Phone banks dedicated to the Federal Bureau of Investigation are shown during a tour of the Multi-Agency Communications Center (MACC) at an undisclosed location in the Chicago suburbs May 17, 2012. 
 
 NEW YORK U.S. law enforcement authorities have shut down "Silk Road," an anonymous Internet marketplace for illegal drugs like heroin and cocaine and criminal activities such as murder for hire, and arrested its alleged owner. 
 
 The Federal Bureau of Investigation said Wednesday it arrested Silk Road owner, Ross William Ulbricht, 29, known online as "Dread Pirate Roberts," in San Francisco on Tuesday, according to court filings. 
 
 Ulbricht, who holds an advanced degree in chemical engineering, appeared in federal court on Wednesday and a bail hearing was set for Friday. 
 
 His lawyer Brandon LeBlanc, a public defender, declined to comment. 
 
 Federal prosecutors in New York charged Ulbricht with one count each of narcotics trafficking conspiracy, computer hacking conspiracy and money laundering conspiracy, the filing said. 
 
 "Silk Road has emerged as the most sophisticated and extensive criminal marketplace on the Internet today," FBI agent Christopher Tarbell said in the criminal complaint. 
 
 The site was used by "several thousand drug dealers" to sell "hundreds of kilograms of illegal drugs," he said. 
 
 The site, which has operated since early 2011, also offered tutorials on hacking ATM machines, contact lists for black market connections and counterfeiters, and guns and hit men for sale, according to the charges. 
 
 More than 900,000 registered users of the site bought and sold drugs using the digital currency Bitcoin. In recent media reports about the growing popularity of Bitcoin, the Silk Road website has emerged as part of a darker side to the use of digital currencies. 
 
 Through the site, according to the charges, users could buy drugs and have them shipped to an address. Investigators, posing as regular users on Silk Road, made more than 100 purchases of drugs, which were shipped to the New York area. 
 
 "DREAD PIRATE ROBERTS" 
 
 According to the complaint, Ulbricht, who shortened his alias from Dread Pirate Roberts to DPR when posting on Silk Road's forums, operated the site from San Francisco. 
 
 At times, he used computers at Internet cafes to access the servers running the website, which employed several technological tools to mask the location of its servers and the identities of its administrators and users. 
 
 The complaint described other aspects of Ulbricht's online presence: In a Google+ profile, he described himself as a fan of libertarian economic philosophy and posted videos from the Ludwig von Mises Institute, an Auburn, Alabama-based economics institute. 
 
 Reached by phone in Austin, Texas, Ubricht's parents said they had not known what their son was doing in San Francisco. 
 
 "He is a really stellar, good person and very idealistic," said Ulbricht's mother, Lyn Lacava. "I know he never meant to hurt anyone." 
 
 Ulbricht's father Kirk confirmed his son had received a master's in material sciences from Pennsylvania State University. His thesis was titled: "Growth of EuO Thin Films by Molecular Beam Epitaxy." 
 
 "He did amazing research on crystals and exotic materials they hoped would have some use for humans," Ulbricht said. "But it was very theoretical stuff." 
 
 The complaint against Ulbricht describes a darker side. During one correspondence with a Silk Road user, Ulbricht tried to call out a hit on another user with whom he had a dispute. That user, known online as "FriendlyChemist," was threatening to expose the identities of thousands of Silk Road users unless Ulbricht sent him money. 
 
 "I wouldn't mind if he was executed," Ulbricht wrote, offering personal details about his foe, including the fact that he was a married father of three, and the names of the city and province where he lived. 
 
 In a later post, Ulbricht wrote: "He is threatening to expose the identities of thousands of my clients." 
 
 "This kind of behavior is unforgivable to me. Especially here on Silk Road, anonymity is sacrosanct." 
 
 BITCOIN CONNECTION 
 
 During the raid, authorities seized $3.6 million worth of bitcoin, which was used instead of cash or credit cards to complete transactions on Silk Road. 
 
 The charges against Ulbricht said his website generated sales of more than 9.5 million bitcoin, roughly equivalent to $1.2 billion. 
 
