SAN FRANCISCO — Federal agents have arrested a San Francisco man on charges that he operated the website Silk Road 2.0, an alleged hotbed for drug dealers and sellers of other illegal goods and services on the Internet.
The news comes a little more than a year after federal officials shut down the original Silk Road website and arrested its alleged operator, Ross "Dread Pirate Roberts" Ulbricht.
Blake "Defcon" Benthall, 26, was taken into custody on Wednesday and prosecutors said he admitted to operating Silk Road 2.0. The U.S. Attorney's Office for the Southern District of New York filed a sealed criminal complaint against him in late October.
In the complaint, federal prosecutors claim that since the copycat site launched in November 2013, it's been used in thousands of illicit, black-market transactions. As of September 2014, prosecutors claim the site was generating sales of about $8 million per month and had about 150,000 active users. An undercover agent working for the U.S. Department of Homeland Security infiltrated the support staff of Silk Road 2.0 from its inception more than a year ago and gained access to restricted areas of the website as a "moderator," according to the complaint.
Read more: http://www.therecorder.com/id=1202675762530/Feds-Arrest-Alleged-Operator-of-Silk-Road-Spinoff#ixzz3IOOXptEr
