Copycat Sites Ready To Take Place Of Silk Road Drug Marketplace

It was only last week that Silk Road was taken offline from the Tor network, it’s owner arrested and taken to court on money laundering and suspected organised murder charges. Days later the vultures are moving in ready to fill the void that the sites closure has left in a bid to grab a part of the highly profitable market that Silk Road operated.

If you’ve never heard of the Silk Road website, you are not alone, as the site was not hosted on the internet as we know it. Running on something known as “Tor”, or the onion router it is effectively on another internet, one that allows for supposedly anonymous usage, a feature that makes it a popular stomping ground for illegal activity.

Silk Road users and a few others recent said in a forum post that “We have SilkRoad v2.0 ready to launch and is now in its final testing stages. Our site has all the features of the original one and we have kept the same style of forum for your ease.”

The representatives of Atlantis (a defunct anonymous marketplace) write:

From a quick scout around I’ve counted at least 5 publicly stated projects with the said aim of replacing becoming “Silk Road 2.0″ and many many more gathering info and building alliances.

And this is what Law Enforcement is now parading as a victory? Over two years of investigation, millions of dollars spent and for what so a couple of armchair programmers can build it again in a few days while in the meantime vendors simply move to other site’s .

Now teams are said to be working on something called BitWasp, a new and even more secure bitcoin marketplace that would be custom made for such services.

It is a big set back for law enforcement, although the current closure and arrest may not slow the tide, it is interesting to see police working harder to take down Tor users.

Thank you TechCrunch for providing us with this information.