what happened to whom, reported straight: takedowns, vanishing acts and orderly goodbyes across the hidden service scene.
Joint #StopRansomware advisories double as a public record of how the ransomware economy runs: initial access brokers priced from $100 to $1 million, tiered affiliates, leak-site countdowns, and sanctions risk for anyone facilitating a payment. What the documents actually state, and why payments are falling anyway.
Genesis Market fell in April 2023, but the trade in stealer logs, databases and network access changed venues rather than stopped. Research from Flashpoint, Sekoia and Kaspersky traces a reseller economy now consolidating around forums like Rehub.
An intruder reached Crédit Mutuel Arkéa through a service provider's platform and used the bank's own account to move about EUR 118 million, a figure the bank will not confirm. The money left as ordinary bank transfers, was withdrawn as USDC and USDT at three exchanges, and partly ended in Monero.
Most sites advertising email hacking for a few hundred dollars take payment and deliver nothing, academic testing shows. A market-watch look at the retail hack-for-hire economy: its price ladder, refund-never mechanics, the professional tier that actually delivers, and what buyers lose.
FinCEN named the crypto exchange MEXC Global a financial institution of "primary money laundering concern" on November 6, 2026 and barred US financial institutions from processing transfers to or from it. The order alleges at least $16 billion in illicit-linked flows between May 2021 and May 2026.
On November 6 and 7, 2014, Europol, the FBI and partner agencies seized more than 400 .onion addresses and charged the alleged operator of Silk Road 2.0. Twelve years later, Operation Onymous remains a study in the gap between announced impact and measured effect.
FBI agents arrested Blake Benthall, the alleged operator of Silk Road 2.0, in San Francisco on 5 November 2014, about a year after the original Silk Road was seized. The market lasted roughly twelve months; the case took nearly a decade to close.
Roman Sterlingov ran the darknet's longest-running bitcoin mixer for a decade before his 2021 arrest. His 2024 trial and conviction turned blockchain analysis into tested courtroom evidence, and an appeals court has now affirmed it.
Gift cards need no bank account and no identity check at redemption, which makes them a durable cash-out rail for cybercrime. A look at the resale economics, the documented enforcement cases, and why the model survives the friction.
An estimated 6.3 to 6.43 billion dollars drained from Binance hot wallets on October 29, 2026, across eleven blockchains. The FBI attributes the theft to North Korea's TraderTraitor cluster, the same actors behind the Bybit heist; Binance says it is covering every customer loss while the laundering effort runs for years.
Underground forums advertise SIM-swapping jobs at $2,000 to $5,000 per number, with a premium when an insider is already in place at the carrier. The pricing, the court cases behind it and the defenses that work.
Qilin, once a small Go-based brand called Agenda, has become one of the most active ransomware operations worldwide. A look at its Rust loader, its kernel-level EDR killer, the Synnovis and Lee Enterprises attacks, and what 2,398 leak-site victims reveal.
