14 DAY TRIAL // It was about a year ago that the original Silk Road was taken down by the Feds, when the alleged Dread Pirate Roberts was arrested. Now, the second Silk Road platform was taken down, along with yet another mastermind.
The alleged Silk Road 2 mastermind is 26-year-old Blake Benthall, who is a contractor for a series of companies, including Close, a secretive startup that was founded by a group of former Google employees, Wired reports.
Federal prosecutors claim Benthall worked alone, however, or at the very least, his colleagues didn’t know about his side business of running Silk Road 2, the illegal online drug marketplace.
The young tech worker drove a Tesla Model S, worth some $127,000, and spent his days working with various startups. Nothing about him gave out what the police say he was doing behind closed doors, nothing hinted to the fact that he was running a drug empire.
Other than having spent a fortune on a Tesla car, Benthall didn’t seem to be extremely rich. Therefore, it’s surprising that he had some $100,000 in cash in his home, as prosecutors claim.
On Twitter, Benthall describes himself as a “rocket scientist, bitcoin dreamer.” He’s a fan of Edward Snowden, Radiohead and he’s an active GitHub user, as well as a fan of hackathons.
He is described by others as a passionate coder that’s been busy with various projects. For instance, a while back, he wrote TweetCall, a tool letting you call an 800 number and convert the words into a tweet. People who know him say he was focused on his work and tended to take control of projects.
Aside from being an obvious Tesla fan, Benthall also worked for Elon Musk’s SpaceX, as his LinkedIn profile reveals. He also worked as a software engineer for Carbon Five, RPX Corporation, and Momentum Design Lab, to name a few.
The Silk Road connection
The authorities claim he was hosting the Silk Road 2 server on a subdomain of the Close.co Internet address. Back in late May, after Benthall left SpaceX, the feds managed to get a hold of the Silk Road 2 server, even though it was placed well beyond the jurisdiction of US authorities. For a few hours, the site went down as they copied its contents for forensic investigation.
“Defcon,” as the site’s admin went by, was notified by the service provider about the downtime. As a result, he immediately contacted them and asked them not to reboot the machine, due to the critical process rolling on it.
The Googlers running the Close startup had no idea that the server running Silk Road 2 was on the company’s Close.co domain and the arrest took them by surprise.
The FBI claims that there were some 150,000 active users of Silk Road 2 prior to the takedown and they generated a money flow of at least $8 million (€6.45 million), while the operators earned some $400,000 (€323,000) in commissions.
Silk Road 2.0 was taken down by a group of cybercrime fighting units, coordinated by Europol. The operation saw the joined forces of law enforcement from Bulgaria, the Czech Re public, Finland, France, Germany, Hungary, Ireland, Latvia, Lithuania, Luxembourg, Netherlands, Romania, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, and the United Kingdom.
It wasn’t just Silk Road 2.0 that was taken down, but other Darknet marketplaces, including Cloud 9, Hydra, Pandora, Topix, Cannabis Road, and Black Market, to name just a few.
