The feds just seized Silk Road’s $1 billion stash of bitcoin

(credit: BTC Keychain / Flickr)

On Wednesday, Ars reported that someone had transferred close to $1 billion in bitcoin out of a wallet likely associated with the Silk Road crime bazaar. Now we know who that mystery party is: the US Department of Justice, which in 2013 shut down Silk Road and went on to put its founder, Ross Ulbricht, behind bars for life.

The successful prosecution of Silk Road's founder in 2015 left open a billion-dollar question. Where did the money go?" US Attorney David Anderson said in a news release. Today's forfeiture complaint answers this open question at least in part. $1 billion of these criminal proceeds are now in the United States' possession."

Silk Road and Ulbricht were among the most popular and successful online crime figures in Internet history. Hosted on the anonymous Dark Web, the service brought together sellers and buyers of drugs, fake IDs, and just about any other kind of illicit good or service imaginable. There were thousands of dealers and well over 100,000 buyers," US attorneys wrote in a civil complaint filed on Thursday. The document said that Silk Road generated revenue of over 9.5 million bitcoin and collected commissions from these sales of more than 600,000 bitcoin.

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