Abacus Market, the largest Western darknet marketplace supporting Bitcoin payments, has shut down its public infrastructure in a move suspected to be an exit scam.
Exit scams occur when the operator of a marketplace decides to vanish with the money they hold in escrow for various transactions between platform users.
Blockchain intelligence firm TRM Labs reports that Abacus shutting down so abruptly has all the indications of either an exit scam or a covert law enforcement operation dismantling the activity.
An international law enforcement action dismantled a Romanian ransomware gang known as ‘Diskstation,’ which encrypted the systems of several companies in the Lombardy region, paralyzing their businesses.
The law enforcement operation codenamed ‘Operation Elicius’ was coordinated by Europol and also involved police forces in France and Romania.
Diskstation is a ransomware operation that targets Synology Network-Attached Storage (NAS) devices, which are commonly used by companies for centralized file storage and sharing, data backup and recovery, and general content hosting.
Researchers have discovered a modern solution to detect vault applications (apps) on smartphones, which could be a game-changer for law enforcement. The paper is published in the journal Future Internet.
The analysis, led by researchers from Edith Cowan University (ECU) and University of Southern Queensland, demonstrates that machine learning (ML) can be used to effectively identify vault apps.
Smartphones are an integral part of daily life, used by an estimated 5 billion people around the world.
Law enforcement authorities from six countries took down the Archetyp Market, an infamous darknet drug marketplace that has been operating since May 2020.
Archetyp Market sellers provided the market’s customers with access to high volumes of drugs, including cocaine, amphetamines, heroin, cannabis, MDMA, and synthetic opioids like fentanyl through more than 3,200 registered vendors and over 17,000 listings.
Over its five years of activity, the marketplace amassed over 612,000 users with a total transaction volume of over €250 million (approximately $289 million) in Monero cryptocurrency transactions.
While the documents refer to the education company only as “Victim-2” and the U.S. attorney’s office declined to name the victim, a person familiar with the matter told NBC News that it is PowerSchool. The hack of PowerSchool last year is believed to be the largest breach of American children’s sensitive data to date.
According to his plea agreement, Lane admitted obtaining information from a protected computer and aggravated identity theft and agreed not to challenge a prison sentence shorter than nine years and four months. He got access simply by trying an employee’s stolen username and password combination, the complaint says, echoing a private third-party assessment of the incident previously reported by NBC News.
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The FBI has asked the public for information on Chinese Salt Typhoon hackers behind widespread breaches of telecommunications providers in the United States and worldwide.
In October, the FBI and CISA confirmed that the Chinese state hackers had breached multiple telecom providers (including AT&T, Verizon, Lumen, Charter Communications, Consolidated Communications, and Windstream) and many other telecom companies in dozens of countries.
As revealed at the time, while they had access to the U.S. telecoms’ networks, the attackers also accessed the U.S. law enforcement’s wiretapping platform and gained access to the “private communications” of a “limited number” of U.S. government officials.
A team of management researchers affiliated with several institutions in the U.S. has found that minority Lyft drivers in Florida are more likely to be stopped and ticketed for speeding and to be more highly fined than white drivers.
In their study published in the journal Science, the group analyzed data for more than 200,000 Lyft drivers working in Florida over the years 2017 to 2020.
Dean Knox and Jonathan Mummolo with the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School of Management and Princeton’s School of Public and International Affairs, respectively, have published a Perspective piece in the same journal, outlining the difficulty in finding suitable environments for conducting profiling studies in public settings and the results of the new effort.
Law enforcement authorities in seven African countries have arrested 306 suspects and confiscated 1,842 devices as part of an international operation codenamed Red Card that took place between November 2024 and February 2025.
The coordinated effort “aims to disrupt and dismantle cross-border criminal networks which cause significant harm to individuals and businesses,” INTERPOL said, adding it focused on targeted mobile banking, investment, and messaging app scams.
The cyber-enabled scams involved more than 5,000 victims. The countries that participated in the operation include Benin, Côte d’Ivoire, Nigeria, Rwanda, South Africa, Togo, and Zambia.
African law enforcement authorities have arrested 306 suspects as part of ‘Operation Red Card,’ an INTERPOL-led international crackdown targeting cross-border cybercriminal networks.
Between November 2024 and February 2025, authorities seized 1,842 devices allegedly used in mobile banking, investment, and messaging app scams linked to over 5,000 victims.
“Ahead of the operation, countries exchanged criminal intelligence on key targets. This intelligence was enriched by INTERPOL with insights into criminal modus operandi using data from its private sector partners—Group-IB, Kaspersky and Trend Micro,” the international police organization said.
