After scrolling through multiple darkweb markets, our researchers found out that the Empire market has been offline for well over 60 hours. There are multiple sayings going over this matter at the moment, as some users suspecting it to be due to an exit scam while others are believing it to be due to a prolonged distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attack.
Empire Market is an Alphabay-style market with BTC, LTC, XMR, MultiSig, and PGP 2FA features. It is currently ranked as the biggest darknet market, which started in late 2018. Empire Market listing is very vast including Fraud, Drugs & Chemicals, Guides & Tutorials, Counterfeit Items, Digital Products, Jewels & Gold, Carded Items, Services, Software & Malware, CVV, Security & Hosting and many more.
There have been some rumors and debating going on the public forums for claiming exit scams as the reason behind the Empire market being down. But however, the chance of it is highly unlikely because as per the Bleeping Computer there were some users who claimed that they were able to access the Empire market site but though with difficulty.
On Twitter, the researcher and analyst Dark.fail has been keeping the public up to date for all the ongoing Empire market’s actions over the past weekend. On August 21, 2020, he posted a tweet in which he stated the Empire market to be under a large DDoS attack ultimately making it very slow to access the darkweb website.
Scammers are taking advantage of this scenario…
It has been observed that phishers are modifying their sites to allow any username and password for logging onto their fake sites which seems to be the Empire market to the users.
Adding onto it, In one of the dread thread, Empire market’s top moderator stated that “If the market is still down in a couple of days I’ll make a post about the whole situation then, it’s early days and maybe the admins will bring it back.”
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