Bitcoin Scammers Run Off With $12 Million: ‘Going to The Caribbean… Hope You Guys Understand’

For the casual observer the underground online marketplace, often referred to as the DarkNet, seems to resemble the lawlessness of the Wild West. Over the last several years millions of dollars worth of digital crypto-currencies have been stolen, oftentimes by the very operators of the web sites tasked with managing the online digital ‘hot’ wallets of its users. (A ‘cold’ wallet is used to store crypto-addresses on your own Flash drive or can be written down on a piece of paper).
The most recent example comes to us from the ‘Evolution’ Darknet, which according to a report from Crytpo Coins News shut down their web server and ran off with $12 million in user bitcoins:
Users of the popular darknet marketplace Evolution were disappointed over the last couple of days as the site has been unavailable. Spotty access is normally unsurprising for the market, and there is a long list of alternative URLs. But none of them have worked, so it appears the site is down.
Evolution has become much more active in the wake of the arrest and subsequent conviction of Ross Ulbricht, the operator of the first major darknet marketplace, Silk Road. Its operators do not have the same philosophical drive as did the Silk Road operator.

This post was published at The Daily Sheeple on March 18th, 2015.