Silk Road was an online black market and the first modern darknet market, best known as a platform for selling illegal drugs. It was operated as a Tor hidden service, such that online users were able to browse it anonymously and securely without potential traffic monitoring. In October 2013, the Federal Bureau of Investigation shut down the website and arrested Ross Ulbricht under charges of being the site’s pseudonymous founder. In November 2020, the United States government seized more than one billion dollars worth of bitcoins connected to Silk Road.
About Silk Road (marketplace) in brief
Silk Road was an online black market and the first modern darknet market, best known as a platform for selling illegal drugs. It was operated as a Tor hidden service, such that online users were able to browse it anonymously and securely without potential traffic monitoring. In October 2013, the Federal Bureau of Investigation shut down the website and arrested Ross Ulbricht under charges of being the site’s pseudonymous founder. In November 2020, the United States government seized more than one billion dollars worth of bitcoins connected to Silk Road. Silk Road was founded in February 2011. The name comes from a historical network of trade routes started during the Han Dynasty between Europe, India, China, and many other countries on the Afro-Eurasian landmass. In June 2011, Gawker published an article about the site which led to an increase in website traffic. Once the site was known publicly, U.S. Senator Charles Schumer asked federal law enforcement authorities to shut it down, including the Drug Enforcement Administration and Department of Justice. On 6 November 2013, Silk Road 2. 0 came online, run by former administrators of Silk Road, and it was also shut down, and the alleged operator was arrested on 6 November 2014 as part of the so-called ‘Operation Onymous’ Ulbracht was convicted of seven charges related to the site in the U. S. Federal Court in Manhattan and was sentenced to life in prison without possibility of parole.
The FBI has claimed that the real IP address of the Silk Road server was found via data leaked directly from the site’s CAPTCHA and that it was located in Reykjavík, Iceland. On 27 June 2014, the FBI reported that it had seized 144,000 bitcoins, worth approximately USD 28 million and that the bitcoins belonged to Ulbricht. An FBI spokesperson said that the agency would hold the bitcoins until the bitcoins would be liquidated, after which the bitcoins will be sold in a public auction. On 29 July 2013, it was reported that the DEA seized 11. 02 bitcoins, then worth a total of USD 814, which the media suspected was a result of a Silk Road honeypot sting. On 23 June 2013, it was first reported that the DEA seize 11.02 bitcoins, which was then worth $814, and that it had sold the bitcoins for $5,657,657 in October 2013. The DEA seized 26,000 Silk Road accounts on Silk Road at the time, worth about USD 3.6 million. On 24 July 2013 the FBI announced that it would be freezing the accounts of 10,657 Silk Road Sals, worth around $3.2 million, and selling them on the black market for $1.5 million each. On 25 July 2013 it was announced that the FBI had seized the bitcoins from Silk Road 1.0, which had been sold on the dark web for $2.4 million. The bitcoins were sold on a black market exchange.
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This page is based on the article Silk Road (marketplace) published in Wikipedia (as of Dec. 07, 2020) and was automatically summarized using artificial intelligence.
