Dark History - 41: Diving Into The Dark Web: Dark History of Silk Road

Episode Date: April 27, 2022

The internet isn’t really that old. But that doesn’t mean that it hasn’t already started to gather its own dark history. I mean we’re talking about a whole branch of the internet literally called “Dark Web.” And there was one site in particular that basically made the dark web the mainstream place for drugs, fake ids, and murder for hire. Today we’re going to talk about the Silk Road. The website that single-handedly validated bitcoin and laid the foundation for dark websites we still see in action today.

Hi friends, I hope you're having a wonderful day today. My name is Bailey Sarian and I'd like to welcome you to the Library of Dark History. Welcome, welcome. This is a safe space for all the curious cats out there who think, hey, this history really is boring as it seemed in school. Oh, Nene. This is where we can learn together about all the dark, mysterious, dramatic stories our teachers never taught us in school. Or maybe just like

glossed over. You know? Anyway, so I had this idea. I wanted to do the dark history of the internet. But when I went down that rabbit hole, I was like, okay, what's like step one? You know? Should I do a dark history of MySpace? If I did that, I'd have to talk about MySpacePage, which was honestly amazing, but that's not the point. So it's like, okay, well, what about Twitter? Hmm, wealthy white dude, start a company and get even wealthier. Where's the story in that? And I can't do a dark history of Google because let's face it.

Google's fucked up and they'll probably cancel me and kill me and like whatever, they're up there with Nestle. Doesn't Google own YouTube? Yeah, I can't. That's my daddy, he pays me. Anyways, but then I remembered an article I discovered that told the story of a place on the internet

where drugs were sold. Mm-hmm. It was a lot like Amazon, except instead of shower curtains, you could buy cocaine. I mean, it was wild. And it sounds too good to be true, right? Well, because it was.

It only lasted a few years, but in those few years, wow, baby girl, this story, it has everything. We're talking murder for hire, a cat and mouse chase with the FBI, and a whole lot of exesie pills. So today we're going to be covering the dark history of Silk Road. Okay, so let me open up my dark history book. Let me go to the Silk Road chapter here in my book of dark secrets. Found it. And let's hop skittily do right into this story. So shall we? So this is probably the most recent story we've covered on dark history, but if you

know anything about Silk Road, you know why I want to tell this story. But it's impossible to tell you the story of Silk Road without learning the story of a man named Ross Ulbrich. Ross was born to Kirk and Lynn Ulbrich on March 27, 1984 in Austin, Texas. His friends called him the Ross man and described him as carefree but also caring as well as being bright but not whiz kid bright. So far so good, right? When he was little, Ross's parents signed him up for the boy scouts, and Ross loved being in the boy scouts. I mean, he was always curious about how trees grew, how to find food in the woods, I mean, everything. So the scouts were just a natural fit. And while in boy scouts, he learned the value of following the rules to get ahead. But it turns out

Ross had a bit of a dark side. When he was in high school, rule abiding Ross started wondering what would happen, you know, if he broke the rules every once in a while. So he started small, you know, like most teenagers do. I smoke in a little bit of the devil's lettuce with his friends and hanging out with them at all hours of the night. But then Ross wanted to push it to the next level, so he started experimenting with much harder drugs. I mean, everything from mushrooms to DMT, which is like a hallucinogenic chemical. I mean, really whatever he could get his hands on.

Ross loved drugs. He once said his drug intake was like, quote, a guy who jumped into the deep end of a pool and stayed under water for as long as he could hold his breath." End quote. Is that a bad thing? Is that bad? I don't know. So, you might think this is the point where everything starts to go wrong for Ross, right?

No, no, of course not. Because while Ross was experimenting with every drug he could find, he collected enough merit badges as a boy scout to become an eagle scout. He also received a 1,460 on his SATs, and got a scholarship to the University of Texas at Dallas. So I mean, he's doing just fine, okay? He decided to major in physics and once Ross got to college, Ross partied hard, but he studied even harder and got a grad school scholarship to Penn State. I mean, at this point, Ross was living two lives.

By day, he was like this cheery, rule following, physics studying, Eagle Scout, you know, but by night Ross was seeing just how far down the rabbit hole he could go and experimenting with more and more drugs. And no matter how far down the rabbit hole he went, I mean Ross was like still a very successful student, the end. Now I'm just kidding, I'm so funny, I know. But he wasn't happy. Look, nobody is rosk it in line. And at age 22, Ross started to realize he had no idea what he was even doing. He found himself depressed

because of how monotonous lab research was. And he was worried that like all the years of work might not even lead to anything meaningful or any kind of money, you know? The future started to look grim. Ross was at a dead end, and he felt trapped. But one day Ross was scrolling around online when he discovered the writings of an Austrian

economist named Ludwig von Mises. I think that's how you said it, you say. Ludwig wrote about how people are trapped in life if they don't have economic freedom. Government enforces taxation, and taxation funds the government to enforce violence upon its citizens, trapping them into a lifelong cycle of poverty.

