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Silk Road 2.0 Seized By FBI, Alleged Founder Arrested In San Francisco

Posted by timothy on from the slippery-stuff-that-silk dept.

blottsie writes The FBI has arrested the online persona "Defcon," identified as Blake Benthall, a 26-year-old in San Francisco, who the agency claims ran the massive online black market Silk Road 2.0. Benthall's FBI arrest comes a year after that of Ross Ulbricht, also from San Francisco, who's the alleged mastermind of the original Silk Road and still awaiting trial. The largest of those reported down is Silk Road 2.0. But a host of smaller markets also seized by law enforcement include Appaca, BlueSky, Cloud9, Hydra, Onionshop, Pandora, and TheHub. Also at Ars Technica.

3 of 219 comments (clear)

  1. Another Idiot Tempts the Fates by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Really, a second fool resides in the US while running an illegal operation? Go ahead, wave a red cape at the bull, but don't cry when it gores you.

    1. Re:Another Idiot Tempts the Fates by lgw · · Score: 5, Insightful

      ... It will NEVER stop.

      ... until the primary products sold there are legalized. Several more states legalized pot this month. I expect it will be sold on Amazon in my lifetime. That will certainly be the end for a black market for that particular good. How much of Silk Road's market (in terms of money actually spent) is for similarly innocuous stuff? For all the hype, I doubt the assassination market is real. There are of course some drugs that will never be legal - anyone know if that's a big business?

      The business for botnets is probably with us forever, but amazingly the price of cloud servers is coming down low enough where it won't make much sense to use a botnet except directly for criminal activities (DDOS etc).

      --
      Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
  2. Re:Silk Road 3.0... by kromozone · · Score: 5, Insightful

    MDMA is relatively benign and no one is overdosing on it. What you do increasingly see is people overdosing on what they think is MDMA because it's not as readily available now thanks to law enforcement.

    http://www.theguardian.com/pol...