Sheep Marketplace was an anonymous marketplace set up as a

Tor Tor, TOR or ToR may refer to: Places * Tor, Pallars, a village in Spain * Tor, former name of Sloviansk, Ukraine, a city * Mount Tor, Tasmania, Australia, an extinct volcano * Tor Bay, Devon, England * Tor River, Western New Guinea, Indonesia Sc ...

hidden service Tor, short for The Onion Router, is free and open-source software for enabling anonymous communication. It directs Internet traffic through a free, worldwide, volunteer overlay network, consisting of more than seven thousand relays, to conc ...

. It launched in March 2013 and was one of the lesser known sites to gain popularity with the well publicized closure of the Silk Road marketplace later that year. It ceased operation in December 2013, when it announced it was shutting down after a vendor stole $6 million worth of users' bitcoins.

Bitcoin theft incident

In December 2013 Sheep Marketplace announced that one of the site's vendors exploited a vulnerability to steal 5,400 bitcoins, valued at about $6 million at the time. According to ''Forbes'' and ''The Guardian,'' several users reported the site had started to block withdrawals of bitcoins more than a week prior to the theft. Users furthermore suggested the site's administrators held far more than 5,400 bitcoins, pointing to records of a coincidental transfer of almost 40,000. As users in the site's forums began to complain and discuss the possibility of connivance, administrators took the forum offline. Victims of the theft have attempted to identify the thief by sending "tagged" bitcoins to his accounts, using the public nature of bitcoin transactions to follow the coins through the blockchain. Within a couple days of the theft, a large amount of bitcoins were noticed being processed by

Bitcoin Fog Bitcoin (ISO 4217#Unofficial codes for cryptocurrencies, abbreviation: BTC; Currency symbol, sign: ₿) is a decentralized digital currency that can be transferred on the peer-to-peer bitcoin network. Bitcoin transactions are verified by net ...

, a tumbler used to launder bitcoins by shuffling them between many accounts for a small fee. The size of the transaction, 96,000 bitcoins, caused Bitcoin Fog to fail, leaving the money traceable. Not long thereafter, the last known wallet of the user who had been presumed to be the thief was found to be a wallet owned by

BTC-e BTC-e was a cryptocurrency trading platform primarily targeting Russian auditory with servers located in USA - until the U.S. government seized their website and all funds in 2017. It was founded in July 2011 by Alexander Vinnik and Aleksandr ...

, a large bitcoin currency exchange. This has led to speculation that the thief sent their money to the exchange in the hope of trading the coins for alternate crypto-currencies or moving to new wallets to further obfuscate their path. In May 2016 two men from Florida, then 21-year-old students Sean Mackert and Nathan Gibson, were arrested after tracing Bitcoin transactions via

Coinbase Coinbase Global, Inc., branded Coinbase, is an American publicly traded company that operates a cryptocurrency exchange platform. Coinbase is a distributed company; all employees operate via remote work and the company lacks a physical headq ...

. Subsequently, the pair pled guilty to the crime of Bitcoin wire fraud on Sheep Marketplace in 2018 and are now facing a maximum prison time of up to twenty years. About $4 million worth of Bitcoin stolen by Mackert and Gibson has since been seized by the United States Federal government. The overwhelming evidence found against Sean Mackert and Nathan Gibson in which they were found to be guilty beyond reasonable doubt also exonerated other persons of interests in the case since the allegations of theft against the latter were found to be baseless and the evidence unsatisfying. Thus, the case is closed.

References

{{Use dmy dates, date=October 2019 Internet properties established in 2013 Defunct darknet markets Internet properties disestablished in 2013