If a citizen is not free economically, they'll just never be free. Well, Ludwig's writings freaking rocked Ross's world. All Ross wanted was to be free. And now he discovered a philosophy that promoted the kind of freedom like he was craving. He was like, sign me the F up. Please and thank you. So after Ross graduated from Penn State in 2009, he decided to give up physics and focus on making money to get that freedom. So he moved back home, okay, and he started working for a company called Goodwagon Books, which was a business that collected used books and sold them online. Great, love that dream job.

While there, Ross built Goodwagon's website. Yeah, he learned how to like manage a business inventory and he made a custom internet script that would determine a book's price based on how it was ranked on Amazon. Ross did so well at the company that when the owner left, he passed the company off to Ross. And under Ross, Goodwagon books thrived. December 2010 was the best month ever for the company pulling in $10,000. Ross loved the power that came from running his own company, but the particular company wasn't pulling in enough money. So on the side, Ross started trading stocks on the internet to make a little extra cash. And one day, he saw something that would really help him get to the next level.

Because one of the ways people were buying stocks was with something called Bitcoin. Now fully explaining what Bitcoin is would take a long ass time plus it's complicated. So I'm just going to give you the quickest definition I possibly can. Bitcoin is a cryptocurrency, which sounds like a scary robot skeleton or something, right? Very terminator, but it's not. Cryptocurrency is actually just digital money, point blank period. You can buy a cryptocurrency with normal money, usually with like a credit or debit card. And then the cryptocurrency becomes digital money. So like that's stored in something called a block chain.

Yeah, I lost you probably. Come back, pay attention. A blockchain is a digital ledger book that manages all your cryptocurrency transactions, but it's encrypted and technically like no one can trace it. It's untraceable. On top of all of that, the value of Bitcoin isn't based out of central baking,

like most of currency is. Instead, it's based on how much of a demand there is for it. That's it, really, I guess. People are gonna be like, that's not it. Blah, blah, blah, blah. Shut up. There's a lot more to Bitcoin than that, but the easiest way to look at why people use Bitcoin

is to think of it as money that isn't tied to the government in any way. It's untraceable, too. Gah. And most importantly, people assume the transactions were anonymous. Ross was blown away by Bitcoin and it gave him an idea, like Bob,

what if he could create a website where people could buy anything they wanted, but it was completely anonymous. And what if it wasn't just normal stuff that you'd buy online? What if you could buy whatever you wanted? Like let's say, drugs. You see, Ross believed that all drug use was a personal choice, and the government should say the hell out of people's personal choices. Plus, Ross believed the war on drugs was a total fail here, which we talked about here on Dark History, remember? It was. Thank you. So by making a website that ignored the government and their,

quote unquote, war on drugs, Ross saw an opportunity to create the kind of freedom of choice he wanted to see in the world. Trial Blazer. Now, the biggest problem Ross faced was that, well, drugs are illegal and selling drugs online. Also illegal. I mean, you can't just like set up a normal website with drugs for sale and call it a day. And this is where something called the Dark Web comes into play.

The Dark Web, if you don't know, is a super secret hidden part of the internet that you can't access on a normal web browser. The Dark Web is hidden behind a lot of encryption. So you need a special web browser to access it. And unlike cryptocurrency, it's actually, it is anonymous. So why exactly is it called a dark web? Well, the dark web is so anonymous and unregulated. It's an easy place for journalists or whistle blowers from across the world to avoid censorship. But because of the lack of regulation,

it also leaves people on the dark web vulnerable to illegal activity. The dark web is home to everything from illegal guns for sale to stolen credit cards and social security numbers. This makes the dark web one of the world's biggest black markets in illegal activity. The kind of activity that usually happens

in the shadows, hence, dark web, you get it. So to Ross, the dark web was the perfect home for his brand new website and cryptocurrency, oh, perfect for anonymous transactions. On December 31, 2010, Ross wrote a New Year's resolution into his personal diary that said, quote, in 2011, I am creating a year of prosperity and power beyond what I have ever experienced before. This website is going to become a phenomenon. And at least one person will tell me about it, not knowing that I created it.

And at the beginning of 2011, Ross closed down Goodwagon books for good and officially launched his brand new website, which he called Silk Road. But first, let's pause for an ad break. When you hear the name Silk Road, close your eyes, what do you picture? Because I picture. What's that? Isn't it like that vegan milk? It's not vegan. Isn't it called silk something?

That's what I think of. That. I think of milk. Yeah. Well, that's not why Ross called it silk road. Ross actually got the name Silk Road from a real thing in history. Oh, hence the name dark history. Full circle. Full circle. I can't talk today more than 2000 years ago there was a trade route that carried everything porcelain cannabis spices gold gunpowder and silk but it wasn't just goods that were traded on the original Silk Road through China. It was religion, philosophy, and information.

All of these things would lead to innovations in technology that changed the world forever. And that's why Ross chose the name Silk Road. I mean, he was hoping his website would do for the internet what the original Silk Road did for the real world. But there's one other thing we need to know about the original Silk Road for this story. There was a third thing that spread across the Silk Road.

