Markets: Wall Street

Wall Street Market was launched sometime during March of 2016 and was seized by Europol and German law enforcement officials on May 2, 2019. The markets’ administrators operated under the usernames “Coder420”, “TheOne”, and “Kronos”. The market was primarily centered around drugs, malware, forged documents, fraud-related items and digital goods. Weapons were strictly prohibited from being sold. Buyers and sellers were able to conduct transactions using Bitcoin and Monero.

Although the market had been under investigation since 2017, law enforcement decided to take immediate action against the market when they discovered that its’ administrators initiated an exit-scam on April 16, 2019, when buyers and sellers were locked out of their accounts. Four days later, all three market administrators were arrested by Europol-led police who also seized approximately $615,000 worth of Euros and “a six-figure amount” of Bitcoin and Monero after they raided the administrators’ homes. The markets’ servers were found to be hosted in CyberBunker, located in The Netherlands. If the exit-scam had succeeded, the markets’ staff would have made off with approximately 12 million dollars worth of cryptocurrency.

Some infosec analysts have said that the most likely reason behind the exit-scam is the shut down of Dream Market, which would have likely caused a massive influx of new users to the market and made it a much higher priority for law enforcement, and that the safest way out was to exit-scam. One of the sites’ moderators admitted to the exit-scam and attempted to extort users who shared their Bitcoin addresses in support requests, and demanded them to pay 0.05 BTC, valued at roughly $280 during the time, or claimed their address would be shared with law enforcement. Later on, the same moderator posted their account credentials online so anyone, including law enforcement, could access the markets’ back-end that potentially contained sensitive information about certain buyers and sellers on the market.