It was about a year ago when the original was closed Silk Road from the Federals, when the suspect as the manager of Dread Pirate Roberts was arrested. As we mentioned previous week, the second platform of Silk Road was closed, along with several other illegal sites of Dark Net.
His supposed brain Silk Road 2 is 26-xronow Blake Benthall, who in his real life was working in several companies, including Close, a secret startup that was founded by a group of former Google employees, as Wired reports.
Federal prosecutors allege Benthall worked alone on Silk Road 2, or at least, his co-workers didn't know he was running the most famous online buy drugs.
Ο νεαρός οδηγούσε ένα Tesla Model S, αξίας περίπου 127.000 δολαρίων, και περνούσε τις μέρες του δουλεύοντας με διάφορα startup. Τίποτα δεν μαρτυρούσε αυτά που έκανε πίσω από τις κλειστές πόρτες του σπιτιού του, τίποτα φανέρωνε το γεγονός ότι έτρεχε μια αυτοκρατορία ναρκωτικών.
Aside from spending a fortune on a Tesla car, Benthall didn't appear to be extremely wealthy. It was a surprise that he had about $100.000 in cash at his home, prosecutors allege.
On Twitter, Benthall describes himself as a "rocket scientist and Bitcoins dreamer." He is reported as a fan of Edward Snowden, of Radiohead, an active user of GitHub, as well as a fan of hackathons.
The others describe him as a passionate coder who was constantly busy with various projects. For example, some time ago, he wrote TweetCall, a tool that lets you dial a number of 800 and converts your words into a tweet.
Benthall has worked for SpaceX Elon Musk, as his LinkedIn profile states. He has also worked as a software developer at Carbon Five, RPX Corporation, and Momentum Design Lab.
Linking it to Silk Road
Authorities claim to host one Silk Road 2 server in a Close.co subdomain (not so smart). By the end of May, when Benthall left SpaceX, the federations managed to track a trace of the server hosting Silk Road 2. Immediately afterwards, the site went offline as agents began copying their content for forensic research.
"Defcon," or Blake Benthall, site administrator, received a message from the company about the server downtime. for the time. He immediately contacted them and asked them not to restart the machine, fearing that data would be lost.
His friend had no idea that the Close.co server was running Silk Road 2 and their capture surfaced.
The FBI claims that there were about 150.000 active users in the drug market before the takedown and that the website had traded 8.000.000 dollars. As the Authorities estimate, the site manager has earned around 400.000 dollars from commissions.
Silk Road 2,0 was closed with the cooperation of authorities from Bulgaria, the Czech Republic, Finland, France, Germany, Hungary, Ireland, Latvia, Lithuania, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, Romania, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland and the United Kingdom with the coordination from Europol.
