The Silk Road Bust | FBI
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Disclaimer, this episode contains strong language throughout. This is True Spies. The podcast that takes you deep inside the greatest secret missions of all time. Week by week, you'll hear the true stories behind the operations that have shaped the world we live in. You'll meet the people who live life undercover. What do they know?

What are their skills? And what would you do in their position? This is True Spies. At one point he said, you know, how about $20 million to let me go? Then we kind of got into a situation of, well, what are we going to do about this guy driving? You know, are we going to kill him? How are we going to get away with all this? I'm Sofia DiMartino, and this is True Spies from Spyscape Studios. The Silk Road Bust.

It's the summer of 2011, and somewhere in a New York FBI office, cybersecurity agent Chris Tarbell is punching numbers into his computer. — Cyber was a new division to New York. It had been around for less than a year. — He's just arrested the leader of one of the most notorious hacking outfits of modern times. Not bad for a rookie.

There was a group called Anonymous that was going crazy, hacking into everything. They were in the news all the time and their hacking arm was a thing called LulzSec or laughing at your security. The leader of their group was a guy named Sabu. And so everyone was out looking for him and trying to find him. They were in the news every day. They had a fuck FBI Friday. Every Friday they would release information about the FBI, which, you know, embarrassing, but still a little bit fun for us to watch what was going to come out.

Anonymous was just the beginning for our true spy, Chris Carbell. In this episode, we tell the story of the Silk Road, a clandestine website that became the most notorious online black market in the history of the internet, and how the FBI brought it down.

Imagine the illegal version of Amazon, where you could find everything from heroin to hitmen, all without fear of being traced. Silk Road was so audacious, one high-profile senator described it as "the most brazen attempt to peddle drugs online that we have ever seen."

But before we get there, let's go back to 2011 to the newly created FBI Cyber Division operating out of a faceless office somewhere deep inside the Bureau's New York headquarters in Manhattan's Tribeca district. LulzSec became so important and so out there in the community of hacking, they didn't have to hack anymore. So other hackers would bring in their hacks just to be part of it. Jeremy Hammond was one of those guys.

After Sabu, Jeremy Hammond quickly became the FBI's number one cyber target. He had hacked his way into a private intelligence firm with connections to the military. Unlike the great Sabu, who was caught after just once forgetting to use a VPN or anything else to hide his identity, Jeremy Hammond was harder to find. He hadn't slipped up. Yet.

He was diligently using a piece of software called Tor, or the Onion Router, that up till now had kept him fully anonymous online. I'll let Chris explain.

Tor is a tool that is used to anonymize internet traffic by not allowing an investigator or anyone in technology to trace the path. Normally on the internet, if I have a place I want to go to, you know, xyz.com, I type that into my browser. My browser then uses DNS or domain name services in order to change that into a number, sort of like a telephone number for a computer.

This investigation is when Chris learned the importance of separating hackers from their laptops before you arrest them. After being identified and located via traditional detective work, the FBI just needed to catch Jeremy Hammond in the act. The moment the SWAT team burst into Jeremy's apartment, he simply closed his laptop, encrypting its contents behind a password.

The arrest had effectively been for nothing. Or had it? His password ended up being Chewy12345. Chewy was the name of the cat. I think Jeremy has heard me tell this story before and he's threatened me if I was to say his cat's name again on some sort of medium like this. So his cat's name is Chewy. So good luck. Good luck, Jeremy.

Yes, one of the world's then most notorious hackers was ultimately brought down for having possibly the world's most guessable password. Despite the fact that it nearly went south, to his colleagues, Chris Tarbell's the new guy that almost single-handedly brought down two of Anonymous's top hackers. Obviously, he has a talent for collaring cyber crooks, but law enforcement wasn't always in the cards.

Chris originally studied to be a doctor, but joining his university's campus cadets — college cops, if you will — directed his passion away from saving lives and towards fighting crime. Then he met someone that would change the direction of his life forever. I became friends with a guy named Sid Hartman, who was a sergeant at the time, and Sid convinced me this was 1998.

that computers were going to be the wave of the future, that computers were going to be part of every crime. For the digital natives among you who might think this screamingly obvious, in 1998, most of us were still relying on dial-up internet connections. And we were almost 10 years away from the release of the first smartphone. We had little clue that the internet would change the world in the way it did.

