How a Tax Inspector Used Google Search To Locate the Founder of SilkRoad (bbc.com)

Posted by msmash on Wednesday August 23, 2017 @02:00AM from the as-simple-as-that dept.

An anonymous reader shares a report: You could buy any drug imaginable, wherever you were in the world, on the Silk Road website. Hidden on the dark web, it made millions of dollars every week. The US government had been trying to shut it down for more than two years when tax agent Gary Alford was brought in to try to trace the money which passed through the site. In his spare time, Gary started searching Google to try to find the mysterious mastermind behind the site: Dread Pirate Roberts. And he was successful. Gary spent hours trawling the internet for the first ever mention of Silk Road. He says he came across a posting on Bitcoin forum. In the post, Roberts had shared his Gmail account. That escalated the investigation. Gary spoke with BBC describing the rest.

1 of 95 comments (clear)

Min score:

Reason:

Sort:

But the book came out this spring... by __aaclcg7560 · 2017-08-23 02:14 · Score: 0, Offtopic

On my reading list is "American Kingpin: The Epic Hunt for the Criminal Mastermind Behind the Silk Road" by Nick Bilton. The author previously wrote "Hatching Twitter: A True Story of Money, Power, Friendship, and Betrayal", a great read about the accidental founding of Twitter, the shenanigans of the four cofounders who wanted to CEO, and everyone else who wanted to buy a revenue-less Twitter.