Incognito Market Exit Scams

05 Mar, 2024

Incognito Market Goes Poof

The darknet market Incognito has just been confirmed to be exit scamming, and all its mirrors are now offline.

A couple hours ago, HugBunter made an announcement on /d/DarkNetMarkets warning all users to stay away from Incognito and DarkNetLive, as well as calling out its administrator's attempt to bribe them into going offline for a week. ¹

Shortly after, a post on DarkNetLive went up, accusing HugBunter and the DrugHub team of pushing a smear campaign against the market, citing a statement made by HugBunter in February of 2023 saying they (at the moment) did not suspect any foul play when DarkNetLive was sold in 2022. ²

This response is amusing. Everyone who operates on the darkweb is constantly on edge, knowing that any website's reputation and reliability can tank at any moment. HugBunter's own 2023 statement says:

This is a vouch that as of this current time, I see no wrong doing and simply want to assist in dispelling misinformation...

Despite the "as of this current time" part of the statement, DarkNetLive wants to insist that this proves some kind of obligation from HugBunter to always vouch for the legitimacy of the website and Incognito, and that trust of DarkNetLive could never possibly change. Hell, some people don't even trust HugBunter and question the possibility of collusions with admins of now-defunct markets like AlphaBay and Bohemia. Granted, these claims are unfounded, but the sentiment is still there.
Not only that, but DarkNetLive states White House Market exit scammed, which just isn't true. It retired gracefully in 2021 and allowed users and vendors to withdraw their funds.³

At the end of the day, no one trusts anyone on the darknet. I don't know how Incognito can expect people to believe they and DarkNetLive are somehow superior in that regard.

Incognito Bought DarkNetLive To Use Its Credibility

According to Dark.Fail, the original administrator of DarkNetLive confirmed that the website was sold to Pharoah, the administrator of Incognito. ⁴

DNL1 confirmed in a PGP-signed message to the Darkdot team that they sold Darknetlive to Incognito Market in 2022. Specifically, they sold the site to Pharoah, Incognito’s admin.

When the details of the website sale became more publicly-known, the darknet community recognized the sale to likely be a move from Incognito to use the credibility of DarkNetLive to bolster its reputation.
Incognito Market faced several hiccups since the acquisition, none of which were reported on DarkNetLive. Incognito Market exit scamming - with vendors and customers losing hundreds or even thousands of dollars alike - and subsequent attempt to bribe HugBunter and lashing out at them has simply validated people's distrust of the website.

DarkNetLive has shown itself to be a wholly untrustworthy resource, and the darknet market sphere has fallen even further into a slump. As of now, there are only two markets besides Incognito that are listed on Tor.Taxi: Archetyp and Abacus. DrugHub is a newly-announced market that is run by some former members of White House Market, however it will still have to go through a lot of effort to build trust and reputation.

March 7 Update

The Tor Times⁵ has published an article on Incognito today. It covers the circumstances leading up to the market exiting. You can check it out here.

Footnotes

#darknet