But Sid's words had enough of an impact that Chris switched his studies to computer science so that he could understand how cybercrime worked. After college, he joined the police and learned the ropes until he had enough experience to apply for a job at the Bureau. The next thing he knew, he was doing knuckle push-ups at the FBI training facility in Quantico, Virginia. And then he got his posting.

There's 56 field offices in the FBI, and you get to order them the way you want to before career night, but no guarantees of where you're going to be. I put New York and I put cyber as my top choices. I think I was about the sixth or seventh person that night to open my orders, and I got both New York and cyber. In little more than his first year at the Bureau, Chris had two significant gets to his name. But he and his small cyber team start to think bigger.

What if they didn't go after individual hackers, but instead went after their tools? Jeremy Hammond was using Tor. Around that same time, you'd go into the FBI systems and you'd be looking up IP addresses for leads and that sort of thing. You'd read a case file and the case would be like, came back as Tor. I can't do anything. Case closed. And you were reading this day after day after day. It was a big problem we were seeing in the FBI.

During the anonymous investigation, Chris and his colleagues had been looking at websites that ran on this pesky Tor network. If they could bring one of those sites down, perhaps they'd figure out how to crack this Tor open. Or, at the very least, it might show would-be hackers it's not as secure as they thought.

And Operation Onion Peeler was born.

and a larger-than-life character or two. You can find all of those things in abundance in June's Journey. In the game, you'll play as June Parker, a plucky amateur detective trying to get to the bottom of her sister's murder. It's all set during the roaring 1920s.

And I absolutely love all the little period details packed into this world. I don't want to give too much away because the real fun of June's journey is seeing where this adventure will take you. But I've just reached a part of the story that's set in Paris.

And I'm so excited to get back to it. Like I said, if you love a salacious little mystery, then give it a go. Discover your inner detective when you download June's Journey for free today on iOS and Android. Hello, listeners. This is Anne Bogle, author, blogger, and creator of the podcast, What Should I Read Next? Since 2016, I've been helping readers bring more joy and delight into their reading lives. Every week, I take all things books and reading with a guest and guide them in discovering their next read.

They share three books they love, one book they don't, and what they've been reading lately. And I recommend three titles they may enjoy reading next. Guests have said our conversations are like therapy, troubleshooting issues that have plagued their reading lives for years, and possibly the rest of their lives as well. And of course, recommending books that meet the moment, whether they are looking for deep introspection to spur or encourage a life change, or a frothy page-turner to help them escape the stresses of work, or a book that they've been reading for years.

school, everything. You'll learn something about yourself as a reader, and you'll definitely walk away confident to choose your next read with a whole list of new books and authors to try. So join us each Tuesday for What Should I Read Next? Subscribe now wherever you're listening to this podcast and visit our website, whatshouldireadnextpodcast.com to find out more.

— Because we were a hacking crew, we investigated hacking crimes. We found 26 Onion sites on Tor that sold either hacking services or hackers for hire or hacking tools. And so we opened Operation Onion Peeler on 26 different sites. — 26 websites running on Tor, impenetrable to those not in the know and operating with impunity.

But of those 26, there was one Chris set firmly in his crosshairs. In the case file, Silk Road was number six on the list. But we kind of knew that that was sort of the golden ring at the time. If you wanted to get into the media and kind of get, you know, the message out, Silk Road was going to be the big one. Chris's official job was to stop hackers, which was one of the illegal services for sale on Silk Road.

But he knew that it was also the largest online market for narcotics, which meant its impact was much farther reaching. Anonymous was a loosely connected group of hackers going after high-profile corporate targets. But Silk Road was different. It was deliberate, focused and organized.

Silk Road opened up in January of 2011 and started gaining some publicity pretty quickly. There was some media presence. I believe Senator Schumer had mentioned it on the floor of Congress that it was going to be an issue. So much for the dark web. Silk Road was brazenly transparent. They had a forum where you could go and learn about it. So by this time, if you'd Google Silk Road, it would come back with that onion address and you could just copy and paste it into the Tor browser and get there.

And just like Amazon or eBay, users could leave reviews or enjoy cheaper shipping if they bought in bulk. It was a virtual bazaar of criminality. But perhaps most surprising to Chris was that, as far as he could tell, the site was being run by just one person. And he adopted a fictional swashbuckler as his alter ego. DPR is Dread Pirate Roberts.

