Exit scam
A market or a trusted vendor takes the escrow balance and disappears. The recurring end state of criminal platforms, and the reason escrow and reputation systems exist at all.
Why it matters to you
An exit scam scatters a market's population into successor venues within days. Monitoring tuned to one forum goes blind at exactly the moment everyone moves.
Where we meet it
The days around an exit scam are unusually loud: accusations, receipts and old deals get posted in public as people try to recover money. It is one of the few moments this trade documents itself.
Connected terms
Garant
A forum-appointed escrow who holds payment until the goods check out. Criminal marketplaces run on reputation systems and dispute arbitration: trust infrastructure for people who trust no one.
Vouch
A public endorsement from an established member that a seller delivered. Vouches accumulate into standing, standing sets price, and a lost reputation is the only real penalty most of these markets can impose.
Initial Access Broker (IAB)
A specialist who breaks into organizations and sells the access (VPN, RDP, domain admin) instead of using it. The wholesale layer between opportunistic infection and targeted ransomware.
Where this term stops being vocabulary
Dragnet is where you watch it happen to you
Knowing the word is the cheap half. The platform is the half where the term arrives attached to your domain, with a timestamp and the source it came from.
More from the trade
Access listing
The IAB's ad format: industry, country, revenue, access level and price. Everything except the victim's name, which is disclosed to serious buyers in private.
Bot shop
A marketplace that sells the output of one infected machine as a single unit: its cookies, saved passwords, browser fingerprint and time zone, packaged so a buyer can load the lot into an antidetect browser and resume the victim's sessions.
Carding
The trade in stolen payment card data and the craft of turning it into goods: testing cards, choosing merchants, shipping to reshippers. An economy with its own schools, slang and reputations.
Cashout
The last mile: turning stolen access, cards or balances into money the criminal keeps. Gift cards, crypto, mule accounts, reshipping, each with its own fee and its own specialists.