A popular dark web marketplace for the sale of illicit goods is alleged to have stolen $30 million in customer funds in what is likely to be an “exit scam.”

The Wall Street Market, which had become popular after rival Dream Market announced it was closing, first started claiming that it was having issues with its “bitcoin server” last week. Both buyers and sellers couldn’t get access to their funds.

As is often the case with sites such as this on the dark web — a shady part of the internet accessible through special software — buyers place their money into escrow and vendors can withdraw the funds after a period of time to allow a sale to be completed. The missing money, estimated to be about $30 million in bitcoin, has all been taken from escrow accounts controlled by Wall Street Market.

Users on a dark web forum managed to trace the movement of the funds, finding that that bitcoin has been transferred to an external wallet before being split and sent forward to other bitcoin wallets, a process known as transaction mixing. The theory goes that by laundering bitcoin through multiple different wallets over and over, the funds become extremely difficult if not impossible to trace.

If running off with customer funds isn’t bad enough, some users of Wall Street Market are also claiming that customer support staff for the site are attempting to blackmail them, threatening to share their details with law enforcement unless payment of 0.05 bitcoin is made.

Greed may have been a motivation for the exit scam, but some observers argued that the operators of the site may have taken the money and run based on the increasing threat of being caught by law enforcement. Some 61 darknet vendors were arrested in a series of raids led by the U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation in March, prompting the announcement from Dream Market that it was shutting down.

“WSM admins most likely realized that with the massive influx of Dream Market users, this would have also brought increased attention from law enforcement forces — which in previous years have shut down all the major dark web marketplaces like clockwork,” ZDNet noted. Closed markets include Silk Road, Silk Road 2 and AlphaBay, to name a few.

Although the demise of Wall Street Market may leave a hole for darkweb trading, it won’t be empty for long. The shutdown of every dark web market place in the past has seen new players emerge in their place. As of April 22, there are 19 active alternative markets listed on Deep.Dot.Web, with more likely not on the list.

Image: Wall Street Market