The federal takedown of the online drug market Silk Road Marketplace has a crucial tie to Utah.
The Wired Threat Level blog details how the feds were able to take down the anonymous site and it’s administrator, who went by the name “Dread Pirate Roberts.” At one point, an undercover investigator agreed to sell cocaine to Roberts, but the address was in Utah.
The delivery address he gave the undercover agent led to the home of Curtis Clark Green, who authorities say was the Silk Road administrator who had been tasked with finding a vendor for the deal. Green, a 47-year-old grandfather in Utah who went by the monikers “Flush” and “chronicpain” joined the site in 2011.
Green has acknowledged in a court document (.pdf) that he received a salary beginning in November 2012 to take on customer service duties for Silk Road, but he was in that role just two months before the feds raided his home on January 17, 2013. The first arrest of a Silk Road administrator was a huge boon to investigators, who say they gained privileged access to private messages that Silk Road users sent each other as well as the details of sales transactions and information about the Bitcoin accounts of users and administrators — including the account of Silk Road’s alleged owner, Ross Ulbricht.