Can you guess? It was the Bubonic Plague! Remember, Bubonic Plague? Bubonic Plague! So even though the original Silk Road spread ideas and goods, it also spread disease and death. LOL. Anyway, Ross launched his site Silk Road in February of 2011, but he had one problem. He freaking didn't have access to the things he wanted to sell on Silk Road, aka, he

didn't have the drugs to sell, you know. Not to mention that because of how the dark web worked. Nobody was going to find his website by accident Like they would like on the normal internet. So Ross needed Product and he needed a way to get people to his site. So one day Ross went online and found out that it's actually really freakin easy to make Homemade hallucigenic mushrooms. Good for him. He's just DIY king over here. So Ross started his website off by selling shrooms. And to promote his magic mushrooms, Ross posted on forums all over the normal internet under the screen name Silk Road. He advertised this amazing new website on the dark web, which is also called Silk Road. And you can buy magic

mushrooms there. So head on over and get started now. Ross grew 10 pounds of mushrooms and sold all 10 in under a week. I'm sorry, in just under a week. I feel like that just makes a big difference. Almost immediately, other people started to notice Silk Road's potential and they wanted in on the action. So other people started selling drugs on Silk Road. Silk Road was already becoming a success, but in June 2011, things really started to take off when the website Gawker wrote a glowing review of Silk Road on the normal internet. The article went viral and within weeks Ross pulled in his first million

dollars. Yeah, within weeks, go for him. But the busier the website got, the less time Ross had to enjoy his newfound wealth. Ross was the only person working on Silk Road at this time, and he was starting to get a little overwhelmed. Okay, he knew that in order to sustain the website success, he would need some freaking help. And that's when Ross received an email from somebody named Variety Jones. Now Variety Jones wasn't the sky's real name. His actual name was Roger Clark, but Ross, if you didn't know that, like everybody else, Ross met on the dark web. Variety always just went by his screen name. We don't know too much about Variety Jones,

except that he was an internet hacker, who noticed a hole in Silk Road's code that could allow other hackers to steal thousands of Bitcoin from Silk Road's customers. Now, even though Variety Jones could have taken down Silk Road, he didn't want to. In fact, Variety Jones wanted in. So he emailed Ross about this whole in Silk Rost's code

and Ross fixed it right away. And then the two kept talking, quickly becoming good friends. And eventually Variety Jones even became Ross's mentor and how to run a criminal enterprise. Now Variety had a lot of experience committing crimes on the internet, or at least that's what he told Ross.

And Variety gave Ross an important piece of advice. What Silk Road was doing was illegal, so Ross needed to protect himself from the government. And in order to do that, Ross needed a new name. And Variety even had that figured out too, obviously. The name he said Ross should use was the dread pirate Roberts. So dread pirate Roberts. So dread pirate Roberts. Look, I'm not going to say that a hundred times, okay. This name comes from the movie The Princess Bride. Remember that movie? The character of the dread pirate Roberts is the most fearsome pirate in the world, but the twist

is he's in a real person. Oh, that makes sense. Yeah, it's a name adopted by somebody who proves themselves to be the best pirate around. So whoever the dread pirate Roberts is, whenever they get tired of being the dread Omnacom DPR, okay, whenever they get tired of being the DPR, they can just hand the name off to somebody else. Variety told Ross this would be like the perfect cover, you know. If the law ever came down on Ross, he could pass the name off to someone else and pretend he was just filling the role, right? Yeah. So in early 2012, Ross officially retired his old Silk Road user name and deleted all his old forum posts about mushrooms on the internet so he could cover his ass and then officially

became known as the Dread Pirate Roberts. Under his new name, Ross hired some employees to help him run Silk Road by using an encrypted chat program on the Dark Web and paid them in Bitcoin. They must be super rich now. They all had weird screen names. Serious, digital alchemy, smetly, and like all of them are anonymous, but all of them way more experienced in drug crimes than Ross. Within months, Silk Road was completely overhauled by Ross and his new employees. One historian described the new and improved Silk Road as user-friendly. And quote, quote, quote, quote, quote, quote, quote, quote, quote, quote, quote, quote, quote,

quote, quote, quote, quote, quote, quote, quote, quote, quote, quote, quote, quote, quote, quote, quote, quote, quote, quote, quote, quote, quote, quote, quote, quote, quote, quote, quote, quote, quote, quote, quote, quote, quote, quote, quote, quote, quote, quote, quote, quote, quote, quote, quote, quote, quote, quote, quote, quote, quote, quote, quote, quote, quote, quote, quote, quote, quote, quote, quote, quote, quote, quote, quote, quote, quote, quote, quote, quote, quote, quote, quote, quote, quote, quote, quote, quote, quote, quote, quote, , quote, quote, quote, quote, quote, quote, quote, quote, quote, quote, quote, quote, quote, quote, quote, quote, quote, quote, quote, quote, quote, quote, quote, quote, quote, quote, quote, quote, quote, quote, quote, quote, quote, quote, quote, quote, quote, quote, quote, quote, quote, quote, quote, quote, quote, quote, quote, quote, quote, quote, quote, quote, quote, quote, quote, quote, quote, quote, quote, quote, quote, quote, quote, quote, quote, quote, quote, quote, quote, quote, quote, quote, quote, quote, quote, quote, quote, quote, quote, quote, quote, quote, quote, quote, quote, quote, quote, quote, quote, quote, quote, quote, quote, quote, quote, quote, quote, quote, quote, quote, quote, quote, quote, quote These makeup or pet products, there were helpful icons for cannabis. Exocetial opioids. Opioids.

