sheep marketplace
sheep marketplace rose to prominence after the fbi shut down the illegal silk road marketplace in october .
divulging the information gleaned from the anonymous hacker. it turns out the unnamed marketplace was sheep marketplace .
sheep marketplace scam scheme figured out. scammer working together with bitcoin tumbling service .
nearly a month before sheep marketplace shut down, its alleged creator was doxed .
silk road - like sheep marketplace scams users; over 39k bitcoins worth $ 40 million ...
what do you think about the sheep marketplace operators facing jail time? let us know in the comments below .
it would be shutting down due to an inability to absorb a massive influx of new users leaving sheep marketplace .
even before the mysterious leaker’s help, branwen smelled something fishy with the goings - on at sheep marketplace. “the veriest google search [ of sheep marketplace ] would turn up that clearnet site, ” wrote branwen in his reddit post
though sheep marketplace calls the thief a vendor, and though the site was a drug marketplace, lichtman denies that gibson and mackert were either drug dealers or even buying drugs .
as a side effect of the sheep marketplace heist and shutdown, another silk road competitor, blackmarket reloaded, has closed doors, claiming the site wouldn' t be able to sustain the migration of users and vendors from sheep marketplace .
in another deep web related news, the south moravian law enforcement agency is charging tomáš jiřikovský, the owner of sheep marketplace with the theft of millions of dollars’ worth of bitcoin. tomáš jiřikovský was arrested last year for his role in enabling drug trade over sheep marketplace .
dark net market sheep marketplace has shut down after $ 5. 3m (£3. 3m) in bitcoins was stolen from the site .
it is not the first time people are accused of stealing bitcoins from sheep marketplace. not too long ago, two men from florida were
sheep marketplace closed down over the weekend after someone got away with 96, 000 bitcoins - and angry users are chasing him around the internet .
the sheep marketplace, like the silk road, was accessible via the tor network and let people buy drugs and other illegal items through its pages .
, but thought he could do branwen one better: he would provide evidence that sheep marketplace was created by tomáš jiřikovský, an accused bitcoin scammer .
sheep marketplace, one of the two most prominent silk road competitors, went down on saturday. a message briefly posted on the site on saturday claimed that one of sheep marketplace' s vendors exploited a security flaw and stole 5, 400 btc ($ 6 million at its current value) .
sheep marketplace has 14 categories of goods that users can browse. one of their biggest categories is drugs, which has upwards of 850 products available, like
sheep marketplace, one of the leading anonymous websites, after silk road ’s closure by u. s. prosecutors, allegedly selling drugs, has gone ...
on the sheep marketplace subreddit, acknowledging that he / she was now convinced the sheep was a scam. the new theory: a couple of vendors had slashed drug prices like infomercial salesmen right around the time the site started experiencing technical difficulties .
users of online underground bazaar sheep marketplace are trying to figure out who got away with $ 5 million, $ 40 million, or even $ 100 million worth of bitcoins from the site — and whether it might be the owners themselves. yesterday, reddit user crazeefruito posted a message from the front page of sheep marketplace, which appeared to have been shut down .
another drug marketplace bit the dust over the weekend and another massive bitcoin heist shook the deep web .
this week the accused thieves from the infamous sheep marketplace have been indicted by prosecutors from the czech republic. the charged suspect thomas jiřikovský may face up to 18 years for firearms charges, theft, and drug trafficking. the sheep marketplace was a popular darknet market much like the silk road but only lasted a few months due to the operators ceasing operations in an alleged exit scam .
probly not a good time for sheep to answer that question. you know, just in case
however, according to reports from vendors the countdown timer was acting funny and wasn’t moving at an appropriate speed. the same case was with buyers as well who had deposited btc in their sheep marketplace accounts .
unfortunately sheep marketplace has been disbanded. the creator of the site has taken all of the bitcoins stored in the account wallets. feel free to discuss anything related to the fallout, including vendor contact information .
sheepmarketscam, and the site' s forum is that the black market' s creators were the thieves. sheep marketplace, for its part, isn’t doing much to help its cause or assuage its users .
if we didn' t talk on here, you' d still be moving funds into sheep .
when a black market calls itself
sheep ,
it' s no surprise when someone gets fleeced. but the effects of a purported theft of thousands of bitcoins from the drug - selling site sheep marketplace have rippled across the dark web, and may lead to the shutdown of its biggest drug - selling site .
in march, sheep marketplace came on the scene; its operators say they’ve signed up 5, 000 members. the latest newcomer is buyitnow which, according to ormsby, is still a startup with just 10 listings .
