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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.

7 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 Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Interesting

      And there will be a third and forth and fifth... It will NEVER stop. There is absolutely nothing the government can do to stop it. Nothing. There is 8 million a month spent on something relatively complicated to use (compared to say Amazon) and carries a risk of jail time. Think about that. Obviously there's a demand and that demand will be met no matter the cost. But it's not like there are more important things to spend the time and money on.

    2. Re:Another Idiot Tempts the Fates by mrchaotica · · Score: 5, Interesting

      I think the previous AC's point was not that it would eventually stop, but rather that eventually someone would come along who was smart enough to run his criminal empire from somewhere outside the US. Then we'd get a story about the CIA, instead of merely the FBI.

      --

      "[Regarding the 'cloud,'] ownership was what made America different than Russia." -- Woz

    3. 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:DON'T ABUSE TECHNOLOGY!!! by Opportunist · · Score: 5, Interesting

    You act as if that law was a natural one, imposed by nature itself. Which are by definition also the only laws you can neither break nor change.

    Just because something is the law doesn't make it automatically right. Human laws don't define what is right. Only what is legal.

    --
    We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
  3. Re:Gentlemen, start your engines! by jittles · · Score: 5, Interesting

    It's completely possible.

    Ulbricht was not very smart. He bought fake IDs off his own website and had them shipped to his actual home address. The IDs were intercepted in the mail. and this clued the FBI in on his activities. Then he managed his servers using a direct VPN connection. Once the FBI traced the VPN endpoint he was done. They coerced the hosting company to allow them access and they could collect all the information they needed to build a case from that point on.

    I imagine this Defcon guy did something similarly dumb.

    To do this right:

    1. Find a VM hosting company offshore that accepts bitcoins and doesn't ask for identity. 2. Buy some bitcoins, use one of the many tumbler services to wash them, and pay for the services that way 3. Never manage or otherwise connect to your VM directly. Always use TOR. SSH works great over TOR. 4. Don't buy shit off your own website and have it shipped to your damn house.

    Just finished reading the affidavit from the FBI. This guy was a dumbass. He used a gmail account to pay for the VPS service and used his home internet connection to connect to the gmail account. He used his own, hotel, and relatives internet connections to connect to the hosting provider without any sort of anonymizing service. The FBI used either an undercover agent or a confidential informant to eventually find the VPS provider. From there, he was quite easy to track. The FBI had been watching the guy for months. The affidavit suggested it was an undercover agent that was hired as a staff member on the website that lead to this case being cracked open.

  4. 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...