The FBI Shuts Down The Silk Road

In sad news for experimental frat bros accustomed to the ease and comfort of anonymously buying molly capsules on the deep web, popular narcotics website Silk Road has been shut down by the FBI and its alleged founder – Ross Ulbricht – arrested on a variety of charges including money laundering, narcotics trafficking, computer hacking and attempting to arrange the murder of a member who had threatened to reveal the identities of the website’s users.

“Silk Road has emerged as the most sophisticated and extensive criminal marketplace on the Internet today,” the criminal complaint stated. “The site has sought to make conducting illegal transactions as easy and frictionless as shopping online at mainstream e-commerce websites.”

Undercover FBI agents apprehended Ulbricht Tuesday afternoon at a library in San Francisco. 

Though little was  previously known about the black market website, court findings made public today reveal the true scale of its reach. Australians, for example, ranked as the third most popular nationality among users of the website, behind Americans and the British. Courts also heard that the site had generated somewhere in the vicinity of $US1.2 billion in transactions since its inception and had made somewhere in the vicinity of $US80 million by charging commission on each sale. Though primarily known as a anonymous marketplace for illegal narcotics, the website was also found to have sold illegal weapons, hacking equipment, fake identities and the services of hitmen. 

To maintain user anonymity, the website was operated on an anonymous Tor computer network which suppressed IP addresses and all financial transactions were made using bitcoins.