Sorry, I'm struggling with opioids. There we go. And then there was even a seller's guide section that had like helpful instructions on how to vacuum seal or hydrox when shipping them. So just very helpful. Criminals helping criminals. Love to see it. So to Ross, this was the freedom

he had been searching for his entire life, okay? He had gone from a book dealer to a successful drug kingpin overnight. I would call him a drug entrepreneur. How about that? I like that better. He was pulling in millions of dollars from all over, boom, boom, boom, the globe.

But you can't make that kind of money in the USA without attracting all over the globe. But you can't make that kind of money in the USA without attracting attention from the government. So just a few months after Silk Road launched, Ross became one of the freaking most wanted men on the planet. Let's pause. For an ad break. So let's recap for a second. Ross Ulbrich really likes drugs, but he also wanted to make a name for

himself. He stumbled upon Bitcoin and the Dark Web and got the idea to combine all of his interests into a website that sold drugs for Bitcoin anonymously and became a millionaire basically overnight. But there's one important part of the story I haven't told you yet, because it turns out from the very beginning of this Silk Road story, there's been another character lurking in the background, and that character, Homeland Security. Yeah, Bill. Homeland Security is the branch of the government,

responsible for public security and are focused primarily on border security, cyber security, and catching terrorists. So it's kind of a big deal that Silk Road was on their radar, okay? But it didn't start as public enemy number one. I mean, at first the Homeland security team just wanted to get a little drugs and party, you know? And then they were like, oh, whoops.

Can't do that. I'm just kidding. At first, it was just one Homeland Security agent who noticed something wasn't right about so low. This guy's name was Jared. Oh, god, Jared. Remember the subway guy, Jared? Yeah.

He turned out to be a shithead. Huh. Fuck that guy. Anyways, one day in June of 2011, Jared was sitting in his office when he got a call from a guy named Mike. Mike worked as a porter protection officer at Minnesota airport and he told Jared like, hey, we intercepted this piece of mail. It's an envelope, but on the inside, it's just a single pink pill. The weird thing is, it has a squirrel engraved on the side." Now, normally when Homeland Security gets a call like this, it's not treated like as a big deal. Most agents have gone on record saying that crimes this small get logged and forgotten.

We appreciate the honesty. And since there are bigger cases like to work on involving like felony level amounts of drugs, this would have just normally would have been nothing, right? But Jared had only been working for home and security for two months. So to him, he's got something to prove, and this was an interesting lead to follow. He's trying to reclaim the name Jared and make it a good name because that subway Jared really ruined it for everyone. He told Mike he couldn't just fly out to Minnesota to check out like a single pill, but gave him his personal number and told him to report back if anything similar happened again,

which I'm sure he was like, sure. Call me back if something happens. Thinking like nothing's gonna happen, you know? So for a few months, Mike went about his daily business of checking the mail, coming through the Minnesota Airport for anything suspicious to report back to Jared. But he didn't really find anything until October 5th, 2011, when he found another plain white envelope with a single bump in the middle. And sure enough, the bump was another tiny pink pill

with a squirrel. That sounds cute, just like the one he found before. So Mike picked up the phone and dialed Agent Jared. Now apparently Agent Jared had become a bit obsessed with small drug seizures ever since that first phone call And the pink pill was like I guess it was an ex-succeed tablet because he took it and he was like what No, it's okay What are you about?

I would what are you I'd be like what's this? I don't know but he finds out it's an exesit tablet, somehow. Wing, wing. And Jared had started hearing about like a number of similar discoveries of single exesit tablets down at Chicago's O'Hare airport. The one where they filmed a home alone. When Jared first heard about these pills, there were only three to five packages every other day that contained small amounts of ecstasy.

But by the time Mike called Jared in October, I mean there were now like 30 to 50 packages like these every single day at the O'Hare Airport. Each package was addressed to an individual person at their homes, which is just kind of messy when you think about it. But the easiest ones to find were drugs taped like on the inside of CD and DVD cases, or single pills and envelopes. But some of the other drugs were more cleverly hidden. For example, there was this one package that had nothing in it, but a small piece of cardboard. And you know how on the sides of cardboard, there's like those tiny ripples and holes. Yeah, you know.