 Authorities seized the currency by taking control of the digital "wallets" Silk Road used to store bitcoin. 
 
 In a corresponding civil asset forfeiture action, prosecutors claimed Silk Road and Ulbricht were liable to the government for the value of all transactions involving drug tracking and computer hacking, as well as for money laundering penalties, and a final amount would be determined at trial. 
 
 The raid on Wednesday was not the first time the U.S. government has made arrests related to Silk Road. 
 
 Earlier this year, authorities in South Carolina arrested Eric Daniel Hughes, known on Silk Road as "Casey Jones," and charged him in state court with drug possession. The Drug Enforcement Agency seized units of bitcoin, which Hughes allegedly used to purchase drugs from the online market. 
 
 Bitcoin, which has been around since 2008, first came under scrutiny by law enforcement officials in mid-2011 after media reports surfaced linking the digital currency to Silk Road. 
 
 (Additional reporting by Daniel Levine in San Francisco; Editing by Jeffrey Benkoe and Bernadette Baum) ||||| It appears the Federal Bureau of Investigation has finally cracked down on Silk Road, the underground marketplace where users could buy cocaine, heroin, meth, and more using the virtual currency Bitcoin. The Verge has obtained a copy of the criminal complaint, civil forfeiture complaint, and protective order filed in the Southern District of New York against Ross Ulbricht, who is alleged to be the mastermind behind the site and the handle Dread Pirate Roberts. 
 
 Ulbricht is being charged with narcotics trafficking conspiracy, computer hacking conspiracy, and money laundering conspiracy. The site, which is only accessible through the anonymizing Tor network, has been pulled and replaced with an FBI notice. The Silk Road forums are still operating, suggesting they were hosted on a different server. 
 
 
 
 
 
 The complaint is based on statements made by Christopher Tarbell, an FBI agent who has been tracking Silk Road out of the cybercrime division in New York. Tarbell acknowledges "undercover activity" by himself and other law enforcement agents, something users have suspected for a long time. 
 
 Law enforcement officers have made more than 100 purchases on the site 
 
 Law enforcement officers have made more than 100 purchases on the site since November of 2011, according to the complaint, and had the drugs shipped to New York for analysis. "Samples of these purchases have been laboratory-tested, and have typically shown high purity levels of the drug the item was advertised to be on Silk Road," Tarbell says. 
 
 Silk Road did $1.2 billion worth of business between February of 2011 and July of 2013, the FBI says, earning Dread Pirate Roberts $79.8 million in commissions using current Bitcoin rates. That number is difficult to pin down, however, because Bitcoin's price has fluctuated so much during that time. Silk Road had 957,079 registered users who did 1.2 million transactions between February of 2011 and July of 2013, the FBI says. 
 
 Dread Pirate Roberts once ordered a murder of a user who was attempting to blackmail him 
 
 The FBI reportedly located the server in "a certain foreign country" on which the Silk Road website was hosted, but does not specify where. It appears from the complaint that the FBI was monitoring Dread Pirate Roberts' private messages through the site. 
 
 Dread Pirate Roberts once ordered a murder of a user who was attempting to blackmail him, the complaint alleges. A user named FriendlyChemist wanted $500,000 from Dread Pirate Roberts, or else thousands of Silk Road identities would be published. Dread Pirate Roberts solicited a hitman through Silk Road to "put a bounty on [FriendlyChemist's] head." 
 
 When quoted a price of $150,000 to $300,000, Dread Pirate Roberts called the price high, saying he had a hit done "not long ago" for $80,000. The parties agreed on a price of $150,000, or 1,670 bitcoins, and the hitman reported the job was done. However, the FBI could not find any evidence of a related homicide and Ulbricht was not charged with murder. 
 
 
 
 
 
 Ross Ulbricht, who is accused of running Silk Road. 
 
 According to the complaint, Dread Pirate Roberts was actually Ross Ulbricht, a 29-year-old living in San Francisco. "I studied physics in college and worked as a research scientist for five years," Ulbricht says on his LinkedIn profile. "Now, my goals have shifted. I want to use economic theory as a means to abolish the use of coercion and agression amongst mankind ... I am creating an economic simulation to give people a first-hand experience of what it would be like to live in a world without the systemic use of force." 
 
