US law enforcement’s infiltration and takedown of the Silk Road underground marketplace has turned up yet another court case, with a New Orleans man charged with selling counterfeit shopping coupons through the site, and its successors, on an epic scale.
Naked Security – Sophos
Two former U.S. government agents face charges related to stealing hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of bitcoin while assisting with an investigation of the Silk Road underground online marketplace, with one accused of using a fake online persona to extort money from operators of the site.
Facing charges of wire fraud and money laundering are Carl Force, 46, of Baltimore, a former special agent with the U.S. Drug Enforcement Agency, and Shaun Bridges, 32, of Laurel, Maryland, a former special agent with the U.S. Secret Service. Both served on the Baltimore Silk Road Task Force, which investigated illegal activity on the Silk Road website, the Department of Justice said Monday in a press release.
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Naked Security – Sophos
Chat logs and other digital records entered into evidence in a federal court case Monday detailed how the operators of the infamous Silk Road underground online marketplace planned to have individuals murdered for potentially disclosing the identities of those who used the anonymous site.
Over the course of March and April 2013, an individual operating under the Silk Road administrator account Dread Pirate Roberts had paid an individual, or group of individuals, approximately $ 650,000 worth of bitcoins to carry out as many as five murders, digital records indicated.
Whether any of these murders were actually carried out remains a mystery. Police have never been able to find any bodies that matched the details of the supposed murders, nor have they found any records of the supposed real names of the people the contract killers claimed to have killed. The defendant in the case, Ross Ulbricht, does not face murder conspiracy charges in the current case in New York.
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