The FBI has shut down the online drug bazaar Silk Road -- and arrested the man who they say created it, according to CNN.
According to the sealed complaint filed by the FBI, federal agents arrested Ross William Ulbricht on Tuesday afternoon, charging him with narcotics trafficking, computer hacking and money laundering. The FBI also seized the Silk Road website, replacing its homepage with a banner noting as much, according to agency spokeswoman Kelly Langmesser. Since its 2011 inception, Silk Road has been the go-to black market for all sorts of illegal products and services.
"Its draw? The online marketplace offered an easy way to find goods and services -- and transact the money in secret. The site had 957,079 registered users, according to the FBI. "Based on my training and experience, Silk Road has emerged as the most sophisticated and extensive criminal marketplace on the Internet today," FBI Special Agent Christopher Tarbell said in the complaint.
The site was operated on an anonymous network known as Tor, making activity on Silk Road virtually untraceable. The only money accepted on Silk Road was the digital currency bitcoin, adding an additional layer of anonymity to buyers and sellers.
The use of bitcoin helped Silk Road become a giant money laundering operation, according to the FBI. To process bitcoin transactions, Silk Road used what the FBI described as a "tumbler," a complex system that used countless dummy transactions to digitally conceal where the money came from.
Over the past two and a half years, the FBI said the site generated revenue worth more than 9.5 million bitcoins -- valued at $1.3 billion early Wednesday. The FBI said Ulbricht's net worth was essentially his value in Silk Road's commissions, which totaled more than 600,000 bitcoins ($85 million).
