I haven't heard anyone talking about their suspicion of Evo being LEO since their exit scam. I've always believed law enforment must have ways to destroying the confidence in the system people aren't talking about, like through giant bitcoin sales to fuck with price, addresses not PGP encrypted, collecting information on DNM statistics/marketshare/vendors, etc.
Weeks before Evo goes down, Shiney-flakes and Liepzig happend... Days before that a major vendor closely associated with SF went into vacation mode and still is. Maybe for Evo, it was mission objective complete... maybe they got the information they needed and couldn't justify facilitating the sale of so much illegal contraband... maybe they only had a designated amount of time to operate an illegal operation.
The biggest issue I have with all this - how did the admins collaborate on stealing the money? Why wouldn't one just run off and fuck the rest? Either they know each other very well or some kind of IRL information about each other, or its not really about the money.
Nice to see people keeping an open mind. One of my favorite sayings is you don't know what you don't know. We don't know what the fuck happened yet so many people will speak with great certaintity they know the score.
Now to speculate. Either whoever was behind the scense knew each other and that's why they all up and left at the same time or it was a LEO bust. Except unlike before, LEO decides instead of putting up a big banner and announcing the shutdown this time they're going to go covert ops. Fly under the radar. Shut down Evo and force the masses to the only other major player in town - Agora. I'll admit though I don't know enough about the system works to know if my theory holds water. Wouldn't there be some information on PACER or some site where we could find out that owners of a darknet site did in fact get arrested in the past week or so? I have no idea.
Another theory I have is that it was in fact just an exit scam to grab the coins and run. Without knowing anything more this is the more likely theory to be true IMO and here's why. Tax refunds. I don't know what the breakdown is of darknet users per country, but I bet USA has the the most buyers with the most money. And I bet you anything that because of the "sweet spot" of tax refund season right when the majority of people are getting their refunds that Evo's escrow hit an all time high, easily. Perhaps V&K had already discussed getting out of the game soon and realized that there would be no better time than now because let's face it, there's not going to be as much escrow in April or May or June or any month really. Tax refunds are huge chunks of cash that people don't budget for so when they come they have no responsibility to pay bills with the money because they already have their income to cover that. They take the refunds and buy not just drugs on here, but tons of shit on clearnet too. This is probably why USPS is sucking wind the last 4-6 weeks. Christmas like volume of packages without the extra Chritsmas help means there's going to be wisespread delays and there are. So for all these reasons this 2nd theory is the most likely one to me.