Topic: usatoday.com - Three men charged in connection with Silk Road (Read 735 times)

Three alleged employees of the an underground Internet drug bazaar Silk Road are charged with drug trafficking in an indictment unsealed Friday

Three alleged employees of Silk Road, an Internet black market firm with millions of customers worldwide, are charged with money laundering, computer hacking and conspiracy to traffic drugs, according to an indictment unsealed Friday in New York.

The indictment charges Andrew Michael Jones, known as "Inigo," Gary Davis, known as "Libertas," and Philip Peter Nash, known by a variety of online handles including "Samesamebutdifferent" and "Batman73," with aiding the vendors who trafficked in heroin, cocaine, LSD, and methamphetamine on the site.

The three men worked as site and forum administrators for Silk Road and sent weekly reports of their work to the alleged Silk Road mastermind, Ross Ulbricht, known on the site as "Dread Pirate Roberts," the indictment said. The employees earned $50,000 to $70,000 for dealing with vendor and customer complaints, questions and the day-to-day operations of the site, the indictment said.

Police arrested Jones, 24, in Charles City, Va, on Thursday. He appeared in court in Richmond on Friday. Police arrested Nash, 40, in Brisbane, Australia, on Friday. Davis, 25, of Wicklow, Ireland, remains at large, but is believed to be in Ireland, the U.S. attorney's office in New York said in a statement. If convicted, the men could be sentenced to life in prison.

Federal agents arrested Ulbricht on Oct. 1 in the science fiction section of a branch of the San Francisco Public Library. Ulbricht is charged with drug trafficking, money laundering and computer hacking and is being held without bail in a New York. He is charged separately in Maryland in connection with a murder-for-hire plot. He has denied the charges.

Federal agents shut down the website on Oct. 2, but not before copying the website's records of vendors and customers. Four people who allegedly sold methamphetamine on the site were indicted earlier this week.

The website, which head nearly a million customers and $1.2 billion in sales, operated on "The Onion Router" or Tor, a computer network that relays messages through at least three separate serves to disguise its users. Silk Road required its buyers and sellers to use only Bitcoin, a digital currency which, unlike credit cards, is difficult to trace.

http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2013/12/20/alleged-silk-road-employees-charged-with-drug-dealing/4148963/