Well, there were tiny pink ecstasy tablets stuffed inside of each of those holes. I love a puzzle. I mean, that's fun. So there was a lot of effort being made to send small amounts of drugs to people and Jared wanted to know who was behind it. So Jared, Jared now decided he had enough evidence to perform what's called a knock-and-talk,

which is exactly what it sounds like. What does it sound like? Knock-knock. Who's there? Talk-talk. I don't know. Jared went to one of the addresses that had ordered some of these drugs and knocked on the door. But the guy who answered the door, it wasn't the person whose name was on the envelope. It was like the roommate. So Jared asked the roommate if he ever noticed anything a little unusual about his roommate's mail. And the roommate immediately said like, yeah, he's ordering a lot of drugs online from his website called Silk Road. Now initially, Jared is, was like, okay, like what is Silk Road? But the roommate had a severe case of verbal diarrhea, so he just keeps talking and talking

and talking. And the roommate tells Jared, I think Amazon, but for drugs. And he goes into great detail about how you can find anything on Silk Road, how it's on the dark web, and how every order is bought exclusively with Bitcoin. Now Jared heads back to his office, and the first thing he thinks is like, there's no way I'm the first one to stumble across this website. But he goes on his computer and finds out there are no open cases involving the words silk road in the Homeland Security database. He tries typing similar key words,

but nothing comes up, you know, nothing's coming up. So with no other options, Jared googles it. And after digging through a few hits related to the historical Silk Road, Jared comes across that gocker article I mentioned earlier, you know, remember? This is an article on the normal internet talking about how to buy drugs on the dark web. So Jared was shooketh. So as he reads the article, he finds out

that the owner of the website is named the Dread Pirate Roberts DPR for sure, yeah, DPR. the article, he finds out that the owner of the website is named the dread pirate Roberts DPR for sure, yeah DPR. But who is DPR? Nobody seemed to know. So Jared reports back to home insecurity saying like, hey, there's something there's something huge going on here. And home insecurity, I mean, they agree. So later that fall, investigation was officially opened into Silk Road. At first, investigators found that most of the people who went on Silk Road were looking for a safer, alternative to buying drugs.

No more risk of police chases, no more shady back alley deals. I mean, this was a way to get drugs sent directly to your home. There were even anonymous community groups on the website where people would talk about keeping drug use recreational where they would hold each other accountable to avoid becoming addicted. I mean, that sounds super great, right? Well, because of how accessible drugs became due to Silk Road,

there was a huge increase in the United States in drug use and drug deaths. One study said that by the time Silk Road ended, nearly 20% of all US drug users had purchased narcotics from Silk Road. Or they're just saying that to like, you know, prove that they did something good. You decide. Across the world, drugs purchased from Silk Road were confirmed to have led to at least six overdose deaths, including two 16-year-olds who had purchased something called an N-BOM. Yeah, an N-BOM is supposed to be a cheaper synthetic version of LSD, but an unlike LSD, you can overdose on it. Federal agencies all around the United States wanted to put a stop to this and they wanted

to put a stop to this and they wanted to put a stop to it fast. No one's going to be making millions of dollars without me coming in, jeered, and fucking shoot up, you know. So investigators decided to reach out to the FBI. Yeah. Now drug crimes weren't the jurisdiction of the FBI, but the investigators hadn't covered other stuff on Silk Road that did fall under their jurisdiction. It turns out that Silk Road's whole, like, anything goes approach to retail, had expanded into other illegal activities.

I mean, things like guns, for profit internet hacking, fake IDs, fake social security numbers, growing name it, whatever, if it was shady, they were doing it. And according to the FBI, even murder for higher postings. Oh yeah, you want to kill your husband, babe? Just a little beep-bap-boop. Two clicks. Check out.

You're good. So easy. What if you could murder your husband with prime? So in September of 2012, the FBI's cyber branch began an investigation with the goal of finding the Silk Road server who was running it and ending the whole damn criminal enterprise.

Burn it down. Let's pause for an ad break really quick, BRB. The first thing the FBI tried to figure out was who the Hick was DPR. Okay? All around the internet people theorized that he was an international drug kingpin. Or that maybe the DPR was some board billionaire and drug trafficking was like, just rich person hobby. One post on an old forum,

even theorized that DPR wasn't a person at all. He was a series of computers running advanced artificial intelligence. For a while, the internet was obsessed with finding out who this frickin pirate was. And so was every federal agency in the United States. Get in line. There was an operation that sprang up in 2012 called Marco Polo.

Oh, fun! It was made up of FBI, Homeland Security, and DEA members. They were focused primarily on unmasking the DPR. I mean, one of their agents was a man named Carl. God, all of them have such basic. Carl, Jared, Mike. Anyways, Carl forces this guy's name. He went undercover on Silk Road using the screen name, knob, so simple.

knob. And started selling cocaine on the website. After a few sales, knob, aka Carl, wrote DPR in December of 2012, complaining that Silk Road sales were too small to be worth his time. So DPR forwarded this email to one of his top lieutenants who went under the screen name, chronic pain.

DPR told ChronicPain that he needed to collaborate with knob to set up like a bigger sale to keep knob on as a dealer. At least he's looking out for his dealers. That's nice. Now this part absolutely sounds 100% insane, but it's honestly how it went down, okay? Chronic pain thought it would be a good idea to have the cocaine shipped directly to his home address. Yeah, I know. He didn't even get like a pillbox. So to nobody's surprise, Chronic Pain was soon arrested.

