Elude, a long-time BTC/XMR mixer and exchanger seems to be conducting an exit scam.
This information was revealed by a staff memeber whistleblower on the Dread forum. User Elude, who has been a part of the Elude site for almost five years, posted on Dread a PGP signed message commenting the situation.
Hello,
I’m sorry to say that the Admins have decided to end the Elude project with an exit scam.
All withdrawals are disabled.
I’m very, very sorry for anybody that has already lost coins.
I was messaged about this half an hour ago.
DO NOT USE ELUDE!
Hugely sad to see it end this way.
Future communication may be difficult from this account.
Please add the following PGP key, and I will create a new account with which to communicate from:
Message with PGP signature can be found here.
Although the PGP key that signed, the message had been replaced with a new one in order to prevent Elude admins from accessing their Dread accounts to remove the whistleblower warning messages. Staff of Dread confirmed that the signature is valid and was signed with the old Elude key.
User Elude revealed shortly after the warning was posted that he was only hired to provide customer support and had no access to the site’s infrastructure. They also claimed they were “offered $1,000 a week to keep quiet.”
Elude users have reported several issues with the service in the past, but most of them were quickly fixed, meaning that the decision to exist scam is recent.
The latest problem was reported 8 hours ago by a user who said that they were unable to withdraw XMR from BTC after they made an exchange to XMR. The complaint was answered six hours later by elude, who wrote: “I’m hugely sorry, but you won’t be seeing your coins.”