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 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 dreamer Bitcoins.” Αναφέρεται σαν οπαδός του Edward Snowden, of Radiohead, an active user of GitHub, as well as a hackathon fanatic.
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 the LinkedIn profile says. He has also worked as a software developer at Carbon Five, RPX Corporation, and Momentum Design Lab.
Linking it to Silk Road
Οι αρχές ισχυρίζονται ότι φιλοξενούσε το ένα server του Silk Road 2 σε ένα subdomain της εταιρείας Close.co (όχι και τόσο έξυπνο). Στα τέλη Μαΐου, όταν ο Benthall άφησε την SpaceX, οι ομοσπονδιακοί κατάφεραν να εντοπίσουν ένα ίχνος του server που φιλοξενούσε το Silk Road 2. Αμέσως μετά και τις επόμενες ώρες, η ιστοσελίδα it went offline as agents began copying its contents for the forensic investigation.
"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 there were about 150.000 active users in the drug market, before the takedown and that the website had trafficked $8.000.000. As the authorities estimate, the administrator of the page had 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 United Kingdom coordinated by Europol.
