Exactly two years after starting its operations, the popular dark web illegal market forum White House Market has published an announcement confirming that the platform will shut down its operations. In their message, the administrators claim to have achieved their goals and must now continue with their plans, which include the definitive closure of White House Market.
“Thanks everybody for your business, trust, support and of course for placing decent amounts of money in our pockets. We may come back some time in the future with a different project… Meanwhile be on the lookout for phishing or copycats, if it’s not signed by us it’s not us”, reads the statement.
After the announcement, White House Market disabled the registration of new accounts and the new product listing feature. Sellers on this platform also received a notification to prepare the transfer of their profiles to other illegal platforms. Administrators added that the platform will remain online for a while longer until the delivery of pending orders is completed, any complaints are resolved, and sellers’ accounts are emptied.
This platform was launched in October 2019 and was only accessible through the Tor network. Although its period of activity was short, it turned out to be a prolific market, reaching about 890,000 registered users, 3,500 sellers and almost 50,000 products listed. The vendors at White House Market offered all sorts of illegal products, mainly narcotics shipped from European territories.
On this platform it was also easy to find stolen payment cards, malware variants, counterfeit services and even hardware for intercepting protected communications.
Another characteristic feature of White House Market is that it required users to disable JavaScript in their Tor browsers before accessing the platform as a security measure, in addition to implementing a large team of moderators dedicated to conflict resolution to prevent problems from leaving this market.
The good control of the activities, in addition to some incidents of scam and closure of other illegal markets, contributed to White House Market consolidating itself as one of the main options of those users in search of illegal products. This closure is surprising and the exact motives of the operators are still unknown, although everything could be related to a potential police investigation.
To learn more about information security risks, malware variants, vulnerabilities and information technologies, feel free to access the International Institute of Cyber Security (IICS) websites.
He is a cyber security and malware researcher. He studied Computer Science and started working as a cyber security analyst in 2006. He is actively working as an cyber security investigator. He also worked for different security companies. His everyday job includes researching about new cyber security incidents. Also he has deep level of knowledge in enterprise security implementation.