Markets: Acropolis

The Acropolis Market was a referral-only marketplace launched in mid-2014 and discontinued all operations in June of 2017. The administrators announced its’ planned closure one month prior to when it went offline, providing its’ users with enough time to withdrawal their funds from the market. One of the things that made this market unique is the fact that it is only one of four dark net marketplaces known to have ever existed that permanently closed down without stealing their users funds or being seized by law enforcement, along with Agora, Black Market Reloaded, and Dream market.

The sites’ administrators operated under the aliases “Reason” and “MrSlick”. They claimed to be from the Russian Federation, which is somewhat believable as the markets’ terms of service prohibited all users located within the Russian Federation from using the market, which would have made Acropolis a lower priority target for Russian law enforcement. However, there are no records that suggest either one of them ever wrote any message in the Russian language on their forum or market, not even a single message in Russian stating that people from Russia are not allowed to use the market. It was also reported that users who personally asked them if they were really from Russia were ignored.

Acropolis Market offered multi-signature escrow, along with the use of different cryptocurrencies, which made the market rather unique during its time as most other markets were still using only Bitcoin as a form a payment and traditional escrow systems that were market-integrated, leaving users’ funds held in escrow completely vulnerable to any and all kinds of theft by administrators and law enforcement seizures. Acropolis Market may have also been the first dark net marketplace to announce a harm reduction program, where their moderators and other willing individuals would have been provided with financial resources in order to obtain drug testing kits, and drugs from their markets’ vendors to check the authenticity and purity of their products, though the program was never initiated.

Since Acropolis Market permanently shut down one month prior to the law enforcement seizure and take down of the AlphaBay and Hansa markets during operation bayonet , many have speculated that the sites’ staff knew something about the impending law enforcement operations. According to one of their previous forum moderators, the administrators said they had detected heavy security scans being performed on the market sometime before they announced its’ permanent closure. If true, it may have been possible that the same team of security researchers who found vulnerabilities in the AlphaBay and Hansa marketplaces of which they later reported to dutch law enforcement, may have been attempting to do the same with Acropolis Market as well.

The true reason as to why the Acropolis Market staff decided to shut the market down may never be known, though the administrators left a message stating that they could not continue to provide escrow services due to personal reasons.