Markets: Evolution

Evolution Market was launched on January 14 of 2014 and later shut down in one of the most notable and largest exit-scams on March 18 of the following year. The market saw massive growth within its’ first few months of being online, mainly because some of its’ competitors were seized by law enforcement as part of “Operation Onymous”. It became one of two of the largest dark-net markets during its’ time in less than one year after its’ establishment. Evolution had very lenient rules as to what could be sold on the marketplace in comparison to most other markets, as they allowed for the sale of explosives, guns, ammunition, stolen credit cards and other forms of fraud.

Evolution was created by Verto and Kimble, who also started the Tor Carding forum during the previous year, which was centered around the trade of stolen credit card data, identity theft, and counterfeit currency notes.

Sometime during mid-March of 2015, the markets’ administrators froze all withdrawals while blaming technical difficulties. Evolution had gained a reputation for its’ security, reliability, professionalism and a higher uptime rate than its’ competitors, which lead to its’ community being shocked when it permanently went offline a few days later on March 18. It was estimated that the sites’ escrow held the equivalent of twelve million dollars worth of Bitcoin during the time of its’ shut down.

There were large bounties put forth by several groups to reveal the identities of Verto and Kimble, and a user on Reddit claimed he knew who they were and that he would reveal their identities if they did not return everyone’s funds, however, there were no successful attempts at revealing their identities. Considering that they were very active in the Russian and Eastern European carding scene, it has been assumed that they live somewhere in those regions.