It was about a year ago that the original Silk Road by the feds, when alleged operator Dread Pirate Roberts was arrested. As we reported last week, Silk Road 2 was shut down, along with several other illegal Dark Net sites.
The alleged mastermind behind Silk Road 2 is 26-year-old Blake Benthall, who in real life worked at several companies, including Close, a secretive startup founded by a group of former Google employees, as Wired reports.
Federal prosecutors allege Benthall worked alone on Silk Road 2, or at least, his colleagues were unaware that he was running the most famous online drug marketplace.
The young man drove a Tesla Model S, worth about $127,000, and spent his days working with various startups. There was nothing to indicate what he did behind closed doors, nothing to indicate that he was running a drug empire.
Aside from spending a fortune on a Tesla, Benthall didn't appear to be extremely wealthy. It was surprising to find that he had about $100,000 in cash at home, prosecutors allege.
On Twitter, Benthall describes himself as a “rocket scientist and Bitcoin dreamer.” He lists himself as a fan of Edward Snowden, Radiohead, an active GitHub user, and a hackathon enthusiast.
Others describe him as a passionate coder who was constantly busy with various projects. For example, not long ago, he wrote TweetCall, a tool that allows you to call an 800 number and turn your words into a tweet.
Benthall has worked for Elon Musk's SpaceX, according to his LinkedIn profile. He has also worked as a software engineer at Carbon Five, RPX Corporation, and Momentum Design Lab.
Its connection to the Silk Road
Authorities claim he hosted one of Silk Road 2's servers on a subdomain of the company Close.co (not so smart). In late May, after Benthall left SpaceX, the feds were able to track down a trace of the server hosting Silk Road 2. Soon after, and in the hours that followed, the website went offline as agents began copying its contents for forensic investigation.
“Defcon,” or Blake Benthall, the site’s administrator, got a message from the company about the server downtime. for the time. He immediately contacted them and asked them not to reboot the machine, fearing data loss.
His friends had no idea that the Close.co company's server was running Silk Road 2, and the arrest took them by surprise.
The FBI claims that there were approximately 150,000 active users on the drug market before the takedown and that the website had processed $8 million. Authorities estimate that the administrator of the page had earned approximately $400,000 in commissions.
Silk Road 2.0 was shut down with the cooperation of authorities from Bulgaria, the Czech Republic, Finland, France, Germany, Hungary, Ireland, Latvia, Lithuania, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, Romania, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland and the United Kingdom with coordination from Europol.
