‘Administrators of anonymous drug platform Evolution flee with millions of dollars’

The Tor site Evolution, which traded in drugs, weapons and other contraband, has been shut down. A dealer who claims to have been active in the marketplace claims that two site managers may have stolen millions of dollars in bitcoins.

Over the past weekend, traders on the Evolution site were suddenly unable to withdraw their bitcoin balances. The site administrators claimed that this step was taken because of ‘technical problems’. On Tuesday evening, however, the user forum and the marketplace also went offline, so that no user of the Evolution site on the Tor network can still access his bitcoin balances.

On Reddit, a drug dealer who claims to have been active on Evolution for some time stated that two administrators, operating under the pseudonyms Verto and Kimble, not only took down the management system, but also stole the deposited bitcoin funds. The dealer claims to have lost bitcoins worth more than 20,000 dollars, or 18,850 euros. The necessary panic and anger would have arisen among users of the website, Wired writes.

The drug dealer’s claim that the administrators made off with the loot has not yet been confirmed by others. However, if this is true, there is a chance that they have pushed back millions of dollars in bitcoin assets. A Reddit user points to a bitcoin wallet in which an amount of 43,083 bitcoin is mentioned, good for more than 11.1 million euros at the time of writing.

After the closure of Silk Road and Silk Road 2.0, Evolution managed to attract the necessary traders in prohibited goods through a so-called multi-signature transaction system for payment in bitcoins. This mechanism should in fact prevent intermediaries from seeing the opportunity to steal the virtual money. This feature and a relatively high uptime of 97 percent on the Tor network led to growing popularity.