bitcoin' s
blockchain
ledger keeps track of every single transaction, so anyone can see what happens to the money. and the transactions are so large it' s obvious that they involve sheep marketplace money .
considering the fbi puppeteered anonymous informant sabu, convincing jeremy hammond to dump the stratfor data onto the bureau’s servers, would it be very surprising if the feds commandeered sheep marketplace? it' s possible that, with information on jiřikovský, perhaps the fbi was able to track the sheep’s bitcoin transactions, and nab careless vendors .
some people in the bitcoin space may remember the sheep marketplace. this darknet forum started gaining a lot of momentum after silk road was shut down. unfortunately, sheep was shut down in march 2015, and its founder was arrested at the same time. apparently, he also stole bitcoins worth several million belonging to platform users .
in the message posted to the site' s opening page, the sheep marketplace' s operator said it had shut down following the theft on 21 november of 5, 400 bitcoins - £3. 3m at current exchange rates .
branwen then criticized sheep marketplace’s official explanation for the clearnet mirror site, which was that “fans” had set up the fully - functioning mirror on cloned software many months before the deep web site started attracting the silk road exodus hordes .
sheep marketplace was smaller than silk road, and he had it running quite well. sr page changes used to time out 3 times out of 4. but the fbi only got a single - day 29, 000 bitcoin snapshot .
bitcoin fog was embroiled in a tor marketplace theft incident in 2013 - a user exploited a vulnerability in the anonymous marketplace called sheep marketplace and used this to steal bitcoins worth an estimated $ 6 million. as it transpired, the user tried to launder their bitcoins using the bitcoin fog service and distribute them elsewhere to avoid persecution. a similar incident occurred again in 2015 when around 7000 bitcoins were stole from a chinese digital currency exchange, and the coins were traced back to bitcoin fog .
he has 1% of the world' s bitcoin. he likes neat whole numbers. when tiny fractions suddenly appear, its obvious he' s tumbling them. nearly all the pants in the washing machine are his, so sheep swag mixes with sheep swag, and comes out looking like... er, sheep swag .
details of the incident are still unclear. angry former users of the drug bazaar are pointing fingers in all directions, mainly on reddit, and mounting a cyber - manhunt operation to track down the robbers. many believe the heist was a scam, and the no. 1 suspect among redditors is the sheep marketplace administrator, a czech citizen named tomáš jiřikovský. rumors of suspicious behavior from sheep marketplace' s administrators began in late november, as documented on the website urltoken .
the mysterious shutdown of sheep marketplace, which relies on vendor fees for funds, follows a tumultuous few weeks for the site and its vendors. beginning november 20, or in the days following, large volume sheep vendors found that they were unable to withdraw their bitcoins. these vendors and other sheep users took their complaints to the site’s forum and reddit. sheep admins addressed these complaints by assuring users that the site was experiencing technical problems related to the update of an automatic tumbler used to disguise transactions. (the site’s timeline of erratic behavior was arranged semi - coherently by the person or people behind urltoken, a site that is compiling the updates of multiple reddit and sheep forum threads. )
after silk road, another underground online marketplace' utopia' has been seized by dutch national police, where users coul ...
... he has 1% of the world' s bitcoin. he likes neat whole numbers. when tiny fractions suddenly appear, its obvious he' s tumbling them. nearly all the pants in the washing machine are his, so sheep swag mixes with sheep swag, and comes out looking like... er, sheep swag .
the closure of sheep has had repercussions elsewhere on the
dark net
. a site called black market reloaded stopped letting new users register on 1 december saying it could not handle the influx of users caused by the closure of sheep .
does this definitively prove jiřikovský’s involvement in sheep marketplace, let alone the bitcoin theft? the information gleaned by branwen’s source seems pretty damning. the evidence could lead to vigilante justice by scorned buyers and sellers, by hackers, and by law enforcement. if bitcoin is to be made palatable for the masses, especially in the wake of the recent effusive praise on capitol hill, those invested in the cryptocurrency' s future will want to bring the sheep marketplace thieves down, and prevent similar scams from happening again .
