First blog
October 11, 2013
I found this article the other night which blew my mind! I thought many of you might find it interesting as well. Its about a criminal mastermind by the name of Ross Ulbricht who was just recently arrested by the FBI on October 2, 2013. Ulbricht ran a huge black market website called Silkroad.com that sold illegal drugs online around the world. He went by the alias “Dread Pirates Roberts” and allegedly grossed around $80 million dollars. He was able to do this without getting caught by having users purchase the drugs using virtual money called bitcoins. Right before Ulbricht was arrested one bitcoin was roughly worth $130. So if a user wanted to purchase $200 worth of drugs he would have to buy 2 bitcoins. But the user couldn’t make this transaction by using paypal, instead he or she would use a routing service called Tor. Tor was created by the Navy to mask top secret messages. Tor encrypts the users IP address several times and then routes it all over the world to multiple locations. this would make it virtually impossible to track the buyer. This article goes into much more depth about Ulbricht’s illegal operation, including how he was also involved in multiple hits on suppliers. This is a must read, i attached the URL below. Check it out!