Cannazon, one of the dark web’s largest marketplaces for purchasing marijuana products, shut down last week after suffering a debilitating distributed denial of service attack.
As the admins explained in a message signed with the Marketplace PGP key, they are officially retiring and claiming not to be scamming their vendors exit.
Admins posted this message on November 23, 2021, and today Cannazon went offline, allegedly forever.
DDoS attack led to shutdown
The site was hit by a massive Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attack earlier this month, which is not uncommon in dark web markets.
Admins reduced the number of orders and kept the marketplace partially offline for a while to alleviate the issues, but it created a buzz in the community with fears of an imminent release scam.
The closure announcement apologizes for the lack of transparency in how the directors handled the situation and states the following:
“We are so sorry that we have had to keep you in the dark over the last few days. In our opinion, this was the best way to stop some sellers from trying to get out of the scam, harming you and the community “, we read in the announcement of the closure of the site. site administrators.
“If a vendor has failed to get all of their signed multisig Bitcoin transactions, they can get them from an encrypted message that will be posted to Dread later this week.”
Source: KELA
With the shutdown of Cannazon, it wouldn’t be surprising to see other sites created using the same name under a new Tor address. However, these will likely be exploited by crooks seeking to defraud members of the original site.
The emergence of bogus clone sites is typical when a large and well-known dark web platform goes offline.
Why is this a bad idea
If you think that buying cannabis on the dark web is an easy way to get around drug laws in your country while remaining anonymous behind VPNs or Tor, you are ignoring much of the risks involved.
First, most of these platforms, including Cannazon and CannaHome, work with subscriptions. As such, all users give scraps of information when signing up. If their servers end up falling into the hands of law enforcement, buyers could be identified.
Second, the chances of getting ripped off when placing an order are always high, even in markets where administrators promise high levels of trade security.
Third, all the drugs shipped to you may contain dangerous toxic substances or be completely different from what you thought you would pay for. As such, consuming them could pose a serious risk to your health.
Finally, buying drugs online is illegal in many countries and could result in fines and prison terms.