He's the system admin or the guy running the show, or as his words put it on the site, the captain of the ship. And if you didn't like the rules, you could get off his ship. Those were his quotes. From the office in New York, Chris worked alongside his colleagues, Ilwon Yum, a Bitcoin specialist, and Tom Kiernan, a computer scientist and the longest serving member of the cyber team.

They got to work pulling on the few threads they had. And while Silk Road might not have been on the regular internet, fortunately for the team, people who were using it were.

Chris, Il-Won and Tom spent hours poring over forum threads discussing Silk Road, looking for anything that might be a lead. A username that matches a public profile or even just a hint at where the site was based. Eventually, they stumbled on some savvy users on popular social community website Reddit, claiming that certain parts of the site weren't properly hidden by Tor.

If true, this meant Silk Road could be leaking an internet address known as an IP address. And that would be an important crack in the site's armour.

And so we go through and just using techniques available to the public, we found that some of the information on the server was in fact leaking. They kind of narrowed it down to what company it was being hosted at. That company only had a range of IP address. So you go through and start entering this IP. Nothing's leaking, nothing's going until we hit one where the page, the front page was sort of matched up and there was certain parts of it that were coming through on the true IP.

Chris turned to look at Ilwan and Tom, all three of them wide-eyed like a group of kids who had just found a $100 bill. This wasn't just a clue. It was a bona fide lead, a tangible, physical piece of evidence that pointed directly to a server located in a data center in Iceland. There was only one way to find out if this was where Silk Road was being hosted. Next stop, Reykjavik.

Just days later, Chris and Serin Turner, an attorney for the Southern District of New York, find themselves in front of Icelandic law enforcement, asking if they will open a local investigation into the server. They want access to the data center where the IP address was pointing to. They know it has something to do with Silk Road. But until local law enforcement agree to investigate, their hands are tied.

Chris suspects that the Reykjavik data center is the main server that makes Silk Road possible, and that perhaps it even contains chat messages or transaction details. But as it's outside their jurisdiction, they can't just issue a subpoena and demand to see it.

To their relief, not only are the Icelanders willing to open a local investigation, they say it might even be possible to provide them with an entire physical copy of the server. They did not have legal process. They had to get it and establish it. Chris and Serin head back to New York. They've done all they can. Now it's in the hands of their Icelandic collaborators. But just a couple of weeks later, a package arrives.

They sent the drive to Saren Turner over at Southern District. Saren walks over, gives me the hard drive and says, "Hey, this is what I got from Iceland. Let me know if I have anything." I take it back into our lab and plug it into the computer and pull it up and it's encrypted. I can't do shit with this. I called Tom Kiernan back into the lab and we kind of looked through it and, you know, like, trying to come up with ideas. What can we do with this? What can we do with that? Is there anything we can pull out of here in small pieces?

Let's put this in perspective. If this server, this nondescript black box in a rack somewhere in a warehouse, is what Chris thinks it is, it's the digital equivalent of a smoking gun. Potentially even more than that. The one thing about cybercrime is that computers are designed to remember everything.

Potentially, this box even holds every chat message and transaction ever made through Silk Road. But Chris will never know, as once again he's been defeated by a password field.

Hours wasted, and Dread Pirate Roberts, as far as Chris knew, didn't have any pets named Chewy or otherwise. I call Saren and I say, yeah, encrypted, we've got to find another way of doing this case. Brute force this thing open or something. And Saren goes, oh, they sent a password for that. Sometimes all you have to do is ask. Now fully armed with the password, Chris slowly picks it in.

What he sees before him is everything he hoped for. There appears to be every chat message, detailed information on purchases, even some customer addresses.

Il-Wan and Tom immediately go to work, sifting through the reams and reams of Silk Road files that spill out in front of them and try to make sense of it all. For Chris, it is a chance to learn a little bit more about the mysterious DPR, especially as he now has a copy of every chat message he'd ever sent on the site.

We still didn't know who DPR was. Even looking through the 600 pages of chat line, I sort of got a personality of who DPR was. But, you know, one thing I learned during the LulzSec case is who people try to make others believe who they are in line, not necessarily in line with who they are in reality. Either way, Chris finds himself with a trove of information.

Not only are there endless chat messages, surprisingly, there are megabytes of details about who bought what and from whom, complete with shipping addresses. Chris's small team of "cyber-dorks", as their FBI colleagues called them, are also surprised. Using the transaction data, they're able to get a sense of Silk Road's scale.

