Silk Road's anonymity helped Feds bring it down
It's still mind-boggling to think that Silk Road, a supposedly anonymous black marketplace for illegal goods, could operate for such a long period of time without police interference. New evidence has come to light, though, suggesting the Feds were actually involved in the operation for a long time before the website was taken down. A recent document released by The Smoking Gun makes clear that Steven Lloyd Sadler - a top drug kingpin from Silk Road - was actively working with the Feds. The anonymity of Silk Road's web presence actually made it easy for cops to make undercover drug deals....
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Undoubtedly many readers have seen this wallet before, we've linked to it a lot here in articles onCCN. Those are the "Silk Road Bitcoins" seized by a joint federal task force in the October take-down of the infamous online drug marketplace: Silk road. During the take-down that included crazy antics by undercover agents at a public library in a brazen heist to steal Silk Road operator Ross Ulbricht's laptop mid-session, the Feds were able to gain control of 29,655 Bitcoins from Silk Roads' servers. These Bitcoins belonged, in large part, to individual users of Silk Road from around the....
In what may be facetiously called the surprise of the century, a new version of the now-famed 'Silk Road' deep web narcotics exchange emerged Wednesday, dubbed aptly as 'Silk Road 2.0.'. The site, accessible via Tor, is reported to sport the familiar interface that the first iteration of Silk Road had before it was shut down in a major bust by the U. S. government. "This hidden site has risen again," it declares boldly on the home page, seemingly poking fun at the Federal notice (seen in the screen shot above obtained by Forbes. According to CoinDesk, "the 'profile' page has been updated,....
Much has happened since the first Silk Road report that we released a month ago. In mid-July, a Silk Road user was arrested by Australian police for allegedly transporting unspecified narcotics into the country. The event attracted considerable attention within the Bitcoin community as it was the first "Silk Road-related" arrest ever to take place, and the Australian police eagerly took the opportunity to warn Australians that law enforcement is "well aware of this method of drug procurement" and that "persons who buy or sell through online marketplaces, on so-called 'anonymous' networks....
The bitcoin community has been having some fun with the FBI, after it discovered the bitcoin address that the agency has been using to transfer Silk Road bitcoins to its own wallet. Pranksters have been sending tiny transactions to the address, giving them a chance to attach personal messages to the feds. The FBI had already seized 26,000 bitcoins that had been held in escrow for Silk Road customers. It registered a bitcoin address using blockchain.info, which has a feature enabling people to attach notes if they send bitcoins using its wallet. Among advertisements for bitcoin exchanges,....
The latest reincarnation of the deep web marketplace, in the form of Silk Road 3.0 is started by the people behind Crypto Market. Will they be able to live up to the expectations? Silk Road is reincarnated for the fourth time. The deep web marketplace is back online after its predecessors were forcibly shut down by the law enforcement agencies resulting in the creator’s arrest and incarceration. Silk Road used to be a network of trade routes traversing through the whole of Asian continent to connect with the Mediterranean Sea. It originally got its name for being the route taken by the....