‘Yellow Brick Market’ Might Be Exit-Scamming or Under Arrest

• The ‘Yellow Brick Market’ has stayed offline for over four days now, so it may not return.
• Some say it has exit-scammed, while others point to the possibility of law enforcement action.
• The particular platform wasn’t the most reliable site on the dark web, so the situation is not that unusual.

The ‘Yellow Brick Market’ is currently offline, and its users are worried that it’s exit-scamming, so all the cryptocurrency they had deposited on the escrow is gone. Considering the recent “DarkMarket” arrests, though, it is also possible that the YB operators have also fallen in the hands of the police, or got scared and decided to pull the plug, or even that the Australian arrested in Germany was running both platforms.

Multiple sources claim that a staff member at DarkMarket also worked at Yellow Brick, which went offline the same week. Did YB exit or were they also arrested? Remember that LE does not announce all arrests.

— dark.fail (@DarkDotFail) January 14, 2021

‘Yellow Brick,’ which people liked to call “the ugliest darknet market to date” for choosing an obnoxious and outdated interface, was generally a mid-sized player that never established a reputation of being particularly reliable. In fact, during the summer of 2019, it went offline without warning for over a week and then returned, citing maintenance reasons.

So, all in all, it’s an unstable platform that may or may not return. This time, we are counting four days of downtime, so the chances of not seeing it return are increasing.

What can be ruled out is the chances of this outage being connected with the recent Tor network problems that had out-of-hand DDoS attacks between marketplaces expose a “v3 onion” bug. The platform was using multiple v2 and v1 onion domains, so that’s not the case. Even if the Yellow Brick was being DDoSed, it would have had some intermediate uptime moments.

Remember, dark web sites rely on private, hidden infrastructure, which is oftentimes not reliable itself. That is especially the case for smaller and mid-sized marketplaces like ‘Yellow Brick,’ and it’s why these sites generally come and go.

Also, trusting them with your crypto is naive, to say the least, as the anonymity factor is a shroud of protection for the operators, who may exit scam without any repercussions at any time.

In the case that law enforcement agencies are involved in the YB situation, users would have a lot to be worried about. The particular marketplace allowed the trade of any products, including illicit drugs, so if its servers were seized, the investigators would have a lot of data collection. That’s yet another reason to avoid these places altogether.