The AlphaBay market, which relaunched in 2021, has become completely inaccessible and may be exiting the scam

A week ago, "ODN" warned that the administrator of AlphaBay market was missing for several weeks, and the vendor and users using 2FA could not log in. This week, "ODN" discovered that the AlphaBay market, relaunched in 2021, has become completely inaccessible, either through Tor or I2P.

dark.fail has also updated its warning from last week:

ALERT: AlphaBay's admin disappeared, the site is potentially exit scamming.

tor.taxi also writes on its website:

PSA: Senior Admin of AlphaBay Advises Users Not to Use the Market

AlphaBay senior administrator TheCypriot posted a PGP signature message on Reddit, warning users of the marketplace to stay away until issues arising from the absence of its creator DeSnake are resolved. In a rather lengthy warning posted on Monday, February 13, AlphaBay administrator TheCypriot provided reddit users with some insight into how the marketplace generally works, why certain users can't log in, and perhaps most importantly, why they feel people should not use it for a while.

TheCypriot describes itself as an administrator, not a controller, of the AlphaBay market.

The hierarchy of the market is as follows:

DeSnake – Owner – Private keys server access, total control
TheCypriot – Admin – Runs day to day market and staff when it’s running. Does not have private keys or server access but has most staff authority
Tempest – Senior Moderator
Amades – Junior Moderator
Wxmaz – Junior Moderator
EvZen – Junior Moderator
Parsed – Scam watch and PR. Incredibly patient normally deals with these types of things but I decided to create an account since this is the longest we have had a lockout.
Peke – Forum Moderator I am the admin of the market.

I am not the owner. I do not have the power to remove the 2FA lock on the market.

"Don't use the marketplace," TheCypriot wrote in his Reddit post. "That's easy to say, because you can't use the market if you want to." TheCypriot went on to explain the difference between the two canaries maintained by DeSnake, noting that DeSnake's apparent failure to update the second canary resulted in the market being unable to read and process PGP signature messages. Cypriots also explained why they did not consider the resulting problems to be the actions of law enforcement:

In my experience over the years this is not LE. Feel free to discuss, many of you will but the signs just are not there. If it is it would be the worst planned and executed LE action in the history of the markets. They didn’t even put up a fancy seizure screen. (Hat tip to the Dutch team for top notch graphics). Doesn’t mean that it wasn’t.

DeSnake last logged into the AlphaBay market on Jan. 25, more than three weeks ago, according to additional information provided in TheCypriot's post. The access issues for users in the marketplace began in early February when users with 2FA enabled (including all vendors) found themselves unable to log into the marketplace. TheCypriot also mentioned that they don't think it's an "exit scam," although it can't be completely ruled out.

Similar to the Tor network, ongoing DDOS attacks on the I2P network have made it difficult to access sites on the I2P network. Users of the I2P network are being asked to upgrade to the latest version of the network, 2.1.0, which has blacklisted some of the attackers' nodes, but remains inaccessible to most users.

AlphaBay's Tor network URL is:
http://alphabay522szl32u4ci5e3iokdsyth56ei7rwngr2wm7i5jo54j2eid.onion

The URL of AlphaBay's I2P network is:

http://tnaefzkcnhryeusi7hdpqujqiqmnbtah3dmjcg3gvezohunjuxbq.b32.i2p

As of the evening of February 20th, the AlphaBay Dark Web Marketplace was still not accessible via the Tor network or I2P network.

For more Dark Web news, check out "ODN".