Grey Market May Have Exit Scammed Robbing Its Users From Their Funds

Updated January 1st, 2020

Grey market may have exit scammed according to a pgp signed message posted by its administrator on a known dark web forum. We are carefully using the word “may have exit scammed” because a single pgp signed message is not sufficient enough to prove the claims. The administrator claims that a co-administrator emptied the market’s wallets and vanished with all the users funds.

Uptime Issues

Grey market was having a hard time staying up due to ddos attacks. They had a very bad uptime in the last 30 days and were down most of the time. Although other markets were also affected by that large scale ddos attack but grey market was hit very bad. The admins may have been fed up due to the problems created by that ddos attack and planned to shut down the market taking all the user’s funds with them to spend the new year’s holidays in style.

Pgp Signed Message By Co-Admin

A few hours ago, the admin of grey market posted a pgp signed message on a known darknet forum using the official grey market pgp key. In the message he revealed that a co-administrator stole all the money from their market’s cold wallet, that’s why they have planned to shutdown the market. He also said they are searching for that admin and they will be back with a new scam proof market. Here is the full message.

hello everyone
i am grey market admin and we had another admin lets call him billy. billy was in charge on promotion and only he has access to all our official accounts here.
as you know last few weeks we had bad ddos attack so while we were very busy to fight billy took his chance and stole all money from cold storage. few days later we had to stop market because we cant pay back. billy’s searching is already on the way we will try to return as much as possible we need time. if everything is good we will back in few months with new ddos and scam proof market we will try to make multisig escrow as simple as possible other ways are not safe for vendors and customers.
we apologise for spoiled xmas and new year we feel the same, peace bros

ps admins you can mark Grey Market as scam exited and ban all our official accounts

Announcement made by grey market admin

Timeline Of Events

• Early November: Grey market starts having uptime issues
• December: The uptime issue becomes worse & the market is down most of the times
• December 24th: The market is not accessible anymore
• December 25th: Grey Market admin warns of issues with payments and auto finalizing of orders
• December 30th: Grey Market bot gone from Jabber
• December 31st: The admin announces the shutdown of market

Conclusion

The conclusion is clear…… More users are left without their funds. There is a myth that walletless markets are safer than those with wallets. It is not true. They both have their funds when you use their escrow service. Rest is always use trusted markets and avoid the markets that use ready made scripts like dark market, dbay, genesis market and now grey market. They are all using the script sold by eckmar on bitcointalk. Now nothing can be done, your funds are gone, take your loss and move on with your life.

If you plan to join a new market then we suggest you join Big Blue Market. We have tested this market and can tell they are very professional and hard working. The market has impressive features and aims to become the top market very soon.