More than seven years have passed since Ross Ulbricht was arrested in the science fiction section of a San Francisco library and charged with running the sprawling, dark web drug bazaar known as the Silk Road. But when the Feds laid hands on Ulbricht's laptop that day, they found keys to unlock only a fraction of the bitcoins that he had amassed over the Silk Road's years of bustling black market drug trade. Today the Justice Department finally revealed where a billion-dollar tranche of the Silk Road's treasure ended up: stolen by a mysterious hacker, and now seized by the US Treasury.
The DOJ today filed a civil forfeiture complaint over 69,370 bitcoins—and other variants of the cryptocurrency—seized on November 3 from an unnamed person who court documents refer to only as Individual X. According to the IRS's criminal investigation unit, Individual X successfully hacked the Silk Road sometime between May of 2012 and April of 2013, stealing that abundance of drug money from the dark web site's bitcoin addresses before Ulbricht's downfall in October of 2013. The IRS says it has finally tracked down the hacker who stole the Silk Road's nearly 70,000 bitcoins—now worth more than $1 billion—and allowed law enforcement to take control of those funds.
"The successful prosecution of Silk Road’s founder in 2015 left open a billion-dollar question. Where did the money go?" wrote US attorney David Anderson in a statement announcing the seizure. "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.”
Cryptocurrency analysts first spotted the movement of the $1 billion collection of coins on the ..
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