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