 Astonishingly, the complaint says that Ulbricht was confronted by Department of Homeland Security officials back in July after seizing a shipment of fake IDs that used Ulbricht's photo. Agents visited him at his San Francisco apartment, where Ulbricht declined to answer questions but told them that "hypothetically," anyone could order such documents on a website called Silk Road. 
 
 Ulbricht has an active social media presence, including a Facebook page, Google+ account, Stack Overflow account, defunct Twitter account, and YouTube channel, which seems surprising considering the cautiousness Dread Pirate Roberts supposedly used in covering his and Silk Road users' tracks. Ulbricht used an email address that contained his name to contact developers to work on a Bitcoin startup, and one of his public YouTube videos appears to include his phone number. The FBI quotes from some of these social media postings in its complaint. 
 
 Ulbricht and his best friend and former roommate, René Pinnell, talking about when Ulbricht first moved to San Francisco. 
 
 Ulbricht was confronted by Homeland Security in July 
 
 The FBI used information from Comcast in the investigation and collaborated with US Customs and Border Patrol and the Department of Homeland Security. The site had more than 13,000 listings in the "drugs" category at the time it was shut down. 
 
 René Pinnell, Ulbricht's friend since age 10, says Ulbricht was trading Bitcoin and other currency to make a living. The two were living together until about five months ago, when Pinnell moved in with his fiance. "I don't know how they messed it up and I don't know how they got Ross wrapped into this, but I'm sure it's not him," Pinnell told The Verge. ||||| Bloomberg News 
 
 Ross William Ulbricht founded the Silk Road, a “sprawling, black-market bazaar,” in early 2011 that he ran under the pseudonym Dread Pirate Roberts. Source: Google Plus via Bloomberg 
 
 The former Eagle Scout accused of running the $1.2 billion online drug bazaar “Silk Road” may face life in prison if convicted in a trial where jurors will hear allegations he tried to arrange the murders of six people. 
 
 Prosecutors claim Ross William Ulbricht, 30, or “Dread Pirate Roberts,” as he was allegedly known online, ran “the most sophisticated and extensive criminal marketplace on the Internet,” where people used bitcoins to buy illegal drugs, guns, phony identification, computer hacking help and other illegal goods and services anonymously. 
 
 “It’s being alleged as a worldwide enterprise with folks everywhere, and the quantities that are alleged are huge,” U.S. District Judge Katherine B. Forrest, who will oversee the Manhattan trial, told lawyers in a hearing last month. 
 
 The Rise of Bitcoin 
 
 Ulbricht has pleaded not guilty to the seven counts against him, including trafficking drugs on the Internet, narcotics-trafficking conspiracy, computer-hacking conspiracy and money-laundering conspiracy. If convicted in the first-of-its-kind trial targeting the Internet’s dark side, Ulbricht could spend the rest of his life in prison. 
 
 His lawyer, Joshua Dratel, declined to comment on the charges. 
 
 Forrest, appointed to the bench by President Barack Obama in 2011, last week sentenced Abu Hamza al-Masri, a Muslim cleric who preached at a London mosque attended by Sept. 11 plotter Zacarias Moussaoui, to life in prison for his role in a deadly hostage-taking and a failed bid to start a terrorist training camp in Oregon. She ruled against Ulbricht on several key issues before the trial set to start tomorrow. 
 
 Evidence Fight 
 
 Forrest rejected Ulbricht’s attempt to block the government from introducing evidence he tried to arrange six murders, including a hit on a former employee he believed had stolen $350,000 in bitcoins. 
 
 In another alleged plot, prosecutors claim Ulbricht paid someone $150,000 to kill a Silk Road user who called himself FriendlyChemist. The government claims FriendlyChemist sought to extort Ulbricht by threatening to publish a list of the names and addresses of Silk Road sellers and buyers unless he was paid $500,000. 
 
