Illegal goods market Alphabay Marketplace has disappeared from the darknet, the shady part of the Internet accessible only through special software, in a move that suggests its backers shut it down to steal from users.

Launched in December 2014 and ranked by researchers as the largest illegal-goods market online by October 2015, Alphabay has often been referred to as the new Silk Road, a previous market on the darknet that dominated the scene before it was shut down by the Federal Bureau of Investigation in 2013. Like Silk Road before it, Alphabay ran a fairly elaborate e-commerce operation, including an integrated digital contracts and escrow system allowing users to make engagements and agree to provide services in the future.

Evidence of the dubious nature of Alphabay’s disappearance emerged on Reddit, where users discovered that a large sum of bitcoin, totaling 1,479.03904709 BTC ($3.857 million) was transferred from a bitcoin wallet known to be used by those behind the site to other bitcoin wallets. The transfers “definitely add to the suspicion a bit,” Tyler Carbone, the chief product officer with Terbium Labs, told Gizmodo. “But honestly that seems like a surprisingly small amount to take, if this truly is an exit scam.”

Others though were not as skeptical. A Reddit user by the name of glooniemcboon called for calm, noting, “Now I’ll admit I don’t know for sure what’s going on and I am a bit nervous myself because if this is the end then I’ve lost a couple hundred dollars myself but think about it last year alphabay went down for about 4 days.”

So-called “exit scams” are fairly common in the Wild West that is the darknet. Evolution, another Silk Road wannabe, closed down in 2015 complete with bitcoin theft, and the ironically named Outlaw Market closed in May.

The potential closure of Alphabay goes to show once again the risky nature of anyone undertaking business on them. The darknet is unregulated, these sites are themselves illegal and it’s only the good faith of those behind them that keeps them going. Put more simply, if you’re buying drugs on the darknet, you do so at your risk.

Image: Torange