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| The Silk Road was infamous as a place to buy illegal drugs |
Four UK men arrested over
Silk Road links
Four men have been arrested in the UK over
their role in illegal online marketplace Silk Road.
Three men in their
early 20s were arrested in Manchester while a fourth man, in his 50s, was
detained in Devon.
The men were initially
arrested on suspicion of drug offences. More arrests are expected in the coming
weeks.
Such sites would be a
"key priority" for the UK's National Crime Agency (NCA), its director
general said.
The Silk Road, one of
the world's largest websites selling illegal drugs, has now been closed down.
Ross Ulbricht, the
alleged operator of the site was arrested in San Francisco by the FBI at the
beginning of October.
Last week 40-year-old
Steven Lloyd Sadler was arrested in Seattle. He is alleged to be one of the
most prolific sellers on the Silk Road.
The site operated on
Tor, a so-called "dark web" service that anonymises users, making it
much more difficult for authorities to track locations. Such areas of the
internet are not covered by standard search engines.
The site sold a range
of items, but was most famous for offering a host of illegal drugs, paid for
using virtual currency Bitcoin.
Keith Bristow, the
NCA's director general, warned that users who think they can hide their
identity on the internet need to think again.
"These arrests send
a clear message to criminals; the hidden internet isn't hidden and your
anonymous activity isn't anonymous. We know where you are, what you are doing
and we will catch you."
"It is impossible
for criminals to completely erase their digital footprint. No matter how
technology-savvy the offender, they will always make mistakes."
Exeter-based officers
worked closely with American law enforcement officers to identify significant
UK users of the Silk Road.
It is hoped that the
investigation will give them insights into how criminals use the dark net.
"These criminal
areas of the internet aren't just selling drugs; it's where fraud takes place,
where the trafficking of people and goods is discussed, where child abuse
images are exchanged and firearms are traded," said Andy Archibald, head
of the NCA's national cybercrime unit.
The Silk Road may now
be defunct but it seems that users are planning to resurrect the service.
What was the Silk Road?
Silk Road took its
name from the historic trade routes spanning Europe, Asia and parts of Africa.
News reports and other
internet chatter helped it become notorious. However, most users would not have
been able to stumble upon the site as the service could only be accessed
through a service called Tor - a facility that routes traffic through many
separate encrypted layers of the net to hide data identifiers.
Tor was invented by
the US Naval Research Laboratory and has subsequently been used by journalists
and free speech campaigners, among others, to safeguard people's anonymity.
But it has also been
used as a means to hide illegal activities, leading it to be dubbed "the
dark web".
Payments for goods on
Silk Road were made with the virtual currency Bitcoin, which can be hard to
monitor.
Court documents from
the FBI said the site had just under a million registered users, but
investigators said they did not know how many were active.
Earlier this year Carnegie Mellon University
estimated that over $1.22m (£786,000) worth of trading took place on the Silk
Road every month.
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