“this vendor found [ a ] bug in the system and stole 5, 400 btc—your money, our provisions, all was stolen, ” the sheep marketplace' s message read. “we were trying to resolve this problem, but we were not successful. ”
, is the hallmark of a virtual drug market scam. while all of this might smell like a smoking gun, determining if ebook101 was a rogue vendor or a dummy account behind a larger sheep marketplace scam could prove difficult given the anonymity of virtual black markets .
thomas jiřikovský from the infamous sheep marketplace has been indicted by prosecutors from the czech republic early this week. he has been charged with drug trafficking, theft, and firearms charges. according to the law, the suspect may face up to 18 years in jail .
the stakes are high: it' s not simply that there is a large amount of stolen cash at stake. because sheep marketplace was a haven for criminals who do business, it' s likely that some of the victims in this theft want the perpetrator dead .
bitcoin doesn’t fail to make it to the headlines every single day – either because of the exchange rate or some kind of hack – and today it is because of a sheep marketplace scam wherein scammers siphoning off over 39, 000 bitcoins worth $ 40 million from its users .
yesterday, sheep marketplace, an anonymous digital narcotics bazaar that grew popular after the shutdown of the silk road, announced that it had been robbed of 5, 400 bitcoins—the equivalent of $ 6 million at current exchange rates—and then promptly shut itself down. this came just days after
evolution - - the largest deep web drugs marketplace, disappeared suddenly overnight from the internet. but unlike silk road, there is n ...
sheep is dead, as is this subreddit. for vendor information and latest market news, please check out / r / darknetmarkets .
before the incidence, the sheep marketplace issued warnings to vendors and buyers that they could not make a withdrawal. at that same time, the website moderators were offering bulk drug purchases to those who could pay first. they did this instead of keeping the money in an escrow account .
the 2013 theft led to the shuttering of sheep marketplace, which had sprung up in response to the closing of silk road, the first online drug marketplace to use bitcoin. at the time, news articles and reddit claimed the amount stolen was $ 100 million or $ 220 million and reddit vigilantes watched transactions out of an address they were convinced was associated with the theft, until they realized it was instead owned by a bitcoin exchange .
according to the information we have been able to gather so far [ through 1, 2, 3 ], sheep marketplace system started acting a little funny wherein it stopped sellers from withdrawing their bitcoins. some vendors had amassed hundreds of bitcoins by selling goods through tens of thousands of transactions .
in early december, sheep marketplace, a site which used bitcoin and the anonymising browser tor to enable online sales of illicit goods, shut down. the site' s administrator reported that a dealer had found a bug in the system which had been exploited to steal 5, 400 bitcoins .
“we are sorry to say, but we were robbed on november 21, 2013, by vendor ebook101, ” explained the sheep marketplace at the time. this vendor found bug [ sic ] in our system and stole 5400 btc – your money, our provisions, all was stolen. ”
being stolen by the operator of sheep were found to have accidentally tracked btc - e internal wallet movements, thus discrediting this alternative explanation .
many former dealers and customers who used the sheep marketplace took to social news site reddit to complain about the shutdown. many wondered why the site was left to run for a week after the theft was spotted. none of those posting reported that their bitcoins had been sent to their emergency address .
mackert opened his coinbase account on december 30, 2013, and then deposited 7. 72 bitcoins into the account the next day. one special agent noted that 24 transactions earlier, those bitcoins had originated in one of the 14 wallets suspected in the sheep marketplace theft, receiving 200 bitcoins at that time .
while some hope to track down the people behind the theft, others wonder if the site' s owners are starting a new scam. urltoken writes that sheep marketplace started linking a service called tormarket, which the author suspects is run by the same people. tormarket, however, has disavowed the site and asked its administrators to take down the link .
this is the worst pr we can get right now ,
its home page reads. for users who moved to sheep marketplace from silk road after its shutdown by law enforcement, this means another major bitcoin black market is gone, along with their money .
it said the theft was carried out by a vendor on sheep who exploited a bug in the site' s software to steal the virtual cash .
the forfeiture agreement states that after the november heist, sheep marketplace notified users, “we are sorry to say, but we were robbed on november 21, 2013 by vendor ebook101. this vendor found bug [ sic ] in our system and stole 5400 btc - your money, our provisions, all was stolen. ”
the sheep marketplace is compared to the old infamous silk road market. due to the operators ceasing operations in an alleged exit scam, the darknet market only lasted for a few months before shutting down. the co - administrator of the silk road also faces a prison sentence, but for much more darknet successful reasons .
the actual theft is believed to be much higher than 5, 400 bitcoins. according to reporters, some have pointed to addresses with transactions which sum up a little over 39 bitcoin. the amount in the sheep marketplace before it was shut down is believed to be an indication that the site owner absconded with the funds .
which raises a third interesting scenario that could explain the sheep marketplace mayhem. as the mysterious hacker who doxed jiřikovský told branwen, he passed the information to the fbi on november 2. that means the fbi had an 18 - day head start on its investigation (assuming it undertook one) before the site started experiencing problems. that would be more than enough time for the fbi to reverse - engineer the sheep creator’s identity, as they had done with silk road’s ulbricht .
but users smelled a rat: they reckoned sheep had probably been holding far more than that amount, and had returned none of the excess to users .
