Now, onto how he got caught…
An agent involved in the investigation (“Agent-1″), found the first few references to SR on the internet from somebody only identified as “altoid”, attempting to promote the site in its beginning days, in January of 2011.
In October of the same year, a user also going by the name of “altoid” made a posting on Bitcoin Talk titled “a venture backed Bitcoin startup company”, which directed interested users to “rossulbricht at gmail dot com”.
That email address is what led to DPR’s downfall.
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After identifying “altoid”, they started connecting the “DPR” identity to Ulbricht pretty quickly.
Ulbricht’s Google+ page and YouTube profile both make multiple references to the a website dubbed the “Mises Institute”. DPR’s signature on the SR forums contained a link to the Mises Institute.
DPR cited the “Austrian Economic theory” along with the works of Ludwig von Mises and Murray Rothbard, all of which are closesly associated with the Mises Institute.
Server logs show that someone logged onto the SR administration panel from San Fransisco around the same time that Ulbricht was staying in San Fransisco.
Multiple fake IDs were intercepted by U.S. Customs & Border Patrol while on their way to an address which Ulbricht was living at the time. These IDs all carried photos of Ulbricht but had false names and details. This was around the same time that DPR stated in a message that he was acquiring some fake IDs to buy new servers.
When questioned by Homeland Security about the fake IDs, he refused to answer any questions but then stated that anyone could purchase such things using “Silk Road” and “Tor”.
The address which Ulbricht was staying at was being rented in cash and he was living with housemates who knew him under a name which corresponded with one of the fake IDs.
He posted on StackOverflow using his real name, inquiring about how to use curl/PHP to grab things off Tor, before quickly changing the name to “frosty” (with a fake email:
[email protected])
