Bitcoin Forum

He made some really big mistakes

1.Advertised Silk Road days after it’s launch on drug forums and bitcointalk.org with the username “altoid”. 8 months later he used this username looking for developers and included his personal email (rossulbricht@gmail.com) in the message.

2.Using records from a seized webserver, the FBI agent subpoena’d his way back through a private VPN server to an IP address at a coffee shop on Laguna street in San Francisco. This happened to be 500 feet away from the house of one on Ross Ulbricht’s friends.

3.US Customs intercepted a package containing 9 pieces of counterfeit id. All 9 had photos of Ross Ulbricht with different names.

4.Ulbricht posted on Stack Overflow using his real name, asking “How can I connect to a Tor hidden service using curl in php?”. One minute later he changed his username to “frosty”, but a subpoena shows the original name.

Biggest mistake, he decided to stay in the US while having 26,000 bitcoins in his wallet.
Now he can explain Bitcoins to the homeys in the prison.

Full arrest warrant here: http://krebsonsecurity.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/10/UlbrichtCriminalComplaint.pdf

It was just a matter of time.  :-\

What was the end game for DPR ? Jail.

How many individuals will they be targeting to take wealth and liberty subsequently as a result of site theft is my next question.

I wonder if this means the mass arrests are coming? I would assume the FBI now has a list of customers and sellers. If you are a customer you may be safe, now that the DOJ has stated that they are no longer going after users.

How does arresting DPR reveal the identities of the sellers on SR? They should be safe.
Only thing that will change for them is that they will start selling on BMR instead of SR.

The more interesting question is how do they locate the server? They just busted Freedom Hosting not long ago. Are there some fatal problems with TOR?

I don't know enough about SR code to know if seller identities are compromised, but the FBI is going to be asking a lot of questions and DPR has a lot of answers. The FBI may also have been collecting data for months or years. These are not mall cops we are talking about.

LOL haha...

TC.

It may reveal the identities of the buyers, as they need to provide mailing address

For sellers, they may leave some trails in their PMs

As many as possible. The US criminal gangs with badges are in the process of taking from anyone they can regardless of laws or location. No one is safe anywhere from the long arm with a gun attached.

Btw: To reduce his lifetime sentence I'm sure he'll rat outs out some Silk Road sellers. Yes?

In an ideal situation, he shouldn't know who the sellers are

Yes, but he knows each one to help in case he ever got caught.  If I was him I would know everything about everyone in order to protect myself.

you mean High-Security Prison

I did buy some mining equipment from there after a friend told me, I had some 0.01 BTC in there, but like  I said mining equipent like a FPGA board and a couple of block erupters. But I noticed how MTgox has been changing its numbers recently.

I notice how Ross look slike s mart man, good potential, smart kid, lots of education into this kid, I cant believe the FBI make people look like criminals, when hes not.

I don't get how the FEDS could seize 26000 BTC did he not encrypt/password protect his wallet at all times?

then just right to silence.

the end.

He tranfered all of his investments into one wallet and used it for some time, which was a big no oops.

yes but you should always have the wallet encrypted......I cant believe he did not do this so sure they can seize the wallet but they should not be able to spend the coins

It's easy saying what you would've done if you were in his position after the fact.

What are you actually doing?

Just got done reading the full arrest warrant.

He made some stupid mistakes by using his real name and email address on several forums/websites with information that could be tied to Silk Road.

I am surprised that he made those mistakes. I always imagined DPR as a very careful guy. I don't think he realized early on how big and famous SR would get and made a few really simple mistakes early.

And WTF... he got his door knocked on in June 2013 and he doesn't close up shop? I would of been too scared to walk outside...

If you read through the arrest warrant and how they found him, he made some really stupid mistakes by using his personal email and name on accounts that could be tied to SR.

I admit some of the other ways they caught him.. he couldn't of changed much. But posting your name and email while you're running an underground drug marketplace is not the best of ideas...

Exactly.

I dont get it all the talk of mirror copies and emergency protocols in case of seizures with multiple way for vendors to get money in case ... exactly this happens and all turned out to be smoke in mirrors LOL

I really gave this guy credit for being a master mind of anonymity  and it turns out he had servers in his HOUSE lol and wallets right there too so this guys was running the show from his house lmao this is too good.

