Dream Market became one of the most popular marketplaces within the dark web when the top two marketplaces, AlphaBay and Hansa, were taken down by law enforcement authorities over the summer.
Users were left looking for an alternate platform to continue their operations performing Bitcoin transactions and buying various illicit items on the dark web.
When dealing with websites and service providers who are not legally recognized by the government, there are several issues that customers have to face on a daily basis.
The most notorious of them all is when a website shuts down with no response; users can only assume that it was taken down by law enforcement authorities.
Dream Market's Unexpected Outage
Recently, Dream Market went dark all of a sudden and users were in a frenzy to know what happened on the service provider's side.
Most people conclude that when websites close down without any notice, it obviously refers to an exit scam.
The exit scam is a notorious method used by marketplaces all over the dark web, wherein they take enough Bitcoins or other cryptocurrency funds from users to abscond at an unexpected point without further explanation.
When any website would go down without any explanation, it is the obvious conclusion that users would come to.
Precisely by definition, the dark web is a place where you don't get any kind of guarantee as to when your cash would go missing but the real story behind this temporary shutdown of Dream Market was something else.
A couple of hours later, representatives of the marketplace surfaced on the popular social forum website Reddit.
Official Explanation
Reddit is one of the very few websites where darknet dealers surface now and then to share their version of the story.
However, when administrators of Dream Market took to Reddit, the team confirmed that the website went offline because of a hard drive crash.
It is supposed to be their primary hard drive which crashed and led to an important wallet file getting corrupted.
When users went online again and logged into the website, they found that many of their Bitcoin funds were missing in the panel.
Based on the team's explanation, this has been caused because of the corrupted wallet file.
The team has confirmed that they are looking into the problem and will restore the wallet balance as it was previously.
There may be some issues initially but the admins are confident that they will eventually be able to sort things out in due time.
Dream Admins Say They Didn't Steal Users' Funds
The most important message the team behind Dream Market wants all users to know is that they never stole users' Bitcoins.
They say they never had such intentions, and the entire issue occurred because of an unexpected hard drive crash.
Besides, in order to fix things and bring them back to normal, there have been occasional shutdowns of the website for a few minutes-which always causes users get panicked.
As confirmed in their official Reddit page and by other users, this is nothing to worry about because in order to fix the corrupt wallet file, as well as retrieve all the information, they have to obviously shut the site down now and then.
It's part of their maintenance process.
Is the Site Under FBI Control?
While the company continues to claim that everything is fine and they are back to operation, as usual, a solid percentage of users strongly believe that the website is now under FBI control.
The suspicion is that Dream Market is being operated by the law enforcement agencies to find what kind of illegal goods people may buy using Bitcoin and to also nab culprits who purchase such items with proper evidence.
Dream Market is the only remaining heavily populated darknet marketplace to trade goods or services over the dark web.
However, the suspicious activities on the site and wallets being emptied suddenly have pushed lots of users to log off their accounts.
The marketplace may not reach the huge popularity and trust it enjoyed for the past couple of years, but it may remain operational if it is still run by the original admins, as they claim to do so.
Disclaimer:
You need to enable JavaScript to vote
