holy shit it has been seized..shit..I guess Axas offer to host the bit coin thing is super topical now..wow..i never thought they could touch SR

Yeah for as long as i can remember its been there. I just thought it was one of those things that couldn’t be brought down.

Bummer, but not a surprise to me. Tor was developed by the gov, for the Navy I believe. You’re kidding yourself if you think they cannot ever find you. Of course, SR/DPR was basically challenging the man publicly to come and get them for a long time. Much better to fly under the radar.

Stay safe and CYA, Spicers!

Word on the street, er road, is that the main person running it was arrested for contracting one silk road user to kill another silk road user.

Thanks for the post.  The man always has their eyes on you…

Word on the street, er road, is that the main person running it was arrested for contracting one silk road user to kill another silk road user.

It also appears that DPR, aka Ross William Ulbricht, screwed up by using his real name –

‘An agent involved in the investigation ("Agent-1"), found the first few references to SR on the internet from somebody only identified as "altoid", attempting to promote the site in its beginning days, in January of 2011.’

‘In October of the same year, a user also going by the name of "altoid" made a posting on Bitcoin Talk titled "a venture backed Bitcoin startup company", which directed interested users to "rossulbricht at gmail dot com".’

It’s the little things…

Don’t forget that they’re also monitoring and taking pictures of all snailmail, so they can trace the origin of SR vendor sent packages. Once they have the goods confirmed on the receiving end, they can simply wait for the vendor to make another drop at the post office of origin, and bam! Bastards!

Thanks for the post.  The man always has their eyes on you…

I feel the man’s eyes on my naughty bits. Eff tha bastards!

The feds have caught up to the Silk Road. The underground website long known for drug trafficking was seized by the FBI who also arrested the owner on three criminal counts. Prosecutors charged Ross William Ulbricht with one count each of narcotics trafficking conspiracy, computer hacking conspiracy and money laundering conspiracy, according to a court filing.

Silk Road has long existed in the corner of the Internet dubbed Deep Web. Launched in 2011, the site quickly gained notoriety for its market place of drugs and guns. Basically, Silk Road became the Amazon of drugs.

As the court documents note, the owner of Silk Road, Ross William Ulbrichy, intentionally and knowingly violated the US’s narcotics laws.

“From in or about 2011, up to and including in or about September 2013, ROSS WILLIAM ULBRICHT, a/ka/ “Dread Pirate Roberts,” a/k/a “DPR,” a/k/a “Silk Road,” the defendant, owned and operated an underground website, known as “Silk Road,” that provided a platform for drug dealers afound the world to sell a wide variety of controlled substances via the Internet.”

Another Post Found Here about what might of happened?

DPR sent a message to "redandwhite" stating that "FriendlyChemist"
    is "Causing me problems" and adding: "I would like to put a bounty on
    his head if it’s not too much trouble for you. What would be an
    adequate amount to motivate you to find him?"

Later that same day, redandwhite send DPR a message quoting him a
    price of $150,000 or $300,000 "depending on how you want it done" –
    "clean" or "non-clean"

    DPR responded: "Don’t want to be a pain here, but the price seems high.
    Not long ago, I had a clean hit done for $80k. Are the prices you
    quoted the best you can do? I would like this done ASAP as he is
    talking about releasing the info on Monday.

    DPR and redandwhite agreed upon a price of 1,670 Bitcoins – approximately
    $150k – for the job. In DPR’s message confirming the deal, DPR included
    a transacation record reflecting the transfer of 1,670 Bitcoins to a
    certain Bitcoin address.

_____________________

The FBI hasn’t yet revealed how it managed to track down Ulbricht in spite of his seemingly careful use of encryption and anonymity tools to protect his identity and those of his customers and vendors who visited Silk Road as often as 60,000 times per day. The FBI spokesperson declined to offer details about the investigation, but told me that “basically he made a simple mistake and we were able to identify him.”

One clue mentioned in the criminal complaint against Ulbricht was a package seized from the mail by U.S. Customs and Border Patrol as it crossed the Canadian border, containing nine seemingly counterfeit identification documents, each of which used a different name but featured Ulbricht’s photograph. The address on the package was on 15th street in San Francisco, where police found Ulbricht and matched his face to the one on the fake IDs.