 Well to all who were dumb enough to sell on SR or buy i say good luck

lol FROM HIS HOUSE ??? really cant get over that part.

I bough mining equipment too from there and had only 0.01 in my wallet, but I thought he was running his servers with an nearby cafes wifi?

He administered servers at said caffe shop.

COFFEE, COFFEE, COFFEE ;)

INCONCEIVABLE!

Seize can be used loosely. Maybe the private key is encrypted, but the address is known, and the funds are not available.

Poor guy. This price of BTC is suffering as well. Down well over $20 today...

I can see why bitcoin took a little hit, but this much? It will settle down and recover.. This is a knee-jerk reaction... Now if bitcoin was at 10 bucks and it was a year ago, then I can see it nose diving. Today,Bitcoin is so much more than it was a year ago... I remember seeing a post where it was figured that  SR was about 10 percent of the bitcoin economy, that might have been true then, but now its a tiny little blip on the radar.. Its a good time to buy coins..

SR is/was a lot of BTC commerce, and was believed to average ~6666.666 BTC a day. Guess the devil was in the numbers :D

One of the articles I read today specifically made the implication that access to user accounts and data was, in fact, also stolen.

4 is definitely parallel reconstruction.

Oh it's even better than that.  One of his former employees was arrested in January and he didn't shut up shop.  That's the first person he tried to have killed.  Guess who took that "contract" and convinced him it had been carried out?


http://www.slate.com/blogs/crime/2013/10/02/ross_william_ulbricht_maryland_indictment_the_alleged_silk_road_mastermind.html

It sucks that he's gone but of course the govt had a way to follow tor they invented it

Likely.  If DPR was so concerned about a black mail that would expose a subset of his clients, that he would pay for a hit on the black mailer.  Then one can expect A LOT of arrests.   That's a lot of BTC that's going to be permanently put on freeze.

I seriously doubt that DPR has the technical skill to set up a backup system that kicks-in on the event of seizure.    Smart dude with the Physics degree and the Materials Science degree, but I doubt he expected to be caught so he never made an effort to create the fall back plan.   

My suspicion is the best he did was create some kind of paper wallet.

What would have been really cool as a backup plan is that someone else that he really trusts had access to a copy of wallet.dat with the 26,000 bitcoin in them.
And now that the is arrested he could tell that person the password so they are transferred out of that wallet that the FBI has "confisquated"

My understanding is that th FBI "moved the coins to an address under their control". But that would have been a savvy backup plan.

I'm not sure I'm buying this guy as DPR. Someone runs the SR for 3 years and then is stupid enough to try to hire a hitman off of it?? Doesn't make sense. Plus, the video of him on YT doesn't give me the impression of someone who would build such a site.

Either SR was a gov't limited hangout all along, or they were able to close the site but still have no idea who DPR is, so they made one up. My guess is that it was a limited hangout all along, and this Ulbricht guy is just another actor.

Based on...?
I just don't see an actor going to jail for years. Why?

Perhaps. I would do it for a billion dollars. But I mean why would the gov do it?

No point for government to pay someone to go to jail, seems like a waste of time and money.

The fact that such a simple plan was not in place is why I could care less what happens to this guy.

He could have had all that money go to charity anything but FBI

Yep.  The 26,000 were the BTC in escrow.  The keys for those addresses had to be on the server because the payment process was automated.  While SR staff had access to the server, the feds had a protective order authorising them to sweep coins from the escrow accounts (and any other accounts identified as belonging to the defendants) into an address controlled by the authorities. 

It didn't matter whether someone else had a copy of  the wallet.dat because that "someone else" wasn't aware of any need to move the coins prior to the domain seizure notice going up - the same protective order which authorised them to seize the domain authorised the feds to move the coins.  It also authorises them to sweep any coins which continue going into the SR accounts (ie, coins from transactions pending) before shutting down the SR servers.  3, 4 and 5 are the relevant parts of the protective order.

http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2013/10/03/nyregion/03silkroad-documents.html?_r=0

Well put.

 The powers that be wouldn't need to send their actor to jail. It's just a face and a name - there's millions of 'em. They made up Adam Lanza, I'm sure they can make up a fake dude as DPR.