 Ulbricht, who is separately charged in Baltimore federal court with the alleged plot against the former employee, doesn’t face murder solicitation charges in the New York trial. Forrest said the government may use the evidence to tie him to Silk Road and to narcotics trafficking. Prosecutors have said they have no proof that any murders were actually carried out. 
 
 Movie ‘Pirate’ 
 
 In November 2013, a U.S. magistrate judge cited those alleged plots in denying Ulbricht’s request for bail. He’s confined in a federal prison in downtown Manhattan. 
 
 Ulbricht’s online name was taken from a character in the 1987 film “The Princess Bride,” prosecutors said. He’s charged with running Silk Road from 2011 to 2013. The Texas native was arrested in a San Francisco public library on Oct. 1, after logging onto his computer as “Dread Pirate Roberts,” prosecutors said. 
 
 Federal agents seized Silk Road, along with bitcoins worth $3.6 million, and shut down the site on Oct. 2, 2013. Prosecutors said in court filings that the site generated $80 million in commissions on sales of more than $1 billion in less than three years. Three Silk Road employees were charged in addition to Ulbricht. 
 
 Tor Network 
 
 Blake Benthall, 26, was charged in November with starting a almost identical online market called “Silk Road 2.0” weeks after Ulbricht’s arrest. Benthall’s arrest was part of a coordinated operation by 16 countries targeting the Tor network, which allows people to use the Internet anonymously by routing traffic through multiple servers. U.S. and European agencies said they shut down 410 hidden web domains, arrested 17 people and seized about $1 million in bitcoins. 
 
 Last month, former Bitcoin Foundation Inc. executive Charlie Shrem was sentenced to two years in prison after pleading guilty to transferring money he knew was to be used for illegal transactions. Shrem was arrested in January 2014 when he arrived at John F. Kennedy International Airport in New York after giving a speech in Amsterdam about bitcoins. 
 
 Robert Faiella, who operated the BTCKing exchange and was charged with Shrem, pleaded guilty to running an illegal money business and is awaiting sentencing. 
 
 Iceland Server 
 
 Forrest in October rejected Ulbricht’s request to bar electronic evidence seized by government agents from his Gmail and Facebook accounts, a laptop and a computer server in Iceland. 
 
 The judge ruled that Ulbricht, who didn’t make any claim to a privacy interest in the materials, couldn’t show that his rights were violated. If he had made such a claim, she said, prosecutors could question him about it if he testifies in his own defense. 
 
 The criminal case is U.S. v. Ulbricht, 14-cr-068; the civil forfeiture case is U.S. v. Ulbricht, 13-cv-06919, U.S. District Court, Southern District of New York (Manhattan). The murder-for-hire case is U.S. v. Ulbricht, 13-00222, U.S. District Court, District of Maryland (Baltimore). 
 
 To contact the reporter on this story: Bob Van Voris in federal court in Manhattan at rvanvoris@bloomberg.net 
 
 To contact the editors responsible for this story: Michael Hytha at mhytha@bloomberg.net Peter Blumberg
– The FBI has pulled the plug at least temporarily on a website accused of serving as a sort of Amazon.com for illegal drugs, reports the Verge. Undercover agents reportedly made dozens of purchases on the Silk Road website since late 2011, and the FBI today announced the arrest of Ross William Ulbricht, aka "Dread Pirate Roberts," reports Reuters. He faces a slew of charges, including narcotics trafficking conspiracy, computer hacking conspiracy, and money laundering conspiracy. Anyone who manages to reach the site is now greeted with an FBI notice announcing that it's been seized. So what is, or was, Silk Road exactly? Last week, Winston Ross at the Daily Beast provided an in-depth primer. "Silk Road, for the uninitiated, is the eBay of illicit substances, from MDMA to LSD," he writes. It offers legal merchandise, too, but drugs are the main attraction. "Because you have to travel through an encrypted wormhole to get there, and because you have to use a difficult-to-trace, encrypted currency to pay for anything, it’s a relatively safe place to buy drugs." And, a la eBay, sellers are ranked, "a relatively certain way to ensure that the drugs on offer aren’t cut with crap and aren’t going to kill you." Click for his full post.