Silk Road alternatives live on despite second FBI raid
In a development that those involved in the project clearly should have seen coming, the FBI today shut down Silk Road 2.0, the revival of the deep web black market site that the FBI took down in September 2013, and arrested its suspected operator exactly one year after it went live.
Blake Benthall, a 26-year-old San Francisco programmer who claimed to work for SpaceX, was charged with conspiring to commit narcotics trafficking, which, the FBI reminds us in a press release, “carries a maximum sentence of life in prison and a mandatory minimum sentence of 10 years in prison,” among other charges.
Another user, using the alias “DPR2,” resurrected the Silk Road a little over a month after FBI investigators arrested the now-infamous Ross William Ulbricht, who used the moniker “Dread Pirate Roberts,” as the chief proprietor of the original Silk Road last year. DPR2 reportedly altered the FBI’s original shut down notice with a declaration: “This hidden site has risen again,” according to USA Today. By December, Benthall, operating under the username “Defcon,” announced that he had taken control of the site, suggesting that DPR2 was facing legal trouble in the fallout of the original Silk Road case.