They knew it was doing good business, but order data revealed that "good" might have been an understatement. Bitcoin logs reveal over a billion US dollars worth of transactions have taken place so far, about the GDP of a small Caribbean nation. But Chris's Icelandic server scoop hasn't gone unnoticed by other agencies running parallel investigations into Silk Road.

They didn't know how we got it, they didn't know what was on it, and we weren't really going to tell them. So that's when a de-confliction meeting was scheduled to happen down in D.C. The cyber team in New York is the FBI's investigation into Silk Road. But they're not the only ones looking into the Dread Pirate. The New York District Attorney's Office and a task force in Baltimore that includes Homeland Security and the Drug Enforcement Agency are also on the hunt.

For Chris, Ilwon and Tom in New York, the other investigations have just been background noise up until now. But now everyone knows they have a copy of the server and egos begin to get in the way. Everyone makes the case that their investigation is the most important one. Somewhat ironic for a de-confliction meeting. I said, "I'm not going. I'm not driving. I'm too busy." I said, I gave him the line, "I'm too busy, but I'll join by a video conference."

Frustrated and disinterested, Chris joins the call, but he isn't really listening. After all, he and he alone has the server, so what could he possibly learn from the others? Then one of the Homeland Security agents takes to the mic. He describes how he has started finding large amounts of drugs being shipped through Chicago's O'Hare Airport, all of them with links back to Silk Road. Chris's ears perk up.

There's a guy named Jared Daryegan. Jared was forthcoming. He was honest about all of his evidence. He laid it on the table. He was just a guy that put it out there. And I said, as soon as this call's over, we're getting Jared on the phone and he's flying out to New York and we're going to talk to this guy. Jared was Chris's kind of agent. Before joining the FBI team in New York, he'd been working on his own investigation and he'd made impressive progress.

After intercepting the drugs in Chicago, he'd followed the thread back to Silk Road. He'd had the idea to go undercover as a user and had managed to become friendly with DPR. Friendly enough that he was made a low-ranking administrator on the site. Jarrod is now the nearest thing the FBI has to a man on the inside.

Over a coffee one morning, a few weeks after joining the cyber team, Jared explains how DPR had set up a chat room for the admins using something called Jabber. From the way DPR had set that room up and the hours they were online, the FBI crew determined that, whoever it was, they were located on the west coast of the U.S.,

Until now, they couldn't have even been certain DPR was in the country, so this is a huge development. Meanwhile, the Icelandic data had recently revealed another secret. Silk Road uses a second server, located in the US.

On this backup server, we see that there's a computer connecting to the backup server and running admin stuff. And the name of the computer connecting to it is Frosty. So we have this name. So we know that DPR is running a computer named Frosty. And there's only now two people in the world that know this, DPR and me. You've seen it on the crime dramas. The suspect says they don't even have an axe, and the detective raises an eyebrow, dryly replying,

We never said that the killer used an axe. Chris was about to have his own real-life version of this during another, otherwise dreary group call between the different investigations.

- Saren sees my big chart on the wall, all the different things I'm connecting and putting together. And an IRS guy gets on the phone call and says that he used Google to find that someone was posting back when Silk Road first came out. - Hey, I'm starting an onion site and I'm just gonna use Bitcoin as part of the onion site. If you know anything and could help me, reach out to me at [email protected]. - In our world, that's a clue. - What the IRS agent has found is interesting.

Super interesting. But not criminal. Posting on a tech support forum isn't breaking any laws. Chris jots it down as maybe something to follow up on. And then the IRS agent says a magic word that instantly catches Chris's attention.

But that guy who had posted on that website looking for it had posted under the name Frosty. So now we have a poster by the name Frosty. The one clue that only I and DPR knew together, Frosty, and this email address, ross.albrecht at gmail.com, who a little bit of research puts him in San Francisco, West Coast. Now that's a clue.

Chris wasn't about to mention how the Baltimore investigation could have known all this months earlier if they had been a little more tech savvy. That backup server in the US? The Baltimore investigation had almost found it half a year ago.

Come to find out that this ISP, Internet Service Provider, for that server was in like someone's house in Philadelphia. The team down in Baltimore had served a search warrant on there because an IP connected to DPR through their investigation led them back to that same ISP. It was the computer under the backup server. They had literally gone and probably put their hand on the Silk Road backup server months before.

