative motive behind the recent accusations.
Read HugBunter's signed message here.
Incognito staff posted a link to the article on Dread.
Incognito's Other Projects
The Incognito team also run Libre forum, Darknetlive, SecTor.City email and Antinalysis exchange. All of these sites, except Darknetlive, have gone offline.
I don't accept bribes under $100,000