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

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.

Comments

Video?

[Anonymous Coward]

No one is going to watch a stupid video for this.

Re:Video?

[Gaygirlie]

Pretty much. As soon as I noticed it was a video I just simply closed the tab in disgust. Videos are great and all for content where there is some visual content that'd be difficult to convey properly in textual form, but... talking heads ain't that.

Best part of the story

[Bill Hayden]

Librarian: I texted my son, "...a bunch of FBI agents just came in and busted a guy." My son knew exactly what Silk Road was! (nervous laugh) I don't know why he knew that.

Comedy gold.