Sheep marketplace scam: 40 million stolen.

"Now, it appears as though the entire site was a scam, resulting in all of the buyers and sellers losing their money. According to users of the site which have been posting primarily on Reddit, Sheep Marketplace appeared to be functioning in an odd way for at least a week. Concerns regarding the legitimacy of the site came into play once the administrators at the marketplace decided to prevent vendors from withdrawing any of their Bitcoins from the site.

With many of these vendors seeing sales in the tens of thousands each month, being unable to withdraw that money was causing people to become worried, especially with how much money was lost after the Silk Road was brought to its knees. As more and more vendors posted about their suspicions, the entire Sheep Marketplace Forum was shutdown.

Even though the events leading up to today seemed to confirm that Sheep Marketplace was scamming its users, the smoking gun appears to have been found. Blockchain (a site which monitors Bitcoin transactions) has been tracking the movement of 39,918 Bitcoins, which is equivalent to $40 million. This is the same amount of money that was expected to be in Sheep Marketplace’s possession and the addresses present on this transaction match those of the website.

This means that more than $40 million worth of Bitcoin was stolen from users of the Sheep Marketplace."

http://www.tapscape.com/sheep-marketplace-scam-revealed-40-million-stolen/


ouch.

 

It also means that no one is going to recover their money. The bad thing about cryptocurrencies is that they aren't recognized currency in most places and therefore nothing can be recovered if this shit happens.

 

Yeah now I see what people meant by non Silk Road sites being potentially shady.

Owner must have been laughing all the way to the bank.

 

Bound to happen, $40M on someone's doorstep lol. I know TradeFortress' site was tiny compared to this but d'you reckon he stole the 4100 btc as well?

 

I suspect so. He has claimed that he will "repay" some of it with 1000 BTC he said he had.... but ya he probably walked away too.

Funny thing is I have used Sheeps before successfully. Thankfully I only had like .0001 BTC left on there since I only deposited what I needed to make the purchase.

 

Wow damn..

I got told a lot about this site, lucky me that didn't try it.

 

As unfortunate as this is, people should have already learned from the MANY past experiences with supposedly "stolen" BTC followed rather quickly by random excuses by the site owners.

As if it is too much effort for people to save them locally...

 

This is why I'm not trusting any of the new markets springing up after the death of SR1.0, and why I'm gonna wait for at least a few months before using SR2.0

 

All the sketchy sites going down like flies lately....

 

Sheep had a shitty name and feeling about it. Been using SR since the OG version since migrated to BmR but thinks are hiccuppy there atm due to server overload. Waiting on new version to drop.


Tbh I thought the feds we're behind sheep lol cuz the name. Done plenty of biz on bmr.

 

Why not use SR. Lol. Dumb enough to use something else then you had it coming

40M free and clear. Geezus

 

Wow, they made some money there.. but sad as they are scamming c*nts

 

Share the 40m? <3?

 

That's why trading cryptocurrencies, while highly lucrative, is a dangerous game.

This is especially true when dealing with black markets.

 

Bingo, Not to mention if you have things waiting in escrow and the price of coins drops or what ever.

 

I highly doubt they made the entire $40,000,000 free and clear.. They'd have to find legitimate ways to launder the money into fiat which I'm sure would raise some flags, and i'm sure more than a few of their members are trying to track the blockchain to see if there are any traces of the BTC from Sheep being transferred. Obviously it'll still be near impossible to return to the users.

 

I heard rumours saying that the owners of Sheep have put a bounty on the thief but that there isnt any thief at all because the owner is trying to divert attention away to allow him to attempt to launder the $ with less scrutiny.


Conspiracy theories aplenty!

 

The name kind of fits... Bunch of sheep fell victim to the wolf.

 

Interesting - does anyone think some of the smaller (or larger) exchange terminals may become scams? Or too much visibility/ non anonymity?

 

I doubt mtgox will scam in the near future, they are too big to run at this stage. The smaller ones perhaps so.