Security News > 2022 > November > Silk Road drugs market hacker pleads guilty, faces 20 years inside
Given that the Silk Road website was very widely used for selling prohibited items, mostly recreational drugs but also stolen identities and other enablers of cybercrime, the adjective dark in the phrase "Dark web" came to be interpreted as dark-as-in-devilish-and-dangerous.
Cybersecurity problems at Silk Road weren't limited just to Ulbricht's poor operational security.
Creat[ed] a string of approximately nine Silk Road accounts [] in a manner designed to conceal his identity; trigger 140 transactions in rapid succession in order to trick Silk Road's withdrawal-processing system into releasing approximately 50,000 Bitcoin from its Bitcoin-based payment system into [his] accounts; and transferr[ed] this Bitcoin into a variety of separate addresses [], all in a manner designed to prevent detection, conceal his identity and ownership, and obfuscate the Bitcoin's source.
Simply put, the perpetator, James Zhong, who was just 22 years old at the time, started with between 200 and 2000 Bitcoins, and by quickly ended up with more than BTC 50,000 after figuring out how to "Withdraw" each new "Deposit" he made five or more times, allowing him to ramp up his stash in a series of rogue trading loops, before exiting in a hurry with everything.
17851897 seized doesn't just sound absurdly precise for an "Approximate" amount, it is as precise as you can be in the Bitcoin ecosystem, given that the smallest transactable unit on the Bitcoin blockchain is 1 Satoshi.
Apparently, over the past year, Zhong must have decided to play ball with the investigators: "Beginning in or around March 2022, [he] began voluntarily surrendering to the Government additional Bitcoin that [he]] had access to and had not dissipated. In total, [he] voluntarily surrendered 1,004.14621836 additional Bitcoin."