as explained by the sheep marketplace at the time: “we are sorry to say, but we were robbed on november 21, 2013, by vendor ebook101. ” they added that “this vendor found bug [ sic ] in our system and stole 5, 400 btc – your money, our provisions, all was stolen. ”
writing on the marketplace' s homepage, the administrators claimed that one of its vendors, ebook101, had exploited a bug in the system that allowed them to pilfer the bitcoins .
the u. s. government has seized $ 4. 5 million from two florida men who allegedly stole 5, 400 bitcoins from illegal online drug sales site sheep marketplace in late 2013, shortly before the price of bitcoin hit its peak of around $ 1, 200, according to forfeiture documents filed last week in jacksonville, florida .
i' ve got a fair amount of experience getting bitcoin out of sheep and turning it into cash, as have all the other vendors contributing to this .
“the reason is probably that one vendor did use bug in marketplace and did steal 5500btc from sheep pocket. then the problems with withdrawals happened, there were no tumbler, we were all fooled: / we, the mods realized all facts just right now, we do hope that some of you can save btc after reading this”, noted the moderator .
the drama began in late november when the operators of sheep marketplace — which had risen to prominance after the fbi took down silk road, the previous large, anonymous hub for drug dealers — announced they were closing down because the site was hacked. the hacker fooled users into thinking their online bitcoin wallets were full when in fact they had been looted .
all this started around november 20 when vendors started posting their suspicion on the site’s forum as well as on reddit. they claimed that the withdrawal system wasn’t working and were not able to withdraw their earnings for straight 10 days. the admins of sheep marketplace implemented withdrawal countdown timer with a minimum of 1btc limit on day 9 of the withdrawal system being down .
at one point, at least, the internet detectives were on the right track. sheep marketplace really did shut down, and bitcoins were stolen. but rather than play a shell game to try and keep the money hidden, the thief appears to have done what any normal person would have: traded the digital currency for real money at the earliest opportunity .
in march of 2015, thomas jiřikovský was arrested in the czech republic for allegedly stealing millions of dollars in bitcoin from the darknet market, sheep marketplace, which was located on the deep web in 2013. the market is notorious for shutting down after a few months of operations due to a so - called vendor who stole $ 6 million worth of bitcoins .
the sheep marketplace was considered one of the biggest exit scams in the history of darknet markets as the operators were accused of stealing 40, 000 bitcoins from customers. users had complained of suspended withdrawals one week prior to the $ 6 million dollar vendor theft incident and the website shut down for good immediately after the announcement, along with all the existing customer funds .
when it comes to sheep marketplace, the crowd is still working through the information. they think they' ve found the former moderator of the site, who has given an interview to the czech republic' s biggest newspaper in an attempt to clear his name, and behind the scenes some users are trying to see if there are any other loose ends in the block chain .
according to reports, thomas jiřikovský was arrested in march 2015 in the czech republic. he faces accusations of stealing millions of dollars in bitcoin from the sheep marketplace. the darknet market was located on the deep web in 2013. a regional report released confirms that jiřikovský and his wife eve have been going through the trial process quickly. they are therefore expected to be sentenced in the near future .
they know sheep is closing and so they are reducing all prices, introducing new products, and making everyone [ finalize transactions early ] to try and take as much as they can ,
wrote the author. and the actual theft is thought to be much higher than 5, 400 bitcoins. as noted by tapscape, andy greenberg of forbes, and others, some people have pointed to an address with transactions totaling a little over 39 bitcoins, supposedly the amount in sheep marketplace before it shut down, as an indication that the site' s owners had absconded with the funds .
by november 27, sheep marketplace claimed 90 percent of users were now able to withdraw bitcoins. this turned out not to be the case. two days later, admins announced that users would be able to withdraw 1 btc, but only after a 22 - hour countdown clock had expired. according to updates on sheepmarketscam, the clock appeared to be operating according to some wacky kind of einsteinian relativity. adding insult to injury, many vendors were unable to withdraw bitcoins after the 22 hours had elapsed. with bitcoin’s valuation skyrocketing following a positive reception in congress two weeks ago, this behavior looked suspicious to sheep users and observers .
by november 30, sheep marketplace, feeling the heat of scam accusations, took their forum offline and posted the following message :
we are enabling a spam filter for the forums, as the number of posts had got out of control. we will be enabling the forum once this is in place. please try to stay calm. this is a temporary measure, and we will keep everybody updated when we have further information
.
yeah, thenodman started another thread when he found the trapdoor in sheep, and i wrote one called
ok. this is how we are going to catch him
, which we were using too .
