Silk Road is back online and by all appearances, the drug market website is much busier than it was before.
Six months after the FBI shut down the notorious website known as “the eBay for drugs,” a new version of Silk Road has emerged, offering even more illegal drugs than its predecessor, according to a report (PDF) published Wednesday by the Digital Citizens Alliance, a group that campaigns against online crime.
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The report found that today there are 14,000 drug listings on the new Silk Road, compared to 13,000 listings that were on the site before it closed last autumn.
“What we see on the Silk Road website today is more drugs, more sellers and an even greater commitment from the administrators and its members to keep the community online”, said Garth Bruen, senior associate of the Digital Citizens Alliance.
In October, the FBI shut down Silk Road and arrested the alleged mastermind of the site, Ross William Ulbricht, a 29-year-old resident of San Francisco. Authorities claimed that Ulbricht was trafficking from the underground market illegal drugs, computer hacking tools, and other illegal products and services.
A month later, a new site with the same name appeared, offering a wide range of drugs.
The Digital Citizens Alliance team reports that it took months to identify such illegal websites like Silk Road. The team observed “an increased level of paranoia” among users of these sites after the arrests of Ulbricht, as well as others who followed after him, according to the report.
The “Silk Road 2.0” and some other similar websites on the “Darknet” continue to thrive, listing various illegal products, such as forged official documents, secret financial transactions, hacking services, anonymous mail drops and hard drugs, the report states.
Let us remind that Ulbricht declared himself innocent of the charges against him. His lawyer, Joshua Dratel, filed a motion to dismiss the charges that weighed on him last month, arguing that his client merely hosted the forum where drug trafficking and money laundering took place and did not actively participate.
