Once upon a time, you could sign on to Silk Road and buy everything from LSD to Moon Rock molly with Bitcoin. That time is now over because the FBI along with a few other federal agencies have seized the domain and shutdown the drug-dealing site. The only question is, what took them so long? Silk Road found its way into popular culture a couple of years ago when Gawker’s Adrian Chen a big exposée on "the site where you can buy any drug imaginable." Chen made the point that it wasn’t just illegal drugs that were being sold on the anonymous black market site. But when you look at the criminal complaint , it’s pretty obvious that it’s the drugs the Feds are interested in. The Criminal Complaint Indeed, the very first count in the complaint is for "Narcotics Trafficking Conspiracy." The complaint is filed against a Mr. Ross William Ulbricht, a.k.a. "Dread Pirate Roberts," a.k.a. "DPR," a.k.a. "Silk Road." The second and third counts include "Computer Hacking Conspiracy" and "Money Laundering Conspiracy," and based on the numbers in the complaint, the scale of the operation was nothing less than severe. The complaint says that Silk Road did some $1.2 billion in sales, amounting to $80 million in commissions: S This was not run like your standard member of the Better Business Bureau, either. At one point, Ulbricht actually tried to hire a hit man to kill a Silk Road user and paid in Bitcoin: S And if you had any hopes that Silk Road was actually a safe place to buy massive quantities of illegal drugs, think again. The cops were on to this place a long time ago, and they had undercovers carry out over 100 purchases. They even tested the drugs, and the drugs were […]
