Bitcoin Trader Gets Four-Year Jail Term Over Silk Road Connection
Robert M Faiella, the bitcoin trader charged alongside BitInstant CEO Charlie Shrem, has been sentenced to four years imprisonment in New York. Faiella, otherwise known as 'BTCKing', pleaded guilty to operating an illegal money transmission business after he exchanged fiat currency for bitcoins that were then used to buy drugs on the Silk Road marketplace. According to a Bloomberg report, Faiella said: "At the time of the event, I saw no other way ... it still doesn't mitigate that I broke the law." Faiella, a 53 year-old Florida native, is a former plumber who claimed he had turned to the....
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One year ago today, former BitInstant CEO and early Bitcoin proponent Charlie Shrem began serving his two-year prison sentence. The former CEO of BitInstant, a popular Bitcoin exchange in the early days of Bitcoin, was arrested at JFK airport in January 2014. He was just 24 year old. Later convicted of abetting more than $1 million in bitcoin sales to Silk Road users, and also cited as a Silk Road user himself, Shrem faced a detailed case against him. He was charged alongside Robert Faiella, who was known as BTCKing on the Silk Road.
The FBI shut down black marketplace Silk Road a year ago. This hidden website was used for the sale and purchase of items and services such as drugs, weapons, fake passports and other forged documents. To refresh your memory of the full Silk Road story, check out our interactive timeline below: This article is part of CoinDesk's Silk Road: One Year On series. Keep checking back for new additions to the series. Road. Silk RoadTimelines
The deep web black market site Silk Road is known for two things: as a place to buy drugs and other illegal products, and for being an early adopter of bitcoin. However, the site appears to have experienced some unusual troubles recently and some analysts are tying Silk Road's problems directly to bitcoin. Silk Road suffered a lengthy outage in the last 24 hours, apparently due to a denial of service (DDoS) attack. The site has resumed service, but there's speculation that hackers attack places like Silk Road because of the connection to bitcoin (some bitcoin exchanges, notably the....
If reports are to be believed, a new version of the online drug marketplace Silk Road - "Silk Road Reloaded" - has been launched recently. It is only a coincidence that the new Silk Road's introduction arrived only after the death of its predecessor Silk Road 2. In fact, our research revealed that Silk Road Reloaded was in development for over a year. This somewhat indicates that the makers of previous versions may not be backing this new project after all. And it reflects in the outcome as well. Silk Road Reloaded apparently uses "I2P" instead of the Fed's favorite Tor. I2P stands for....
The Silk Road 2.0 saga continues, a 29-year old Briton has pleaded guilty to supplying and possessing drugs on the Silk Road 2.0 platform. Silk Road 2.0 was the successor of nefarious drug-dealing platform Silk Road, created by Ross Ulbricht in order to create a use case for popular digital currency Bitcoin. The history of Bitcoin has been plagued by both Silk Road and Silk Road 2.0 platforms. Not because these platforms created new use cases for the popular digital currency, but because they are both associated with illegal substances, drugs and other illicit dealings. Ever since both....