Long dead dark web site reawakens to move millions in Bitcoin.
The dark web continues to be a hub of criminal activity, with everything from stolen credit cards and passwords compromised by infostealers to the full access to your small business available for purchase. One criminal marketplace, however, has remained as dead as a dodo for the last nine years, with no activity of any sort observed by dark web threat intelligence analysts. Until now, that is. The Nucleus Marketplace has just been reanimated with some $77.5 million of Bitcoin, out of a total of 5,000 BTC, being moved in a sudden transaction. Here’s what we know.
Nucleus Marketplace Reanimates—Bitcoin Haul Starts To Move
The Nucleus Marketplace was a reasonably successful criminal sales forum operating on the dark web between 2014 and 2016. In that time it sold everything from drugs, the primary source of its income it would appear, to fake IDs and computer hacking services. All of that came to an abrupt halt in 2016 when the dark web site, well, went dark. At the time it was speculated that this could have been due to anything from law enforcement disruption or a hack from criminal competitors, through to fraudulent exit strategy by the operators in order to make off with the estimated 5,000 BTC it had sitting in its wallets. The reasoning has never been adequately explained, and the money has never been touched until now.
According to blockchain analysts at Arkham Intelligence, posting to X on March 7, the ancient dark web site has reawakened and there has been activity involving the $400 million in Bitcoin it has been sitting on. “Wallets belonging to Nucleus Marketplace woke up this morning after 9 years of inactivity,” Arkham said, “transferring $77.5M worth of Bitcoin to 3 new wallets.”
If this is an exit scam, then the criminals behind the Nucleus Marketplace are indeed masters of the long game. And with $365 million in Bitcoin still available to them, it really is a case of watch this space. You can be sure that both Arkham’s intelligence analysts and law enforcement will be doing precisely that.
