Silk Road Drug Dealers Get Combined 10 Years In The U.K.
Two U.K. men who pleaded guilty to selling drugs on the Silk Road Marketplace website were each sentenced to five years in jail, according to The Express & Star in the U.K. Richard Hiley worked with Peter Ward, who was reported to be a major figure on the dark web and used the name PlutoPete. Ward commissioned Hiley, a former customer, to transfer bitcoins into cash. The duo claimed to be running a legitimate business offering legal highs. Ward called himself a “psychonaut,” specializing in military-grade foil packaging that could hide illegal materials from detection. Ward also....
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Two years after the FBI shut down Silk Road, online drug markets are alive and growing, thanks to the Tor browser and virtual currency, reports US News & World Report. Darknet markets offer greater product reliability and less risk of violence than physical encounters with drug dealers. Darknets average $300,000 to $500,000 in sales per day according to one study. Johns Hopkins University computer science professor Matthew Green says Silk Road provided a proof of concept for darknet markets. He says it's an idea that someone doesn't think about until it happens. Some Silk Road successors....
Wired reports that the shutdown of Silk Road 2 was shut down by FBI's and Europol's Operation Onymous, earlier this month, scattered the Dark Web's drug dealers. But one new and improved crypto market is welcoming and profiting from those refugees: an appropriately named website called Evolution. Evolution, a Tor hidden service only accessible using Tor (like Silk Road and most online drug marketplaces), has more than tripled its rate of growth in new product listings, according to data collected by the non-profit Digital Citizens Alliance, since the demise of Silk Road 2. That's helped....
City A. M., London's first free daily business newspaper, reports that a study by researchers at the University of Manchester and the University of Montreal concluded that Silk Road prevented violence associated with the illegal drug trade and represented a breakthrough in criminal innovation. The study is open access and can be downloaded from the Social Science Research Network. The researchers found that many (between 31% and 45%) drug-related transactions on Silk Road were not business-to-consumer (B2C) but business-to-business (B2B), in other words, transactions between drug dealers.....
A new study argues that online black marketplaces, such as the infamous Silk Road, can actually reduce the number of drug related-violent crimes. The researchers' argument is simple: online drug traffickers act more like wholesalers, and since online markets limit the scope of direct interaction between the traffickers - blurring or removing territorial boundaries, there is less of a chance for violent confrontation. The research was conducted by University of Lausanne criminologist David Décary-Hétu and University of Manchester law professor Judith Aldridge. Entitled "Not an 'Ebay for....
Federal prosecutors say details about the second arrest of Shaun Bridges, a former U.S. Secret Service agent charged with stealing in the Silk Road investigation, must remain sealed, in part, because they believe there are one or more co-conspirators, according to a filing in the U.S. District Court for the District of Maryland. Authorities charged Bridges and former DEA agent Carl Force with stealing from Silk Road during the investigation following the trial and conviction of Ross Ulbricht, the mastermind of the online drug marketplace who went by the name, “Dread Pirate Roberts.”....