All transactions were required to be completed in Bitcoins, which are also designed to provide cash-like anonymity to users. Authorities said they had seized 26,000 Bitcoins worth about US$3.6 million as part of their raid on Ulbricht.
The website allowed users to anonymously browse through nearly 13,000 listings under categories like "Cannabis", "Psychedelics" and "Stimulants" before making purchases. One listing for heroin promised buyers "all rock, no powder, vacuum sealed and stealth shipping", and had a community forum below where one person commented, "Quality is superb."
The website, which offered other categories including "Erotica" and "Fireworks", protected users with an encryption technique called onion routing, designed to make it "practically impossible to physically locate the computers hosting or accessing websites on the network", court papers said.
It offered various illegal services, including one vendor who offered to hack into Facebook, Twitter and other social networking accounts and another selling tutorials on how to hack into ATMs. Under the "Forgeries" category, sellers advertised forged driver's licences, passports, Social Security cards and other documents.
As of July, there were nearly one million registered users of the site from the United States, Germany, Russia, Australia and elsewhere, the court papers said. The site is estimated to have generated US$1.2 billion since it started in 2011 and collected US$80 million by charging 8 per cent to 15 per cent commission on each sale.
Undercover agents in New York made more than 100 purchases of LSD, Ecstasy, heroin and other drugs offered on the site, the papers said.
Yesterday the website showed a holding page created by the FBI, announcing: "This hidden site has been seized."
Prosecutors argue that Ulbricht, a former physics student at the Universities of Texas and Pennsylvania, was in effect running a multimillion-dollar money-laundering operation through the website.
He announced in a website forum last year that to avoid confusion he needed to change his Silk Road username, court papers said. He wrote, "Drum roll please ... my new name is: Dread Pirate Roberts," an apparent reference to a swashbuckling character in The Princess Bride, the 1987 comedy film based on a novel of the same name.
The complaint also alleged that he approached a user of the site with the screenname redandwhite after another, FriendlyChemist, had posted a message threatening to publicly disclose the identities of thousands of other users.
"In my eyes, FriendlyChemist is a liability and I wouldn't mind if he was executed," he is said to have written. In a follow-up message he is said to have provided a real name and address in British Columbia, Canada, for the troublesome user.
After being quoted a price of up to US$300,000, Ulbricht allegedly complained that "not long ago, I had a clean hit done for $80k". A price of US$150,000 was eventually agreed on, according to the messages. No killing is believed to have been carried out.
- Additional reporting, AP