Chris secretly enjoys knowing that the other investigations were making such glaring mistakes. It means he has time to follow up on his frosty lead. Finding Ross Albrecht was easy. A simple Google search brings up his LinkedIn profile. Chris even found his YouTube likes on videos with libertarian ideals, a favourite topic of DPR's.

He would often write posts about Silk Road's higher purpose as a sanctuary where anyone could do or sell whatever anyone else was willing to buy, as long as it didn't impact the freedoms of others. Little does he know that Chris is exercising his freedom too. The freedom to fill out the paperwork needed to place DPR under surveillance at his San Francisco home.

With Jared's privileged access to the JabbaChat, the hope is that the surveillance team could match up DPR logging on with Ross Ulbricht using his laptop. He's logging on the exact same time DPR is logging on, within seconds. Like whatever it would take to put a username and password, DPR logs off, his connection falls off. We find a pattern of this.

It's now 2012, over a year since Chris drafted up his list of onion sites. During that time, Silk Road has continued to grow in size. There was even talk that DPR had put a hit out on an admin that had been talking to the cops. So far, the investigation has been a heady mix of dead-end, detective work and the occasional dash of dumb luck. But now it's turning sinister.

After all, Jared is both an admin and an actual cop. What's to say DPR hadn't put a hit out on him as well? Thankfully, Chris is finally confident they have DPR in their sights. They just needed to write up their case for probable cause, present it to a judge, get a warrant and arrest him.

But crucially, they need the laptop too. It was the only time I've ever went over to Southern District and Saren and I took the judge's private elevator up to his chambers. I don't know anybody else that's ever done that. It was pretty exciting for me. And he sat and he read this and he's like, "Guys, this is going to be huge." Three days later, the New York team is in San Francisco making early preparations for the plan.

Chris knows that the local branch of the FBI has jurisdiction here and they have to play by their rules. But in the back of his mind, he really wants his team to be the one to make the arrest. He'd worked too hard on it to give that pleasure over to the Californians. Not to mention, he's seen before what happens if you go in heavy-handed. So he gathers his crew for a private debrief.

We're out in San Francisco. We meet up for dinner. I talk about the plan. I tell the Jeremy Hammond story to the table and explain to him that we need to make this arrest so this laptop stays alive. This is our big plan. We cannot have the same thing where Jeremy Hammond closed the laptop. There had been some talkings that Ross had a degausser or a device that you hit a button and it blows away the whole hard drive. So all about keep the laptop alive.

Chris and Tom even go to a local electronics store to buy, as he describes it, "every adapter that was available" to make sure Ross' laptop can be kept alive. The New York crew has their plan, but they are still at the mercy of the San Francisco office. The local FBI supervisor has made it clear that they are planning to catch Ross their way, once again with a SWAT team.

I explained to him the Jeremy Hammond story. You can't do that. It's not going to work. He'll close it. And so the boss sits back and he sits there and he thinks about it in other ways. He goes, okay, we'll send in three SWAT teams. He was going to have a SWAT team rappel down from a helicopter, one come up through the basement and one break through his window. And I said, that's not going to work. Give me a couple of days. The local boss reluctantly gives Chris another day. He's tracking Ross's movements in order to catch him in the act.

But Ross is a no-show. The following afternoon, the local FBI calls a briefing down in San Jose to plan the SWAT team's maneuvers. The operation is to take place the next morning. Any last hope of catching Ross his way is slipping through Chris's fingers.

Worse, he has to head down to San Jose for the briefing about the mission he is certain isn't going to work. Just when I'm about to leave, we got a call from the surveillance team that Ross just walked out of his house and he's got a laptop bag over his shoulder. So we scatter. We go and run.

I come out of the cafe and take a left and I go into the crosswalk and there's Ross right in the middle of the crosswalk. It's just me and him going head on. I have an arrest warrant in my pocket. I got my gun. I got my cuffs. I'm ready to throw him on the ground, case over. But I remembered that we got to get the laptop. So I just walked past him.

Chris feels a wave of adrenaline rush over him, but he has to keep to the plan. They needed to keep eyes on Ross, so he circles the block and finds Jared posted outside the library, where he's just spotted Ross going in. From the bench outside, Jared opens his laptop and logs in to his undercover admin account. Sure enough, moments later, DPR is online.

They have a visual on their suspect. Ross Ulbricht, the great DPR, turns out to be your average 29-year-old white American male. Mild-mannered, slender, almost forgettable looking. The sort of person you might see in a cafe or library, just casually working on their laptop and never notice. Not your stereotypical drugs baron, that's for sure.