The complaint also mentions security mistakes, including an IP address for a VPN server used by Ulbricht listed in the code on the Silk Road, mentions of time in the Dread Pirate Roberts’ posts on the site that identified his time zone, and postings on the Bitcoin Talk forum under the handle “altoid,” which was tied to Ulbricht’s Gmail address.

One remaining mystery in Ulbricht’s criminal complaint is whether he was in fact the only–or the original–Dread Pirate Roberts. In his July interview with me, Roberts said that he had in fact inherited the Dread Pirate title from the site’s creator, who may have also used the same pseudonym.

As of around noon Wednesday, the Silk Road’s forum for users also remained online, and the site’s loyal users were grieving over the Silk Road takedown and mourning the arrest of Ulbricht, whose apparent persona as the Dread Pirate Roberts was a widely respected figure in the online drug community.

“jesus christ this is TERRIBLE!!” wrote one user named danceandsing. Others suggested that users migrate to other, smaller but similar anonymous black markets such as Black Market Reloaded–another popular alternative to the Silk Road known as Atlantis went offline last week, with its administrators saying only that they shut down the business for “security reasons.”

Another user blamed the Dread Pirate Roberts’ carelessness, including his decision to raise his profile by giving an interview to Forbes. “Sorry, but when he gave the fucking Forbes interview I imagined this would be coming,”  wrote a user calling himself Dontek. “Should have kept all this shit on the down low rather than publicly bragging about it.”

Ulbricht’s LinkedIn profile describes his background as a graduate researcher in materials science at Pennsylvania State University, as well as an undergrad degree in physics from the University of Texas at Dallas.

According to Ulbricht’s grandmother, Martha Ulbricht, who was reached by phone, the younger Ulbricht received a full scholarship to UT Dallas. “Ross has always been an upstanding person as far as we know and a rather outstanding person,” she said.

Ulbricht’s half-brother Travis Ulbricht, also reached by phone in Sacramento, described him as an “exceptionally bright, smart kid” who had no criminal history to his knowledge.

Asked what he did for a living before moving to San Francisco, Ulbricht’s grandmother said, “Something on the computer…a little technical for me. He was good with computers.”

________________________________________

I know this guy was a fucking genious and all, but why in the world would he be in the USA?
I know *why* I guess, but under his circumstances though, no fucking way.

This guy could have bought a country to live in and have his own personal army.
Or at least be hiding in another country that isn’t very friendly with the US…

San Francisco?? Sheeshh.. SMH

The main country that is looking for you. 
THE WHOLE FUCKING COUNTRY. :wacked:

______________________

I’m still mind blown by this whole thing though… Crazy shit.

:goodpost

Thats what surprised me as well SSF. I had always assumed the owner was nowhere near the US…….tisk tisk

Some good notes I found on the whole thing. Not quoting it for better reading.

Here is the original criminal complaint

__________________________________________________

* This has been a joint operation run the cybercrime squad within the FBI’s New York field office. It involved the FBI, DEA, IRS and Homeland Security’s investigative unit.

—

* It’s unstated from when the investigation started, but they received a complete copy of the Silk Road web server on the 23rd of July 2013. This was all done under the Mutual Legal Assistance Treaty, which implies that they had access to current site information up until the point they shut the site down.

* This included user account and transaction information. It’s unclear whether or not this covers addresses and other sensitive transaction information.

**This also apparently covers at least 60 days worth of messages from the period where the site was copied.
From February 6, 2011 to July 23 2013, 9,519,664BTC was generated in sales, 614,305BTC going directly to DPR in the way of "commissions". This comes to a total of 1,229,465 transactions.
Based on the copy of the site which the FBI received, they believe DPR to have been the sole operator and owner of SR, handling all aspects of the site himself and delegating only user affairs to appointed moderators.

—

* In March of this year, a SR user/vendor called "FriendlyChemist" attempted to extort DPR via SR’s private message system, providing proof that he had the names/addresses of thousands of vendors/users after having allegedly hacked a bigger vendor. He demanded $500,000USD, saying that he needed the money to pay off his supplier. DPR then stated that he wished to speak to FriendlyChemist’s supplier.

