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February 12, 2025

Slashdot: How a Tax Inspector Used Google Search To Locate the Founder of SilkRoad

How a Tax Inspector Used Google Search To Locate the Founder of SilkRoad
Published on August 23, 2017 at 08:00AM
An anonymous reader shares a report: You could buy any drug imaginable, wherever you were in the world, on the Silk Road website. Hidden on the dark web, it made millions of dollars every week. The US government had been trying to shut it down for more than two years when tax agent Gary Alford was brought in to try to trace the money which passed through the site.
In his spare time, Gary started searching Google to try to find the mysterious mastermind behind the site: Dread Pirate Roberts. And he was successful. Gary spent hours trawling the internet for the first ever mention of Silk Road. He says he came across a posting on Bitcoin forum. In the post, Roberts had shared his Gmail account. That escalated the investigation. Gary spoke with BBC describing the rest.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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