Alphabay Exit Scam?! - Suspicious 1, 400 BTC Transaction

What We Know So Far

At the time of writing this post, the Alphabay servers have been down for around 6 hours. As usual, this has stirred a lot of controversy around the community of users who use Alphabay. Word on the street is, they exit scammed.

Before we all simultaneously defecate ourselves from fear of losing our coins, let's look at what we know so far.

No Updates/Announcements

This is a point I've seen stated quite a lot. When AlphaBay do maintenance or has any downtime, they usually update people on what's happening to prevent situations like this. However, we've still not received an update on what is happening and what the cause of this down time is.

Australian Vendor Selling People's Medicare Information

Recently, news have come up of an Australian vendor selling 70 people's Medicare information for as low as $35!

According to Stealthy_Stranger on Reddit, this occurance has triggered the Australian police take action against Alphabay.

Although something that doesn't make sense is,
why would one guy selling people's details on the cheap cause the website to shut down....?
Instead of, you know, the millions of dollars worth of drugs, card details and stolen identities flowing through it every day.

In addition, none of the news sources that reported on this story directly moentioned or showed Alphabay.

Suspicious 1, 400 BTC Transfer

A suspicious transaction has been found on the blockchain that happened around the same time of this conspiracy.

Someone moved 1.4k bitcoins from this address:
359FSXmTtzgpgphvRf439XdwmiQkWPDcyX

Many are speculating that this is proof of Alphabay exit scamming.

While this transaction was suspictious and had convenient timing, lethanos on Reddit has traced the transactions down the blockchain and found the address has been sending bitcoins since 14/08/2015. This is proof that the transaction did not come from Alphabay. You can view this proof by clicking here.

Conclusion

While its not possible to know exactly what will happen, its reasonable to assume that AlphaBay is simply undergoing maintenance. This has happened in the past where Alphabay would go down and everyone would panic about their lost investments. While this reaction is understandable, we should approach this from a logical angle and wait for time to tell what shall happen.

EDIT: Alphabay's Big_muscles replied to a post on Reddit confirming that the servers are simply under update. Here is a screenshot of his post.