So Chronic Pain turned out to be a man named Curtis Green, a grandpa and a former semi-pro poker player who lived in Spanish fork Utah. Good for him. You go, Grandpa. Curtis turned on DPR fast and became an informant for the FBI and exchange for his freedom. The FBI released him almost immediately and hopes that DPR wouldn't find out like that they had a spy on the inside. Well, DPR found out anyway, and he'd think like he would have realized something fishy

was going on with this knob guy. I mean, he's a new guy, and the second he came along, Curtis got arrested, you know, like you think he'd put the piece together? Nene, that's not what happened. In fact, DPR started complaining to Nob that Curtis was the mole. And not only that, but he thought Curtis was stealing some of the website's Bitcoin on the side. DPR wanted revenge, so after a few messages back and forth, he asked Nob if he knew anybody

that could murder Curtis Green, so he could get his money back. No, DPR. Remember, knob is literally an undercover federal agent, so knob is loving this. He's like, yeah, I could help you out. Noveline to DPR and said that he knew some quote, quote, prose who could get the job done for $80,000 in Bitcoin. That's expensive.

You guys watched my murder mystery makeup? There was a story I did the other day where this girl offered this other guy $1,000 to killer husband. So you could get a deal in like, what was that Alabama? Yeah, $80,000? That's a lot.

DPR agreed, anyways, on the condition that knob said proof of death photos of Curtis' body. Uh-oh. So knob had a lot of evidence photos of Curtis' body. Uh-oh. So Nob had a lot of evidence on this DPR guy, but there's just one big problem. Nob still had no idea who DPR even was, right? I mean, how can he arrest this guy if he just, he doesn't know who he is?

So he had to prolong the investigation by taking pictures of Curtis' screen pretending to be dead. So they put like a makeup on Curtis Green and made them look dead and they take pictures like glamour shots and are like, oh my god, look, and they sent them to DPR. They're like, yeah, look, dead. Now it's extra crazy about all of this is that DPR. Now he freaked the fuck out. Yeah, he told knob that the images were disturbing and implied that he didn't actually want the guy to be killed. He's like, here's Psycho Nob.

How can you do that? So now on top of the whole running and illegal empire charge, the FBI had solid evidence that DPR hired a hitman. And it wasn't the only time they caught him in the act, because over the next few months, the FBI discovered five other instances of DPR paying someone to murder one of his enemies. But despite all of the evidence piling up, the FBI still wasn't any closer to knowing who DPR was, okay? But then, in the summer of 2013, they

discovered a coating air on Silk Road that leaked the IP address of the website's server. Now this might not sound like a huge deal because an IP address shows you where an internet server is located. And the FBI soon discovered that the Silk Road server was located in Iceland. Yeah, Iceland, okay. Now the FBI was fairly certain that the owner of Silk Road wasn't actually in Iceland and that the server had been like set up by someone paying a handler to run the server in another country. So even though they knew where the server was, they decided not to take it down. They didn't want to let DPR know that they were onto him. So instead they created a mirror of it so they could see all the digital traffic coming

and going. So once the FBI made a mirror, they were able to see just how big Silk Road, the Silk Road Empire like had really become. And girl, what they discovered was freaking huge. In just two and a half years, Silk Road had made over a million illicit transactions. Each of these purchases was made with Bitcoin, and they equaled over $100 million in revenue. Uh-huh, that's a lot of money. But the most importantly that came from mirroring the server was access to DPR's activities. They saw when he logged in, when he logged out, who was online currently at Silk Road,

and most importantly, where Silk Road was being run. That's the most important thing. I mean, the FBI discovered that almost all of the activity was coming from a laptop in an internet cafe and San Francisco, which leads us back to Jared of Homeland Security. By the time Jared got word that a lead was found on who DPR was in 2013, he had already made 3,600 drug seizures. Plus he had arrested another one of DPR's top deputies, Sirus.

After negotiating a deal with Sirus, Jared took over his screen name and started communicating with DPR for months. As Sirus, Jared worked with DPR on a lot of transactions, but they would even talk about more mundane things like movies they liked and what are you doing? You know, just being cute. Eventually DPR promoted Jared to assistant manager of the entire Silk Road operation, and even put him on a salary. But no matter how much Jared pride, he just couldn't figure out who DPR was.

Well all of this was happening. There was a massive bust on fake IDs going down in San Francisco. I mean there were nine fake IDs that had been discovered in the mail and traced back to the same address in San Francisco. So a team of border protection agents who weren't even involved in the Silk Road investigation, went down to the address to investigate. So they knocked on the door, and when the door opened, the man pictured in the IDs was standing right there in front of them. He told the agents, quote, my name is Ross Ulbrich. It was Mr. DPR himself. Ross denied knowing about the IDs at first, but eventually he said that he'd heard of

this website called Silk Road where you can buy anything you wanted, like fake IDs. He just wanted to help the agents, however he could. Since the agents weren't part of the Silk Road investigation, this didn't raise any red flags for them, so they let Rosscoe and just filed a report, which made its way back to the FBI cyber branch who was now working with Agent Jared. What a small little world, huh? When Jared heard about all this, everything started to add up, right? San Francisco, fake IDs, even the chats Jared had with DPR were timestamped with the Pacific time zone.

