Another drug marketplace bit the dust over the weekend and another massive Bitcoin heist shook the deep web.
Sheep Marketplace, one of the two most prominent Silk Road competitors, went down on Saturday. A message briefly posted on the site on Saturday claimed that one of Sheep Marketplace's vendors exploited a security flaw and stole 5,400 BTC ($6 million at its current value).
See also: Man Throws Away Trove of Bitcoin Worth $7.5 Million
The heist could be even larger than that, though; it may have involved up to 96,000 BTC ($100 million), which would be by far the largest Bitcoin theft in U.S. dollars, given that Bitcoin's value is currently at an all-time high. It's the third major Bitcoin robbery in the last month; cybercriminals also stole 4,100 BTC from inputs.io and 1,295 BTC from BIPS, both online Bitcoin payment providers.
On Saturday, Reddit user posted a message from the site's administrators, which has since been removed. The message claimed vendor EBOOK101 hacked the site and stole 5,400 Bitcoin:
Sheep is down We are sorry to say, but we were robbed on Saturday 11/21/2013 by vendor EBOOK101. This vendor found bug in system and stole 5400 BTC - your money, our provisions, all was stolen. We were trying to resolve this problem, but we were not successful. We are sorry for your problems and inconvenience, all of current BTC will be ditributed to users, who have filled correct BTC emergency adress [sic]. I would like to thank to all SheepMarketplace moderators by this, who were helping with this problem. I am very sorry for this situation. Thank you all.
Details of the incident are still unclear. Angry former users of the drug bazaar are pointing fingers in all directions, mainly on Reddit, and mounting a cyber-manhunt operation to track down the robbers. Many believe the heist was a scam, and the No. 1 suspect among Redditors is the Sheep Marketplace administrator, a Czech citizen named Tomáš Jiřikovský. Rumors of suspicious behavior from Sheep Marketplace's administrators began in late November, as documented on the website SheepMarketScam.com.
"You run a site partially dedicated to thieves and scammers selling their wares, yet somehow wonder how it ends up getting robbed?" wrote Reddit user twigburst.
Jiřikovský has, in turn, denied the accusation in a Facebook post.
The stolen 5,400 BTC were allegedly just the tip of the iceberg. Redditors pointed to a transfer of 39,900 BTC this weekend, claiming it was an indication that the administrators were siphoning money from users' accounts on the site, as first reported by Forbes.
On Monday, a Redditor nicknamed sheeproadreloaded2 claimed to identify a transfer of 96,000 stolen bitcoins. Along with another Redditor, sheeproadreloaded2 kept track of the money as it moved through Blockchain, the public repository of all bitcoin transactions.
"We've been chasing the scoundrel with our stolen bitcoins through the blockchain," sheeproadreloaded2 wrote. "Around lunchtime (UK), I was chasing him across the roof of a moving train, (metaphorically). I was less than 20 minutes, or 2 blockchain confirmations, behind 'Tomas.'"
As a side effect of the Sheep Marketplace heist and shutdown, another Silk Road competitor, BlackMarket Reloaded, has closed doors, claiming the site wouldn't be able to sustain the migration of users and vendors from Sheep Marketplace.
After the abrupt closings of both sites, others launched in the wake of Silk Road's shutdown in October will stand as the leading websites for buying drugs and other illegal goods online: Silk Road 2.0, which was launched less than a month ago, and the lesser-known Pandora Marketplace, Deep Bay and Budster.
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Image: Flickr, Antana