‘i am a large vendor on sheep marketplace, or i was until recently. i sold hard drugs in reasonably large quantities. i have around $ 90k locked up in the site. i owe some money to some very nasty people, ‘i have until monday evening. they have already threatened me with death. i have no doubt that they have killed before... i am 26 and i don' t want to die. ’
then came the shocker when one of the moderators replied to vendors’ concerns. according to ctrlaltweed, who is listed as a seller as well, revealed that users should leave the marketplace asap as admins that run away with all the money .
sheep marketplace gained prominence in the deep web after the downfall of silk road. however, unlike the latter, it wasn’t taken down by law enforcement, but by the owner himself who decided to run away with customers’ money. a detailed investigation into the incident is said to have revealed huge deposits into the bank accounts of tomáš jiřikovský’s family members. these deposits combined with his recent expenses worth over $ 800000 led to the identification and subsequent arrest .
balances being gone. most people suspected the owner of running off with the funds, and it turns out they were correct. south moravian police officials, who are investigating this darknet marketplace, were notified of one individual receiving suspicious bitcoin transactions .
this is the biggest heist of all time. is it in the newspapers? no thenodmanout made the hardest spot - the escape route wallet from sheep. i assume he normally drives round in a van solving mysteries .
admins of the sheep marketplace then claimed (the chronology here is fuzzy) that they didn’t want to flood the bitcoin network with small transactions, another curious move given bitcoin’s booming business. the vendors who were able to withdraw, according to sheepmarketscam, had less than 1 btc in their accounts to begin with. the implication here being that many vendors with larger vaults of bitcoins were unable to withdraw, leaving the alleged scammers free to cherry pick the most fruitful accounts .
now, the sheep marketplace is considered as one of the biggest exit scams in the darknet market history. this is attributed to the fact that the operators were accused of stealing 40, 000 bitcoin from their customers. there had been complaining from users over one week suspended withdrawals. these complaints are prior to the $ 6, 000, 000 vendor theft incident. the website shut down for good immediately after the announcement was made along with the existing fund of the customers .
former customers of sheep banded together, and discovered a bitcoin wallet holding 96, 000 bitcoins which seemed to be linked to the thefts. at the exchange rate at the time, that was worth a little over $ 100m .
a reporter who followed the case wrote that “they know sheep is closing and so they are reducing all prices, introducing new products, and making everyone [ finalize transactions early ] to try and take as much as they can. ”
first, some background: i have never been to the sheep market website. i do not have an account there, i don' t even know the url. i heard about it after the scam when it hit the news .
sheep marketplace, an anonymous online narcotics bazaar that received an influx of users after the shutdown of the popular drug - selling site silk road in october, went permanently offline over the weekend, claiming that it had been robbed of $ 6 million in bitcoins by one of its sellers who found a security vulnerability in the site. and black market reloaded, the leading online black market after silk road, has responded by announcing a plan to go offline - - perhaps only temporarily - - and has already cut off registrations to new users .
here is the wallet that i' ve been chasing him with. note the balance. he still hasn' t given me my bitcoin! he' s some kind of sucker for punishment. its cost him millions and uncovered the albion marketplace booty. the most expensive bitcoin in history .
sheep' s administrators wrote on the site' s homepage that it had experienced a theft of 5, 400 bitcoins by one of its dealers known as ebook101, close to $ 6 million at the cryptocurrency' s current exchange rate .
this vendor found bug in system and stole 5400 btc - your money, our provisions, all was stolen ,
reads the message on sheep' s homepage, which includes records of the stolen funds .
we were trying to resolve this problem, but we were not successful .
sheep' s owners have used that theft to justify closing the market without returning the bitcoins stored in the market by users, despite claiming that they would redistribute those coins to users'
emergency addresses .
sheep users and other bitcoin followers on reddit say that the administrators began blocking withdrawals of bitcoins from the site more than a week ago, and may have absconded with as much as $ 44 million from the site' s users, pointing to a movement of 39, 900 bitcoins visible in the public record of bitcoin transactions known as the blockchain .
he' s still stealing now. i' ve been making fresh sheep pocket addresses and sending fractions of bitcoin in to see where they come back out onto the blockchain. he should have just pulled the plug rather than breaking the transaction fee payment and all that clever shit .
