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I don't understand how these shady sites are monetized. Through shady ads from other shady services? How are these shady ad networks operating? I've been led to belive that operating a file sharing site would be quite expensive with all the bandwidth and storage needs.

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advertisements; obfuscates files operators/sponsors want to share; watering-hole attacks; honeypot

That makes sense. If you are a mafia type that needs to send hundreds of gigabytes of contemporaneous data to others secretly and sneakernet is too slow, then throw up an "anonymous" file sharing site, advertise it a bit, let the creeps and weirdos use it to flood out the actual payload from online watchdogs and then let it fall to pieces when it has served its purpose.

Kind of like when Bitcoin was used primarily for the drug trade in the silk road days.

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