As we first reported in a previous post, the FBI has arrested Ross Ulbricht , 29, who was the owner and operator of " Silk Road ," an underground website that has earned him around $1.2 billion in the last 30 months from trafficking illegal drugs, malware , and hacking tools .
Authorities also seized around 26,000 Bitcoins worth about $3.6 million. Ulbricht was arrested on Tuesday in San Francisco and will appear in federal court later today.
Ulbricht is a 2006 graduate of the University of Texas with a degree in physics. Ulbricht started Silk Road as a graduate student at the University of Pennsylvania . He used the alias Dread Pirate Roberts , and is accused of running a highly professional underground website that he used to make money by being a meeting place for sellers of illegal goods and hundreds of thousands of customers from around the world.
As of September, Silk Road had over 13,000 listings of illegal substances, including cannabis, LSD, heroin, methamphetamine, opium, and prescription drugs. The drugs sold on the site were available in single-dose quantities as well as kilo-sized packages.
On his website there were hundreds of listings for hacking tools, such as keyloggers, Trojans for attacking banks, Trojans for remote access, and services for hacking Facebook and Twitter accounts , etc.
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The website offered firearms and ammunition, bank account information, credit card information and, watch out: professional killers.
As of July, Silk Road had more than 950,000 registered customers. More than 1.2 million transactions had been made since February 2011. Total revenue from those sales was about $1.2 billion, and Silk Road took in about $79 million in commissions, according to the indictment.