( when you or i tumble a few bitcoin, it does a better job because it takes somebody else' s 2 bitcoins from last week and sends them through as ours. but sheep has too many to do that). listen to blockchain classics while you follow the money. urltoken
according to regional reports, jiřikovský and his wife eve who was allegedly sheep’s programmer have been going through the motions of trial and will likely be sentenced in the near future. “he faces 10 to 18 years in prison, ” said hynek olma, a spokesman for the regional prosecutor’s office .
after the abrupt closings of both sites, others launched in the wake of silk road' s shutdown in october will stand as the leading websites for buying drugs and other illegal goods online: silk road 2. 0, which was launched less than a month ago, and the lesser - known pandora marketplace, deep bay and budster .
sheep marketplace and black market reloaded are only the latest to succumb to a widening crisis in the dark web drug industry. in late september, a fast - growing competitor market known as atlantis went suddenly offline, citing
security
reasons. a week later, the silk road was seized by federal agencies and its alleged owner ross ulbricht arrested in a san francisco library. in late october the fbi seized 144, 000 bitcoins allegedly belonging to ulbricht - - more than $ 150 million at current exchange rates. then the administrator of a third market known as project black flag closed the site, openly admitting that he had panicked and stolen users' bitcoins .
assuming the sheep was behind the scam, it would seem that deep web and bitcoin anonymity might have guaranteed a perfect digital heist. but, the site' s founders may have left virtual cookie crumbs leading back to their identity. as silk road' s dread pirate roberts so perfectly illustrated in his downfall ,
writing on forbes, tech reporter andy greenberg said the closure of sheep was only the latest event in a
widening crisis
that was hitting drug sellers operating via the dark net. he cited the example of two other sites, atlantis and project black flag that had shut down following the fbi seizure of the silk road .
making money in digital back alleys isn' t hard, if you know what you' re doing. among the many revelations to emerge from the silk road' s implosion was that ulbricht made a great deal of money on bitcoin transaction fees—millions, in fact. this model of direct user fees helps to eliminate users' fear that any particular marketplace is running a scam .
1 of those ninety six fucking thousand stolen bitcoins that i just chased after for 20 hours belongs to me, and the big sheep should have just given it to me when i asked him for it. i sold my car for it, thats why i' m so fast. i have to walk everywhere, and i want it back .
poachers make the best gamekeepers
, and customers only really put bitcoin in to sheep. they' ve... er, we' ve never had to get it out and turn it to cash like the sheep rustler, you cant just put it in the bank or buy a loaf of bread with it. i imagine (cough). this is just a nod of recognition to all you guys who are anticipating what this guy is about to do next. lets retain our anonymity, aaaiit? you know what i' m talking about. you won' t be getting any community awards for this, and if you did, you won' t turn up to collect it .
urltoken i posted this issue on r / bitcoin that night. we thought it was then transferred to a btc - e cold wallet when i posted about this a few days ago... but surprise surprise, it was actually posted to the sheep market scammer' s. he just hadn' t been caught yet. look who it was actually transferred to :
if bitcoinfog is in on it, then all they must do is to tumble their coins of theft once or twice more and close bitcoinfog and make several millions of cleanly laundered dollars. or even continue to operate the fog as a quasi - legitimate business to avoid arousing the suspicion that closing the fog would bring upon them. thieves would never even have to withdraw the illgotten gains from sheep to become rich in the utmost sense
under this theory, if ctrlaltweed and premiumgoods could convince buyers to purchase both existing and new drugs at deep discount, they could flood their accounts with bitcoins. that would leave the site' s creators or hackers—either of which theoretically could have created the above vendors as dummy accounts—free to potentially run with the money. (it’s worth noting that ctrlaltweed was a well - known and respected silk road vendor before jumping ship to the sheep. )
one day later, sheep users, working off of numbers from the bitcoin monitoring site blockchain, posted on reddit that 39, 918 btc ($ 40 million) simply disappeared into the digital ether—making ebook101’s alleged 5, 400 ($ 6 million) heist look like chump change. this mysterious exodus of 39, 918 btc seems to have occurred only after administrators blocked users from withdrawing their bitcoins from the site. this move, according to a
i' m not sure fog would' ve worked anyway. the other name for a tumbler is a mix, as in, your coins get mixed with other people' s coins... but who on earth would be handing fog 96k btc which could be mixed with sheep' s 96k? if you want to delink yourself from the original batch of 96k, you need to pull 96k from somewhere else! easier said than done .
this vendor is believed to be someone named ebook101. an official statement from marketplace reads, “we are sorry to say, but we were robbed on saturday 11 / 21 / 2013 by vendor ebook101. this vendor found bug in system and stole 5400 btc – your money, our provisions, all was stolen. we were trying to resolve this problem, but we were not successful. we are sorry for your problems and inconvenience, all of current btc will be ditributed to users, who have filled correct btc emergency adress. ”
i had a sheep withdrawal with no transactions next to it for 3 whole days, to try to balance his books. so i' ve had a good fortnight to wait for my car to be stolen. when he said i can only drive it in 25 hours, once a day, if the tank is full, we all knew this was bullshit, right? send me my public and private wallet keys in an email if your wallets only work one - way .
, claiming czech vendors were also involved in the site' s administration; namely, ctrlaltweed and premiumgoods, who are apparently friends. “these 2 vendors have dropped their prices like crazy on all products, ” added throwme1121. “in addition, they have added new products like cocaine and mdma that they have never stocked before, and they are using stock images not their own. and you guessed it—fe [' finalize your transactions early' ] on everything because of sheep withdrawal issues. ”
black market reloaded is probably silk road' s biggest competitor, with 8, 551 public listings. its operators claim to have booked $ 400, 000 in revenue last month. black market reloaded took off in august of 2012, after silk road stopped selling guns and shut down its offshoot, the armory. since then, black market reloaded has become the go - to market for people with
no moral restrictions at all .
the fast - growing russian anonymous marketplace, or ramp, is another serious contender for market share in the burgeoning digital underground .
i was still sending fractions of bitcoin into sheep, looking for the puncture, and saw that thenodman had already sussed it. i clicked the link to the wallet and stood open - mouthed to see a planet - sized spaceship hovering above europe. we were both pretty knackered i think, but every door led to another door, rooms full of bitcoins stacked from floor to ceiling. i was ready to call it a day, but the spaceship started to dissappear into a fog before my eyes !
defcon, an administrator at underground marketplace silk road 2 (not to be confused with silk road), noticed that funds held for the escrow service were stolen in february 2014. transaction malleability, an issue with the bitcoin protocol at the time that also affected some other services, was blamed for the theft. [ 87 ] others note that transaction malleability is unlikely to result in coins being stolen and belive the silk road 2 incident to be an inside job. several months after the incident, it was reported that silk road 2 is paying users back with funds earned from commissions [ 89 ]
in this anonymous free - market matrix, there is no legal recourse for the scammed. every user is anonymous and making transactions in anonymous currency. that makes it harder for law enforcement to bring their digital surveillance tools to bear on the drug war, but it also makes it harder to establish human trust on the deep web. amidst the meteoric rise of bitcoin, and the promise of the security and anonymity that comes with cryptographic currencies, the people of virtual black markets—especially ones named
sheep
—have forgotten the age - old maxim that a fool and his money are soon parted .
sheep is down we are sorry to say, but we were robbed on saturday 11 / 21 / 2013 by vendor ebook101. this vendor found bug in system and stole 5400 btc - your money, our provisions, all was stolen. we were trying to resolve this problem, but we were not successful. we are sorry for your problems and inconvenience, all of current btc will be ditributed to users, who have filled correct btc emergency adress [ sic ]. i would like to thank to all sheepmarketplace moderators by this, who were helping with this problem. i am very sorry for this situation. thank you all .
you can see my wallet! its the first one to send 0. 00666 - starting
1ahyn
. my phone buzzes when it receives bitcoin, and i need sleep. you can all look in it, and see that i' ve been chasing down a £150m thief with 0. 7 bitcoins, because he took my bitcoin! the whole of my day is there - firing airgun pellets into new sheep wallets, lots of 666' s, my 0. 5 btc deposit to climb into the tumbler with thousands of stolen bitcoins, then it coming back to the same wallet in chunks after being tumbled. its now more tainted than before it went in !
tumblers are worth it, but you have to trust them because your bitcoins might not tinkle out of the other side. i don' t trust bitcoin fog because they didn' t answer my legitimate questions. if i find that the sheep swag was tumbling when it was supposedly broken on nov 26th, i am personally going to put them out of business. and they said
no fees for the rest of the year
, but i didn' t get all of my 0. 500 btc back. some of it was chipped away as soon as it arrived at the deposit address. obviously, a% of 96, 000 bitcoins - twice - isn' t enough christmas spending money for them. and not answering support tickets is rude. i can' t abide ill manners .
the forbes e - book on bitcoin secret money: living on bitcoin in the real world, by forbes staff writer kashmir hill, can be bought in bitcoin or legal tender .
black market reloaded, the current largest anonymous market for contraband online with nearly 7, 000 product listings, responded saturday with a message on its forum for users saying that black market reloaded wouldn' t be able to handle the influx of new customers and sellers, arguing that the tor anonymity software that hides the identity of the site' s users and owners isn' t designed for such a large user base. on sunday he followed up by blocking new registrations, closing inactive accounts and notifying users that the site would go offline in around two days .
this puts bmr in the edge of the blade, tor can' t support any site to be too big ,
wrote the bmr administrator who calls himself backopy .
