Apollon Market is Probably Exit Scamming

Users of Apollon Market—both customers and vendors—have been reporting unusual behavior from the administrators of the market. All evidence points to an exit scam.
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Hours after Dread relaunched, an attacker started DDOSing Dread, Envoy, The Hub, and possibly other forums. Many of the HugBunter wrote, “we were back up and running and then ALL forums were attacked at once, all hard down.” Dread access has been limited since relaunch. Many of the other forums appear to have recovered as of this post. The Dread administrator believes Apollon is responsible for “the dos attacks against all the forums and Empire.”
Many of the users who accessed Dread (likely through one of the mirrors) posted their concerns about Apollon Market.
SamWhiskey, a Dread mod, stickied the “Apollon Megathread” and issued a similar warning:
Since the downtime we’ve had some reports of problems with Apollon. This is the place to post any information or questions you have. Please do not make separate posts about it.

Apollon market is paying for DDOS attacks against dread, avengers, the hub, envoy and empire. Most likely to cover up an exit scam.


A number of vendors on Apollon Market sent emails to darknetlive with information concerning their accounts on the market.
One vendor, SteroidWarehouse, wrote:
I can confirm that when I try to sign into Apollon I get the following:

The username and/or password you entered is invalid

This morning I could still login and then all of a sudden I couldn’t. I also had several customers who told me that their wallets have been depleted yesterday night and this morning. It might be that they’re doing a Nightmare style exist scam. If you need more details please let me know.

Echelon:
As a vendor we can confirm that we are unable to login to our vendor accounts but still able to login to fake customer acconts [sic]. Out oof [sic] stock items in our listings have been re enabled

Feels like an EXIT scam

astronomicat:
I’m astronomicat, a small-time vendor with years of experience with darknet markets. I’d like to inform you that there are some issues at Apollon where several vendor accounts have had their passwords changed, hindering access to the accounts. I’m one of them. It cannot be a matter of phishing or similar as I have 2FA enabled and have had good opsec since 2013. At the time of writing this message, at least two others have claimed the same.

tomandjerry (via Dread)
All vendors are locket out their accounts, buyers not, withdraws disabled

Dread user /u/OwlofLogic posted a TLDR in the Apollon Megathread.

Apollon locked out all vendor accounts. It says the username/password is wrong. Any attempts to reset password will tell you your pin/mnemonic is wrong.

Buyer accounts, 2FA enabled or not, can still log on and deposit money.

Withdrawals haven’t been processed for some time before this, at least since somewhere Jan 27.

New withdrawals still possible but will remain processing for buyer accounts.

Inactive listings have been forcefully put active again by admin

Mods either removed their own access or were removed as moderators from /d/apollon If you open a ticket about it you will get the following response:

There is a fault on our side after last update. We are now working on it thank you for your patience and sorry for the delays. As the admin comes online all will be fine again. We locked all vendor accounts till we fix the issue. Please wait until resolution don’t reply the ticket


Apollon Market staffer /u/sator is sending the above response through the market’s ticket interface as well as on Dread.

One unusual note: The market’s homepage changed at some point within the last five days. The homepage had links to Dark Eye, TheOnionWeb, DarknetLive, and Dread just days ago. As of publication, the homepage only has a link to Dark Eye.

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If anyone has additional information, feel free to email darknetlive or leave a comment. Story is still developing. History repeats itself, though.