Chris gives the signal for the plainclothes agents to move in. He reminds them, if Ross runs, let him go. The important thing is to get the laptop.

A female agent who, you know, she'll tell you she's five feet tall. I don't think she's five feet tall. She sat at the same table reading a magazine. He's a drug czar in a billion dollar empire sitting across from an FBI agent at the library table. An older male agent and female agent walk behind Ross and the female agent cocks her hand back and punches the male agent right in the jaw and says, fuck you.

Ross thought that was pretty exciting, so he turned around to take a look at them. And the five foot tall little agent sitting across from him just simply pulled the laptop across to her and kept it open and alive and unlocked. Handed it off to Tom Kiernan, who then plugged it in and kept it alive. Those power adapters were money well spent. While Tom makes sure to keep the precious laptop alive, another agent explains to Ross that he is under arrest.

By now, Chris has made his way upstairs and the commotion has settled down. Finally, it is the moment he's been waiting for. I handcuffed him and brought him downstairs, read him his rights, and then showed him his arrest warrant that said Ross Ulbrich, a.k.a. DPR, a.k.a. Dread Briar Roberts. And it sort of kind of washed over his face after that.

While Chris reads Ross his Miranda rights, Tom stays in the library taking photos of every screen or app that he could find running on the laptop. Now there is just the small issue of the hundred or so agents down in San Jose preparing for the now redundant SWAT raid. They were in a warehouse waiting for us and when we called them and said, hey, we just arrested Ross, they called us a bunch of fucking cowboys. They were not pleased.

The local FBI may have been annoyed that these out-of-towners had gone rogue, but either way, they had their man. Local forensics drive up to San Francisco to collect the laptop that Tom is still tending to like a newborn child. Chris had bundled Ross into a surveillance van until there was a secure police vehicle available to transfer him to the station to be booked.

I sat next to him and we drove off to the San Francisco FBI, which is about half an hour away because of U.S. laws. I can't really talk to him about the case, but I can ask him how he's feeling. You're breathing all right. It's got to be a scary effing day for people when they're arrested by the FBI. So I think he felt some of that, the compassion. And at one point he said, you know, how about $20 million to let me go? Then we kind of got into a kidding situation. What are we going to do about this guy driving? You know, are we going to kill him? How are we going to get away with all this?

The mysterious Dread Pirate Roberts may have been caught, but the operation's not over yet. There's a satellite team over in Iceland making sure that the server and all the evidence it contains is secured after Ross's capture. After all, there's still a chance he's left a tripwire. Or maybe he tasked a faithful admin with instructions to delete everything if he's missing for a certain period of time.

Not to mention the important job of finding all the spoils, the ill-gotten bitcoins. That job fell to Tom.

He had found Ross Ulbricht's password and him and Il-Wan were working on Ross's laptop going through things and they found the keys to the kingdom on all Ross's Bitcoins and all that. And then the two of them did what was called the ultimate high five. That's what we labeled it as. Now I picture them as like jumping up like a Toyota commercial. Neither one of them was touching the floor and they describe it as their hands hit together so hard.

that they couldn't eat lunch that day because their hands were still throbbing in pain. While we may never know the true scale of Silk Road, we do know that the FBI seized at least 144,000 Bitcoins. In 2013, when Ross was arrested, they would have been worth around $28 million. And that's only what they were able to recover.

As you'll hear in the next episode of True Spies, today, those bitcoins would be worth many, many times that amount. We moved the bitcoin in 324 chunks, because you can't move it all at once, you know, because of the blockchain. So we decided to chunk it up into 324 bitcoins at a time on a telephone, 324 is FBI. For Chris, it was one last chance to troll the hacking community that had been cheering for Ross the whole time.

They figured that out pretty quickly and they thought we were assholes because of that. As you might imagine, there's a postscript. On February 4th, 2014, Ross Ulbricht was charged with conspiracy to sell narcotics, conspiracy to commit money laundering, and conspiracy to commit computer hacking.

He was later convicted on all counts. And in May 2015, he was sentenced to double life imprisonment, plus 40 years with no chance of parole. I'm Sofia DiMartino.

Next time on True Spies, the Silk Road saga continues with a digital heist of mind-blowing proportions. Get exclusive subscriber-only content and episodes first and ad-free with SpiceGate Plus on Apple Podcasts.