The Silk Road was an online black market that was created in February of 2011. Its creator was Ross Ulbricht, who was living in Arizona at the time. The Silk Road used Bitcoin transactions and primarily sold narcotics, fake licenses, guns, assassinations, and more.

The site grew to around 1 million customers and people known as "vendors" would trade and sell mostly illegal products on the forums. The FBI caught wind of the Silk Road and would later call it "the most sophisticated and extensive criminal marketplace on the Internet today." By June 2011 the internet was buzzing with information about the onion Tor website and the DEA was ordered to take it down.

The DEA were only able to DDoS (an explicit attempt by attackers to prevent legitimate use of a service by either crashing services or flooding services) the Silk Road in June of 2013 and only seized 11.02 Bitcoins from it, or $814. Still, they managed to pin the owner as Ross Ulbricht and arrested him only four months later. The site was eventually shut down by the FBI in November of 2014.

However, let's back up. The Silk Road was certainly targeted by the FBI because its illegal substances and products, however, there was a lot more going behind the scenes with Ulbricht that was only later found out, that really spurred the hunt and only starts digging the rabbit hole.

In March of 2013 Ulbricht, who was going by the online pseudonym of "Dread Pirate Roberts" (DPR), received a message from a vendor known as "FriendlyChemist" (FC).

FriendlyChemist nervously explained that another vendor, "lucydrop", owed him a lot of money that he needed to pay to the Hell's Angels in Canada. If he didn't get the money, he was afraid he was going to be killed along with his family by the Hell's Angels. Lucydrop apparently went to jail for 2 months, and during then his partner took over his account and stole all of his savings, scamming people. FC was one of those people.

FC knew that DPR and Lucydrop were partners because DPR had made him #1 seller on the site. FC threatened to dox (release personal information) of thousands of users on the Silk Road which would turn people away from the site if he didn't get the money he was owed by Lucydrop.

Now, Lucydrop's cover story was obviously a lie, it was an elaborate scam so he didn't have to pay any money. DPR hated scammers on his site but knew there would be trouble if the personal information of his users was leaked across the globe. DPR had FC talk to the Hell's Angels and explain that he'd been scammed out of $500k in Bitcoin and to message DPR.

A new user by the name of "redandwhite" messaged DPR and explained that they were with the Hell's Angels that FC owed money to. DPR got information on FC and offered to make redandwhite a top vendor if the Hell's Angels killed FC. Redandwhite agreed and DPR paid them a whopping $150k in Bitcoin to carry out the execution. With a picture as proof, DPR was assured FC was dead and that he wouldn't blackmail anyone again. What redandwhite got out of FC before his death was that he and Lucydrop were working together to blackmail and scam DPR.

DPR ordered another hit out on Lucydrop for the same amount and redandwhite carried out.

When the FBI managed to catch Ulbricht in October of 2013, it was revealed that FriendlyChemist, Lucydrop, and Redandwhite were all the same person. They'd scammed Ulbricht (DPR) out of hundreds of thousands of Bitcoin and got away with it.

In May 2015, Ulbricht was sentenced to double life imprisonment plus 40 years without the possibility of parole. He appealed in 2017 and 2018 but was unsuccessful. There's a huge movement that says Ulbricht was wrongly incarcerated, but the evidence is there. Despite the murders never taking place, he still ordered and paid for two hits and believed fake evidence. Plus, there's evidence he carried out even more hits. He ran a dark web site and was the mastermind behind millions of illegal activities.

Of course, it's up to your discretion, just remember the evidence before you form an opinion. The messages between Ulbricht and the scammers is online, just look it up. Reading it in real time is chilling because he truly thought these were all real people he was going to kill. Read them for yourself. Good luck.

Aaaaaaand it looks like I'm kinda back for conspiracies! Because I have some new motivation to write these..... The Silk Road is by far one of my favorites, I mean it isn't even a conspiracy, it's just plain fact, but it's really interesting. Please read those transcripts!!! They're insane.