Silk Road Drug Marketplace Shutdown By FBI

Sites like the Silk Road have gained a cult personally on many dark corners of the internet. Silk Road provided people with an anonymous market place to buy and sell illegal drugs and items, mostly via the use of the digital currency BitCoin. Now the FBI have arrested Silk Road owner Ross William Ulbricht, 29, who goes by the name “Dread Pirate Roberts”.

According to court filing Ross was picked up by police on Tuesday in San Francisco, since then the site has been taken off line and is no doubt being investigated and picked clean by FBI agents, who have already seized $3.6 million worth of BitCoin that was tied to transactions on Silk Road. A small percentage of the estimated 9.5 million BitCoins it is believed the site has generate, roughly $1.2 billion worth!

While this isn’t the first Silk Road related bust, most of the catch in the past has been through clients of the site, not the owner. Yet since the site was operated on the Onion Router, also known as the Tor network, catching the people using the service has been complicated.

Users of the service have already taken to sites like Reddit to vent their frustration at lost funds they had deposited on the site, likely in a bid to purchase illegal substances, but the full scale of this shutdown, or how many arrests will come from it, will likely not be known for sometime.

Thank you Orlandosentinel for providing us with this information.

Image courtesy of Orlandosentinel.