But the final piece of the puzzle came when Jared met a special agent for the IRS named Gary Alford. The IRS was interested in collecting taxes for all that sweet drug money, so Gary's number one priority was figuring out who DPR was. And like Jared, whenever he hit a dead end, he turned to Google and started searching for Silk Road. One day after digging almost a thousand pages back on Google, that's dedication because sometimes you go to page two and you're like, I'm tired, right? Yeah. I don't think I've ever gone to page three, have you? You're psychotic, if you do.

Gary, going way back, discovered postings on a Bitcoin forum that dated back to 2011. Now, the person making the post was talking about magic mushrooms, asking questions about how to make them and how to sell them on the internet. Hmm. And as Gary dug a little deeper, he found posts from the same users promoting a new website called Drumroll playing Silk Road.

And then Gary finally found the smoking gun everybody had been waiting for. That very same user had made a post asking for anybody familiar with web design to contact the email Ross Olbrickt at gmail.com. Ah, poor guy. If only he used a fake name. Darn it! This was the first time Ross's name had ever come up in any of the Silk Road investigations. Wow, all they had to do was go back a couple pages on Google. Who would have thought? Anyways, and when Gary met Agent

Jared, they started sharing their notes. All the pieces fell into place and everybody knew the truth. The dread pirate Roberts is Ross Ulbrich. After putting out a subpoena for Ross's Gmail, they discovered that every single time Ross locked into his computer, DPR logged on to Silk Road. Now this was their guy. So within 10 days, the US Attorney's Office drafted a criminal complaint.

The FBI got an arrest warrant and the entire investigation team headed down to San Francisco. Road trip! But first, let's pause for a little ad break. In order to fully nail Ross's involvement with Silk Road, the task force knew that they couldn't do like a normal knocking talk, remember where they knock and they talk. They needed access to his laptop. Now conventional search warrant could lead to, I don't know, a roster storing his computer.

So they had to be smart about this, right? And that's where Agent Jarrin came in. Jarrin had still had access to the serious screen name and was still messaging DPR like almost every day. Jared was involved. Let me tell you. So Jared headed down to the same internet cafe Ross hung out at in San Francisco. When he got there, Jared saw Ross leave the cafe and walked down the street to the

library. Now undercover FBI agents followed him. Ross enters the library with his laptop and walks upstairs. He sits down and sets his laptop down next to a woman. Meanwhile, Agent Jared is down the street, sitting on a park bench, and he's watching his laptop to see if DPR signs online. Then Agent Jared hears a ping at his computer. The dread pirate Roberts is online.

Yes! So agent Jared heads inside, sits at the bottom of the stairs and starts messaging Ross as serious. The plan was for Jared to tell Ross that there was something weird going on with one of the Bitcoin transfers. And he wanted to know if Ross could check it out for him. Now to do this, Ross had to navigate to a specific screen on the Silk Road email hub,

labeled FLAGD. The idea was to get him to this page, so when the fed swooped in and took the computer, it would be on the flagged screen and prove DPR equals Ross. So they need him to be on that screen. That's how they're going to get on. Meanwhile there were SWAT teams on the move a few miles away heading to the library, but they were freaking all running a bit late. All the FBI agents were getting very anxious and Ross had just finished

his coffee and was like starting to get ready to leave. Mayday, Mayday. The supervisor in charge of the bus sends Jared an email saying, quote, let the guy run if you have to, but do not let that computer close." End quote. The message was clear and everybody decided, well, fuck the plan, let's improvise a bit. At 3.14 p.m., Ross was in the middle of typing a message to Jared, saying that the flat section had been checked, when a middle aged man and woman started hobbling towards Ross. Now, Ross thought they were a couple of random drunks, so he tried to ignore them, but then the woman

had screamed, fuck you, Ryan Ross's ear. Ross turned around like just for a second. Now remember how I said Ross sat next to a woman at the table? Yeah, well that woman turned out to be an FBI agent. Great. Well, not great for Ross. So she snatches the computer. Ross dove across the table for his computer, but he was too late. she snatches the computer, Ross dovercross the table for his computer, but he was too late. The agent grabbed the computer, handed it off to another agent, and the rest of the FBI on site swarmed Ross and cuffed him. While Ross was cuffed, the FBI looked at his PC, and were amazed to see that the screen was still on. And the website opened on the computer? None other than Silk Row, baby.

A. Oh, and it was logged in from the administrative side, even better. The team dug deeper and found fake identities, chat logs, and Ross's personal journal. One FBI agent said later that he'd never seen more incriminating information in one spot in 11 years with the FBI. The FBI arrested Ross and charged him with seven counts, including drug trafficking, computer hacking, money laundering, and a super rare charge called a kingpin statute, which is usually reserved for mafia dons and cartel leaders. Bravo Ross, you made it!

It just goes to show you that, like, what the feds thought of Ross and Silk Road, right? Ross was initially charged for the murder for higher plots too. So it's just like Nala can good for him. Most of those charges ended up being dropped, but one is still pending, I mean to this day. Everybody who had known Ross was incomplete shock. Ross, the dread pirate Roberts, in control. He bought all.

