Twelve years since the Silk Road 2.0 arrest: Blake Benthall, Defcon, and the market that came back
Twelve years ago this week, FBI agents arrested Blake Benthall in San Francisco. The date was 5 November 2014; the charges were announced in Manhattan the next morning, on 6 November. Benthall, a 26-year-old programmer known online as Defcon, was accused of running Silk Road 2.0, the drug market that had reappeared on Tor barely five weeks after the original Silk Road was seized. The site operated for about a year; the case that followed took nearly a decade to resolve.
A market rebuilt in five weeks
The original Silk Road went down in October 2013 together with the arrest of its alleged owner, Ross Ulbricht. According to the complaint unsealed by the US attorney's office for the Southern District of New York, Silk Road 2.0 launched in November 2013, roughly five weeks later. Prosecutors described it as virtually identical to its predecessor, operating exclusively on the Tor network with Bitcoin as the only accepted payment. At launch it was even administered under the same Dread Pirate Roberts moniker, until control passed in late December 2013 to an operator using the handle Defcon. Investigators alleged that Defcon was Benthall, a San Francisco developer with a prior stint at SpaceX and contract work for startups on his resume - a background that Wired's Robert McMillan documented in detail, including the fact that the site's server ran on a subdomain of a startup Benthall had contracted for.A year of aggressive growth
The complaint's figures show how quickly the replacement scaled:- Sales of at least approximately $8 million per month as of September 2014
- Roughly 150,000 active users
- Over 13,000 controlled-substance listings as of 17 October 2014, among them 1,783 psychedelics, 1,697 ecstasy, 1,707 cannabis and 379 opioids
- Additional listings for fraudulent identification documents and computer-hacking tools
How the takeover worked
The FBI's operation did not begin on arrest day. Per the complaint, an undercover Homeland Security Investigations agent infiltrated the site's support staff, gained access to restricted administrative areas and interacted directly with Benthall throughout his time as administrator. Wired also reported that in late May 2014 investigators had quietly pulled the server offline for a few hours to copy its contents, prompting the site's operator to allegedly tell the hosting provider: "Do NOT reboot the machine, there is a critical process we need to watch." The arrest fell within Operation Onymous, a coordinated sweep by US and European agencies. Andy Greenberg reported for Wired that the operation produced 17 arrests across multiple countries and the seizure of hundreds of dark web domains tied to more than a dozen black market sites. Silk Road 2.0 was the marquee name, not the only target."Let's be clear - this Silk Road, in whatever form, is the road to prison. Those looking to follow in the footsteps of alleged cybercriminals should understand that we will return as many times as necessary to shut down noxious online criminal bazaars. We don't get tired." - Preet Bharara, then US attorney for the Southern District of New York, 6 November 2014At the initial appearance in San Francisco, assistant US attorney Kathryn Haun told the court that Benthall had waived his rights and "did admit to everything," and that agents had found $100,000 in cash in his apartment. A magistrate judge ordered him held pending a bail hearing. Prosecutors put his take at roughly $400,000 in monthly commissions.