The Next "Tor Market Kingpin" Made Off with All Its Users' Money

We only know this person, or group of individuals, as MettaDPR, and that this person wrote some code that froze the money being held in escrow on the dark web drug bazaar Project Black Flag, effectively funneling funds to himself. Now, he's trying to justify such brazen scam-baggery on account of it all being just too damn stressful to keep up with.

That's if we're to believe a recent post (dark) by MettaDPR over at Project Black Flag (dark), which was one of a handful of dark web, er, startups (and in at least one case, holdout), gunning for a piece of the post-Silk Road action. "Well mates," MettaDPR begins, "I am saddened to say goodbye." In creating PBF, MettaDPR's intent "was pure and I wanted to help the community." But then a few days ago:

I begin implementing code changes to freeze funds and dump them to myself. I was unable to cope with the stress and constant demand, so I panicked. I am sorry for my actions, but with the funds I gathered from the site, I will be able to keep myself from being homeless for the next several months. I will always remember those that made this possible.

In other words, MettaDPR not only stole his users' money, in this case an unknown amount, likely not all that much, of the cryptocurrency Bitcoin (BTC) that got routed to MettaDPR's wallet. He then turned to the very same people who entrusted their money in PBF's services and says-without-saying that everyone should just remain chill because hey, you've helped a dude really turn things around up in the real world. For a few months, at least.

It's almost like MettaDPR is asking everyone he stiffed to have pity on his soul. Which makes this whole thing one of the scummiest episodes to rock the rubble of the Silk Road.

That's saying something. This is the dark web we're talking about. This is a place whose batshit highs must always try to stave off a nagging and constant low: scamming.

It's an itch that's only grown more intense in the weeks since the arrest of Ross Ulbricht, the alleged founder-guru of the recently shuttered Silk Road 1.0. That site seems to have served as a template for PBF, for all intents and purposes a new market that either in homage or out of considerble laziness (or calculated, if ultimately slipshod thievery) seemed to have pulled heavy from the Silk Road's playbook.

PBF looked and felt alot like the Silk Road 1.0. Before it became the third underweb market to go dark in the last two weeks, PBF lured in an unknown number of users scrambling to find their old guy in the fractured dark web. Some saw in MettaDPR the potential to one day emerge as a "Tor Market Kingpin". And this despite what were then still unknown scamming levels on the site.

MettaDPR quickly made those levels crystal clear: Highest. Naturally, people are hot pissed. As one cheated PBF user reponded to MettaDPR's admission:

I know everything. I know who you are. More specifically, I know your consumer IP address, your name, your age, and your place of birth. You have not configured your Tor correctly, by the way. I was able to gain access to the server shortly after you put it up… You have 24 hours to respond to this post. If this post is deleted, I will take it personally.

Twenty-four hours later, and nothing much seems to have gone down. But our guy, the same cheated PGF, just followed up with this:

The deadline was not met. I will undertake appropriate actions over the next 48 hours. I am still going through the aprox. 1,719 private messages in the database… Let this serve as a warning to the pathetic anarchist scum out there, terrorizing the Internet with your drug cancer. The number of drug-related overdoses and homicides has spiked in the past decade. The Internet is not a place for junkies to score drugs.

We'll see. If anything, it's a reminder of what's perhaps the central tenet of the Wild West that is today's darknet: Only keep in the system what you could stand losing.

Because it's all about trust. "Someone could set up a site for a while, wait for people to trust their money to it, and then skip town," Ian Steadman writes over at the New Statesman. "You can’t regulate against that because, y’know, the drugs thing." It's the impossibility of recovering stolen bitcoins, a bulwark that's built right into the system, that makes it so that the only thing one can do is try to prevent thefts from happening in the first place, Steadman adds.

As they say, never trust a pirate.

@thebanderson