My belief is that the admins, as they would be the only personnel with the means to do this, are isolating and scamming new users.
I created an account earlier today to purchase an order from [Emma Goldmen]. I made a test deposit of .01 coins. 30 minutes later it was in my wallet on AlphaBay and everything was cool (It should be noted that in this time I had closed and reopened my tor browser). Next I deposited ~4 BTC to my AlphaBay wallet and logged in to browse some more and wait for the coins to show. Since the site has been slow lately, I closed and reopened my tor browser and tried to log back in with my same username/password but was met with "Authentication Failed". Weird right? I tried like 5 more times, same error every time. Next I created a new account, logged out, and attempted to log back in,,,,with success!
Weird...I had initial suspicions that maybe their login server/communication was faltering but creating that new account proved me wrong. Over the next 30 minutes I occasionally tried logging into my original account, with its original and valid username/password, still greeted with "authentication failed".
About an hour after this started happening I was finally able to log in to my account, with the original credentials, to find a successful deposit of ~4 BTC..... and a remaining wallet balance of .0034BTC. FUCK
Looked at my orders (hadnt ever made any on alphabay, this would have been my first) and I had one order, placed with the vendor ''' (only 3 apostrophe's). It was for an abraxas invite code custom listing....for the exact amount of BTC I had deposited, and the order had been FE'd with a positive rating and no comment.
So I guess Im fucked at this point?
Ive obviously changed my password on my login to AlphaBay. However, I am still receiving the "authentication failed" message when attempting to login to the forums. I have been directed to the forums to talk to /u/alpha02 regarding this situation, yet I cannot login to post because of the ("Authentication Failed").
The entire situation seems pretty dodgy to me, and too well planned and quickly executed for it to have been executed by a third party outside source.
Or I might be completely wrong. But I just fucking lost 4BTC directly after depositing....to a vendor with an account created 4 months ago with no transactions. And the admin/moderator /u/alpha02 has provided little to no help regarding the situation
If anyone has any other ideas of what have might happened, or how the fuck to fix this. Please let me know, thanks and good luck out there.
edit: moderator and owner /u/alpha02 has shown little to no desire to help in the situation. After multiple messages on the alphabay forum he has kept his responses to non-helpful single sentences, and simply regurgitated the transaction details. He has not offered to look into the period of time when I did not have access to my account (when the transaction was made), nor has he looked into the vendor account my coin was sent to. Additionally he closed a help thread I opened on their forums and marked it as "resolved" with his response being "I Pm'ed you the details".
So I guess TL;DR Stay the fuck away from AlphaBay.
where were you grabbing these links from? the same place? it sounds a lot like phished from the initial description