* A user called "redandwhite" then proceeded to contact DPR, stating that he was FriendlyChemist’s supplier and also the owner of his debt. DPR then solicited redandwhite to "execute" FriendlyChemist, supplying redandwhite his full name and address. After having agreed on terms, DPR sent redandwhite approximately $150,000USD (1,670BTC) to have FriendlyChemist killed. redandwhite later provided photographic proof of the alleged murder.

* Investigators could not find any record of somebody in that region being killed around that date or matching that description. This possibly implies that DPR was duped/scammed, but, DPR is also quoted as having told redandwhite the following: "Not long ago, I had a clean hit done for 80k."

—

* DPR has been identified as Ross William Ulbricht.

> "He is 29 years old, graduated from the University of Texas with a Bachelor of Science degree in Physics in 2006. From 2006 to 2010, he attended graduate school at the University of Pennsylvania School of Materials Science and Engineering."

His LinkedIn profile is at: http://www.linkedin.com/in/rossulbricht
His Facebook URL is at: https://www.facebook.com/rossulbricht/
His YouTube URL is at: http://www.youtube.com/user/ohyeaross

Now, onto how he got caught…

* An agent involved in the investigation ("Agent-1"), found the first few references to SR on the internet from somebody only identified as "altoid", attempting to promote the site in its beginning days, in January of 2011.

* In October of the same year, a user also going by the name of "altoid" made a posting on Bitcoin Talk titled "a venture backed Bitcoin startup company", which directed interested users to "rossulbricht at gmail dot com". Here is the post, https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?PHPSESSID=tt9mt8nqt3lfm0ff1reoduo8j6&topic=47811.msg568744#msg568744

* That email address is what led to DPR’s downfall.

* Another post on shroomery about SR here, http://www.shroomery.org/forums/showflat.php/Number/18920981

—

* After identifying "altoid", they started connecting the "DPR" identity to Ulbricht pretty quickly.

* Ulbricht’s Google+ page and YouTube profile both make multiple references to the a website dubbed the "Mises Institute". DPR’s signature on the SR forums contained a link to the Mises Institute.
DPR cited the "Austrian Economic theory" along with the works of Ludwig von Mises and Murray Rothbard, all of which are closesly associated with the Mises Institute.

* Server logs show that someone logged onto the SR administration panel from San Fransisco around the same time that Ulbricht was staying in San Fransisco.

* Multiple fake IDs were intercepted by U.S. Customs & Border Patrol while on their way to an address which Ulbricht was living at the time. These IDs all carried photos of Ulbricht but had false names and details. This was around the same time that DPR stated in a message that he was acquiring some fake IDs to buy new servers.

* When questioned by Homeland Security about the fake IDs, he refused to answer any questions but then stated that anyone could purchase such things using "Silk Road" and "Tor".

* The address which Ulbricht was staying at was being rented in cash and he was living with housemates who knew him under a name which corresponded with one of the fake IDs.

* He posted on StackOverflow using his real name, inquiring about how to use curl/PHP to grab things off Tor, before quickly changing the name to "frosty" (with a fake email: frosty@frosty.com)

======================================================

From p. 14 – "22. During the course of this investigation, the FBI has located a number of computer servers, both in the United States and in multiple foreign countries, associated with the operation of Silk Road. In particular, the FBI has located in a certain foreign country the server used to host Silk Road’s website (the "Silk Road Web Server"). Pursuant to a Mutual Legal Assistance Treaty request, an image of the Silk Road Web Server was made on or about July 23, 2013, and produced thereafter to the FBI."

So, the FBI was able to:

* Locate the Silk Road server
* Get the authorities from that country to find the host
* Get the host to generate a server snapshot
* Do a complete forensic analysis on the snapshot
* Decode every message and transaction in the logs

______________________________________________________________

wowza.

And he had roommates too? omfg.

Nice catch! I was just about to post a link to the same pdf but you beat me to it.

Something else will be online soon enough in its place. maybe they will go back to old BB’s and Newsgroups using shorthand.

DPR

‘In October of the same year, a user also going by the name of "altoid" made a posting on Bitcoin Talk titled "a venture backed Bitcoin startup company", which directed interested users to "rossulbricht at gmail dot com".’

rossulbricht@gmail dot com was a huge mistake that cost a lot of ppl a lot of money. noobs  :wacked: