Bitcoin 'exit scam': Deep-Webbers disappear with $12m

The administrators of a top deep-web marketplace have disappeared with over $12m worth of the cryptocurrency Bitcoin it has emerged, in what appears to have been an “exit scam”.
On the website Reddit, a user called NSWGreat, who identified him or herself as a moderator for the site, raised the first red flag in a post to the DarkNetMarkets marked “EVOLUTION EXIT SCAM”.
NSWGreat said that he or she personally had $20,000 in Bitcoin currently in escrow at the site, and had confronted Evolution’s administrators, who go by the aliases Verto and Kimble, confirmed the scam, according to NSWGreat.
Evolution Marketplace was one of the largest of a number of deep-web sites, which grew up after the collapse of the Silk Road, which was shut down after its administrator, Ross Ulbricht, who went by the alias Dread Pirate Roberts, was arrested in 2013.
But while Ulbricht’s Silk Road, and many of the sites that followed in its footsteps, had a quixotic if libertarian bent, Evolution was always known as more anarchic and less scrupulous.
One vendor on Evolution, speaking anonymously to the Guardian, said they had been on the site for two years. “Now it’s gone; I just lost my career,” they said, adding that they had lost around $5,000 in the scam.
Guardian http://bit.ly/192i8S5