Death threats fly as $100 million of Bitcoins disappear from Sheep Marketplace
First came the closure of criminal underground Silk Road, now an apparently vast theft of Bitcoins from one of the sites that replaced it, Sheep Marketplace. Are the users of darkweb markets now being targeted by criminals?
A weekend message on the Tor-based Sheep Marketplace claimed that 5,400 Bitcoins (worth about $5.6 million) had been stolen with the message, “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.”
That would have been bad enough but estimates since then suggest that the true scale of the theft could run as high as almost 100,000 BTC, equivalent to more than $100 million in the real world. A slew of angry user complaints have since alleged that the whole site had been operating for some time as a honeypot designed to collect Bitcoins in advance of a prepared heist, an accusation that if true would be an unprecedented example of a business calmly collecting money in order to steal it.