[ black market reloaded ] can' t hold another wave of refugees... . without competition the wisest thing to do is to shut down the market, doing it in a timely and orderly manner .
whether that shutdown will be permanent still isn' t clear. one administrator on the site' s forums writes that it' s merely working on a new version of the site and is taking the current site offline to focus on building it, with plans to launch in early 2014 .
we will be back up. but to speed up we need to close shop ,
writes the administrator named lecontog .
don' t worry, we don' t rip [ off ] anyone and will be back stronger than ever .
backopy himself wrote on the forums that he wouldn' t yet comment on the timing of the site' s reopening .
there are those who claim that this blockchain refers to the scammed bitcoin, while there are others who claim that the this blockchain refers to the actual amount .
ravi is the editor of techienews. he is a technology enthusiast with keen interest in information security. ravi has over 6 years of experience and has been actively involved in editorial groups of many us and uk based news portals .
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i just chased him through a bitcoin tumbler, and when he came out with 96, 000 btc, i was waiting for him... : sheepmarketplace
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i just chased him through a bitcoin tumbler, and when he came out with 96, 000 btc, i was waiting for him ...
i' ve been a very busy boy. all day, we' ve been chasing the scoundrel with our stolen bitcoins through the blockchain. around lunchtime (uk), i was chasing him across the roof of a moving train, (metaphorically). i was less than 20 minutes, or 2 blockchain confirmations, behind
tomas
.
he was desperately creating new wallet addresses and moving his 49 retirement wallets through them, but having to wait for 3 or 4 confirmations each time before moving them again. each time i caught up, i
666
ed him - sent 0. 00666 bitcoins to mess up his lovely round numbers like 4, 000. then, all of a sudden, decimal places started appearing, and fractions of bitcoins were jumping from wallet to wallet like grasshoppers on a hotplate without stopping for confirmations .
he was tumbling our stolen bitcoins a second time, and a tumbler is unbeatable... .
unless you guess which one it is, nearly all the coins belong to the person you' re tracking, jump in with him, and get jumbled up through the same wallets using the same algorithm. i was hopping from foot to foot shouting
come on !
at my laptop, waiting an age for 6 blockchain confirmations to get 0. 5 btc into
bitcoin fog
. my half a bitcoin got sliced and diced through loads of wallets and i followed the biggest chunk with urltoken - along with 96, 000 stolen ones !
i chose the shortest tumbling time - 6 hours - and my half a coin plinked back onto my android phone in dribs and drabs, sparkly and new .
i think he' s asleep now in the czech republic. when he awakes, he will see my
666
next to his 96, 000 stolen, freshly - laundered bitcoins. along with lots of insults attached to fragments of bitcoins that i hope you are about to send here: -
now i' ve got to sleep. i' ve just chased a thief through a washing machine for you
* * * * edit 04 / 12 / 2013 the cash has moved continually for days, and i' ve been chasing it, pulling my trousers down, and depositing 0. 000666 into each cash pile above about a million dollars i' ve found, any empty accounts that i think were important hubs, and a couple of 10 bitcoin
spending money
wallets he uses .
click the filter to select payments, then you only see my red arrows. follow the ones that end in 666. you will find yourself standing in a cavernous wallet next to millions of dollars, with doors leading to others. * * * * 17: 20gmt, weds 4th dec. he' s siphoning it all through here: - urltoken
its the input trough of a tumbler. if you follow the largest chunk, you catch up to
zero confirmations
eventually, but its not him. its a mincer / washing machine. if you do it at night, there is a recombined cash pot at the end of the rainbow. or you can follow a chunk until it starts to get smaller quickly. then do
taint analysis
and select
reverse taint
. you are halfway through the tumbler, and
reverse taint
can see the output pots where the money has stopped moving.
sheep marketplace was an anonymous marketplace set up as a tor hidden service . it launched in march 2013 and was one of the lesser known sites to gain popularity with the well publicized closure of the silk road marketplace later that year . it ceased operation in december 2013 , when it announced it was shutting down after a vendor stole $ 6 million worth of users ' bitcoins . 
sheep marketplace was an anonymous marketplace set up as a tor hidden service. it launched in march 2013 and was one of the lesser known sites to gain popularity with the well publicized closure of the silk road marketplace later that year. it ceased operation in december 2013, when it announced it was shutting down after a vendor stole $ 6 million worth of users' bitcoins.
sheep marketplace was an anonymous marketplace set up as a tor hidden service. it launched in march 2013 and was one of the lesser known sites to gain popularity with the well publicized closure of the silk road marketplace later that year. it ceased operation in december 2013, when it announced it was shutting down after a vendor stole $ 6 million worth of users' bitcoins.