exit scam

an exit scam is when a market's operators close shop and vanish with everyone's money still held in escrow - the single biggest financial risk of buying anywhere.

an exit scam is the planned looting of a marketplace: the operators stop processing withdrawals, cook up escalating excuses (wallet maintenance, migration, an audit, a hack), keep sales running so escrow keeps filling, and then disappear with the balance. users holding funds on-site absorb a hundred percent loss.

history provides textbook cases. evolution market executed the genre-defining exit in 2015, vanishing with an estimated twelve million dollars in bitcoin after weeks of withdrawal delays. empire market pulled a smoother version in 2020, faking downtime before going dark with escrow full. in between, dozens of mid-sized markets did quieter versions.

warning signs cluster predictably: withdrawals slowing to days then "temporarily" disabling, staff going quiet or turning hostile in threads, sudden forced-account "upgrades", aggressive final promotions pushing deposits, and the site adding features nobody asked for while basic cash-out breaks. none alone proves anything; together they are a countdown.

defense is behavioral, not technical: keep balances near zero and fund orders individually, treat any "deposit now, buy later" advice as malice, diversify rather than marrying one site, and read our anatomy of an exit scam note before the next "temporary outage" thread appears.