{"id":217985,"date":"2025-07-16T01:17:07","date_gmt":"2025-07-16T06:17:07","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2025\/07\/abacus-dark-web-drug-market-goes-offline-in-suspected-exit-scam"},"modified":"2025-07-16T01:17:07","modified_gmt":"2025-07-16T06:17:07","slug":"abacus-dark-web-drug-market-goes-offline-in-suspected-exit-scam","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2025\/07\/abacus-dark-web-drug-market-goes-offline-in-suspected-exit-scam","title":{"rendered":"Abacus dark web drug market goes offline in suspected exit scam"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a class=\"aligncenter blog-photo\" href=\"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog.images\/abacus-dark-web-drug-market-goes-offline-in-suspected-exit-scam2.jpg\"><\/a><\/p>\n<p>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.<\/p>\n<p>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.<\/p>\n<p>Blockchain intelligence firm <a href=\"https:\/\/www.trmlabs.com\/resources\/blog\/abacus-market-conducts-likely-exit-scam-amid-increasingly-unstable-western-darknet-marketplace-landscape\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"nofollow noopener\">TRM Labs reports<\/a> that Abacus shutting down so abruptly has all the indications of either an exit scam or a covert law enforcement operation dismantling the activity.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>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 [\u2026]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":427,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1318,3818,1493],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-217985","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-bitcoin","category-blockchains","category-law-enforcement"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/217985","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/427"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=217985"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/217985\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=217985"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=217985"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=217985"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}