On March 10th, several days after Incognito Market was assumed to be shut down or no longer be processing transactions, the site posted a message to its homepage that reads as follows:
”Expecting to hear the last of us yet? We got one final little nasty suprise for y'all. We have accumulated a list of private messages, transaction info and order details over the years. You'll be surprised at the number of people that relied on our "auto-encrypt" functionality. And by the way, your messages and transaction IDs were never actually deleted after the "expiry"...”
”SURPRISE SURPRISE !!! Anyway, if anything were to leak to law enforcement, I guess nobody never slipped up. We'll be publishing the entire dump of 557k orders and 862k crypto transaction IDs at the end of May, whether or not you and your customers' info is on that list is totally up to you. And yes... YES, THIS IS AN EXTORTION !!! As for the buyers, we'll be opening up a whitelist portal for them to remove their records as well in a few weeks.”
”Thank you all for doing business with Incognito Market”
Exit scams are not uncommon on dark web markets, but this one is particularly large and openly threatening compared to most. Incognito Market requires the loading of cryptocurrency to a site-based wallet, which can then be used for in-house transactions only. All cryptocurrency on the site was seized from user’s wallets, estimated to be anywhere from $10 million to $75 million. After seizing the cryptocurrency wallets of all of the marketplace’s users, the site now openly explains that it will publish transactions and chat logs of users who refuse to pay an extortion fee. The fee ranges from $100 to $20,000, a volume based 5 tier buyer/seller classification.
Incognito Market also now has a Payment Status tab, which states ”you can see which vendors care about their customers below.” and lists the some of the market’s largest sellers. Sellers which have allegedly paid the extortion fee to not have their transaction records released are displayed in green, while those who have not yet paid are displayed in red.
Additionally, in a few weeks the site claims it will have a “whitelist portal” which would allow buyers to wipe their transactions and re-encrypt chat records.
Whoever is behind the website must be extremely, extremely confident in their anonymity, already working with government agencies, or both, because a bounty on this person is likely worth millions.
It wasn't as easy to get, less people were using it outside of very serious bodybuilders, and yeah online sourcing has made it even easier.
And yeah, I'd say in addition to the internet in general, around late aughts/early 2010s started a rise in social media and accompanying body dysmophria skyrocketing in men and boys due to it.
This was also followed by a shift in body ideals for men. You can see this reflected in our celebrities; take the physique of an 80s action guy like Jean Claude Van Damme for instance vs Chris Hemsworth's Thor.
It followed that guys wanted to look even beefier with physiques that are largely unattainable through natural means, cue rising anabolic steroid usage.
There's also the rise of things like fitness culture contributing to it and "alpha male" stuff so now every other cis guy is at the TRT clinic for supposed low testosterone levels.
As a bonus it's now less stigmatized than it used to be.
So now there's more people using, more people selling it, and more ways to get it if you can't legally, just a numbers game.