The FBI arrested Ross Ulbricht, the owner and operator of the famous “Silk Road” website on Tuesday. Ulbricht 29-years old and was living in San Francisco when he was captured for running one of the biggest underground drug markets on the Internet. By some estimates he was making around $80 million in 2 years.
Silk Road, now taken off the web, was enormous. It profited $1.6 billion from sales, rather than the $22 million from initial estimates and he used some of those profits to pay teams of engineers.
The FB agent Chris Tarbell is alleging that Ulbricht attempted to have someone with the name of FriendlyChemist murdered for attempting to blackmail him. Adopting the online persona of “Dread Pirate Roberts” or DBR, Ulbricht allegedly wrote the following:
“In my eyes, FriendlyChemist is a liability and I wouldn’t mind if he was executed,” DPR wrote. DPR even tried to bargain down FriendlyChemist, messaging: “Don’t want to be a pain here, but the price seems high. Not long ago, I had a clean hit done for $80K.” DPR gave redandwhite the address of FriendlyChemist in British Columbia, and the indictment reports that redandwhite sent back photo evidence of the deed. But according to the indictment there is no indication the hit actually happened—”Although I believe the foregoing exchange demonstrates DPR’s intention to solicit a murder-for-hire,” Tarbell wrote, “I have spoken with Canadian law enforcement authorities, who have no record of there being any Canadian resident with the name DPR passed to redandwhite as the target of the solicited murder-for-hire. Nor do they have any record of a homicide occurring in White Rock, British Columbia on or about March 31, 2013.”
Some people believe that Ulbricht was caught due to incriminating posts he made in the early days of Silk Road. He allegedly wrote thinly veiled advertisements for the online drug trading firm and those are believed to have led to the police uncovering his identity. Also, Dread Pirate Roberts’ online persona and Ulbricht’s real life online persona both were fans of the Ludwig Von Mises Institute, which narrowed down the search results. The Mises Institute is a free market institution in Auburn, Alabama that educates people about libertarian principles.
Still others believe Ulbrich was caught because he mistakenly requested information about how to use a secure online transmission tool while using his real name. No matter how it happened, it appears as if the Silk Road is gone for good, and for customers of the site the news is even worse. The FBI has access to the transaction records from the Silk Road and more arrests could be coming very soon.