Ross smoked a ton, a lot of weed, drove an old car, and his friends called him Ross Man because of how chilly it was. How could this guy be a criminal kingpin? There's just no way. It didn't make sense. Eagle Scout? Huh, come on.

The trial came in January of 2015. The defense argued that Ross did in fact create Silk Road, but had handed it off to others, who then lured him back in to take the fall. Now this had been called the Dred Pirate Roberts Defense and well, it didn't work. The prosecution responded with hundreds of exhibits, including testimony from friggin agent Jared,

about the bust and his time as Ross's right hand man. And there were like cat-logs straight from Ross's computer. And lawyers right aloud from Ross's personal journal. I mean, the evidence was so overwhelming that after only 12 days of trial, the jury found Ross guilty on all counts, sentencing him to two life sentences, plus 40 years. And since he was tried federally,

he was not eligible for parole, but he got to go to a nicer prison. And they get free healthcare. The only place you get free healthcare in America, in prison. Yay! The Silk Road Fiasco made a huge impact we're still feeling today. I mean, cryptocurrency is more popular than ever

and has expanded way past Bitcoin. I mean, have you been to the movies lately? There's a commercial for cryptocurrency playing in between movie trailers starring none other than Matt Damon. At the end of the commercial, he's like, buy crypto because fortune favors the brave. Whatever the fuck that means. So yeah, Silk Road didn't hurt crypto, not all.

If nothing else, the media circus brought Bitcoin to like a way bigger audience. And made drugs accessible. And even though Ross was arrested, the dark web didn't go away. In fact, some of Ross's former employees started a website called Silk Road 2.0, a month after he was arrested. At the time, it was the most successful site on the dark web, but it shut down just a year after it began. Even as recently as 2021, websites like Dark Market

popped up that follow Ross's Anything Goes retail model with like a twist. They banned weapons and fentanyl among other things. Unfortunately, Dark Market ended up being a bit disappointing too. With all success at its peak, Dark Market also only managed to gain a fraction of the web traffic Ross's website did. That said, some of the Silk Road successors got much bigger. They learned from Ross's many fuck-ups. Alphabet sold close to half a billion dollars worth of drugs and other illicit goods before getting shut down. And even as recently as 2021,

law enforcement agencies across three continents came together to bust a dark, web drug ring that saw more than 150 arrests and over three billion in Bitcoin. So Ross and his creation continued to have an impact. Damn, how can I find these websites? Let me know down below. Let me know. Send me the links. Thank you.

For research. Anyways, you guys, wasn't that a fun story? I just love talking about drugs. And honestly, like, really interesting. Mm-hmm. Great. So here's my biggest problem with this story and story similar to it.

When you Google drug deals on the internet, almost every story is about buss on the dark web. When you change your search to say drug deals on Facebook, you can find a 2021 report that found thousands of posts on Facebook, Instagram and other social media websites selling heroin and other opioids. One of the Instagram posts from early 2020 was live for over a year. I'm not here demonize anybody for using or selling drugs on a nay. And Silk Road clearly had a flaw in the whole anything goes approach to retail.

Murder for hire happened because of Silk Road in case you forgot. I mean, if they would have just dropped that, it would have been okay, right? Bring it back. Bring it back. Plus, it's not just drugs you can find on social media. A 2020 report on human trafficking showed that over 40% of defendants and active sex trafficking cases met their victims on social media. Almost 60% of victims were recruited on Facebook. The point is, a lot of really sketchy shit happens on social

media on the normal internet, okay? So why don't we kind of fix that first? Just a thought. But nobody comes to me for answers. What do I know? So just because it's called the dark web, that's not the only place dark shit happens. The problems faced on Silk Road exist on the normal internet too.

And there's way more people on social media than there are on the dark web. Plus judging by the numbers I said earlier, it may be even worse, right? Yeah. Well everyone, thank you for learning with me today. Let me know what you learned down below. Remember, don't be afraid to ask questions to get the whole story because you deserve that. Now I'd love to hear your reactions to this story, so make sure to use the hashtag darkhistory so I can follow along. Join me over on my YouTube where you can watch these episodes on Thursday after the podcast airs and also catch murder mystery and make-up which drops every Monday. I hope you have a great day today. You make good choices, and I'll be talking to you next week. Goodbye!

Dark History is an audio boom original. This podcast is executive produced by Bailey Sarian, Kim Jacobs, Dunia McNeely from Three Arts, Justin Cummins, and Claire Turner from Wheelhouse DNA. Produced by Lexi Kiven, research provided by Tisha Dunston, writers, jed book out Joyce Guzou, and Kim Yegid, edited by Jim Luchi, shot by Tafazwa Nemaru Dwayne, and a big special thank you to our historical consultant Nicholas Christian. And I'm your host, why my last goddammit, I'm your host, Bailey Sarian. And I'm your host, why am I last?

God damn it. I'm your host, Bailey Sarian. Goodbye.