If you never heard about the Silk Road, you will be probably living under a rock the last 4 years.
For those of you living under these rocks, here ‘s the story. The Silk Road was founded by Ross William Ulbricht aka Dread Pirate Roberts, an open-minded genius with a particular vision of business. Lunched In February 2011 the site was using the famous TOR (Onion Router) more known as the Deep Weeb. The principle is simple hide your IP address allowing you an anonymous navigation.
So what could you buy on the Silk Road?
A little resume of some of the most unbelievable things you could buy!
Cocaine
MDMA
LSD
The products that interests us Weed.
Crystal Meth
But you could also find guides to hack the ATM machines
Or contract a Hitman
The list is much longer: credit cards, id’s, weapons…. The site is very well designed and the principle is simple connect sellers and buyers like Ebay. The logistics and discretions of the Bitcoins build the success of the web site. The web site receives in few weeks a large amount of traffic and in less that 5 month the D.E.A was investigating on the Silk Road.
Despite the surveillance, D.E.A was unable to find the owner of the web site Ross and Silk Road become the fist Online Store of the dark web generation an huge amount of clients more than 1 million with a sales turnover of 1.2 billion dollars, and a gentle fee for Dread Pirate Roberts of 80 million dollars aged of 28 in 2013.
So how did the D.E.A arrested Ross William Ulbricht ?
The federal agency told that they hacked the data base of the Silk Road and localise Dread Pirate Roberts. News that has been quickly dismantle by various students of Computer science degree in Berkley. The Tor network has been so well developed by the US government that even now days it’s impossible to monitor the sites using the browsers. So how did the D.E.A find Ross?
Ross committed a major error that will probably cost him life in prison. As told before D.E.A was aware of the existence of the site 5 month after the creation in June 2011. One of the agent had the idea to look the archives of the early 2011 of the bitcoin.org blog. And guess what they found, a commentary posted from “Altoid” coming from the blog silkroad420.wordpress.com. the comment was about hiring an IT & PRO developer bitcoin for a start-up.
Attracted by this comments agents visited the Altoid profil and found the unbelievable but true address email: [email protected] this address mail was linked to a Gmail, facebook, linkedin account that matched on the photos with the so called mastermind Ross William Ulbricht aka Dread Pirate Roberts.
With this email address they just had to monitor the gmail account who indicated a small bulding in San Fransico with a cyber coffee. Ross was operating all his actions from the cyber coffee.
Ross William Ulbrich more known as Dread Pirate Roberts was arrested the 2 october 2013, he is waiting his judgment that will be the 15 May of 2015 for owning a criminal company, money laundering, computer hacking, narcotic traffic….
One thing sure is that Ross opened a new era in the Cyber drug dealing. So if you decide to lunch your own illegal business. Don’t make stupid mistakes.
