It was about a year ago when the original was closed Silk Road by the Feds, when the alleged as Admin of the Dread Pirate Roberts was captured. As we mentioned her 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 real life worked at several companies, including Close, a secret startup founded by a team former Google employees, as reported by Wired.
Federal prosecutors claim that Benthall was working alone at Silk Road 2, or at least, his colleagues did not know he was running the most famous online drug market.
The young man was driving a Tesla Model S, worth about 127.000 dollars, and spent his days working with various startups. Nothing testified to what he was doing behind the closed doors of his house, nothing revealing the fact that he was running a drug empire.
In addition to having spent a fortune on a Tesla car, Benthall did not seem to be extremely rich. It was surprising that he had about 100.000 dollars in cash at his home, as prosecutors claim.
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 Elon Musk's SpaceX, as profiled on LinkedIn . 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 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. Europol.
