For whatever reason, some people aren’t satisfied with buying their drugs through their local dealer, despite everyone claiming to want to support local businesses these days. Instead, many people turn to the internet for their drugs, which kinda makes sense — we buy everything else online these days, so why not drugs?


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Ironically, the owner of the largest darknet drug market has provided us with a perfect example of why buying drugs online might not be the best idea. Earlier this month, the admin behind Incognito Market seized all of their users’ money, and has now followed up with threats of extortion. If users, including dealers who sold on the market, don’t pay fees that range anywhere from $100 to $20,000, the admin will release transaction and chat records that could potentially identify buyers.


A message posted to the site describes it as a “nasty surprise” and, in case things weren’t clear, includes the line, “Yes, this is an extortion!!!”


Part of the problem seems to be that many customers relied on the “auto-encrypt” feature, as well as the fact that site admins didn’t delete chat and transaction histories after they were meant to have expired. These two things would suggest this has been planned for quite some time.



The message also says admins plan to publish the dump of 557,000 orders and 862,000 cryptocurrency transaction IDs at the end of May. Linked is a “payment status” page that shows which vendors have paid the extortion fees and thus “care about their customers.”


Only time will tell whether or not the site admins follow through on their threats; watch this space come May, I guess. The general rule of thumb when dealing with extortion is that paying the blackmailers once is unlikely to get them to give up; there’s literally nothing stopping them from blackmailing you a second time even if they’ve said otherwise. You weren’t expecting people who run an illegal online drug marketplace to be scrupulous and upstanding citizens, were you?