The age bracket and when they concluded interviewing suggests that this SR1 user was arrested before 2014, and there are only around two known arrests in that age bracket and period for SR1; combined with background knowledge that only a small fraction of buyer arrests are ever reported (see discussion of completeness of the arrest table ), it is highly likely that this arrest is not otherwise in the table.

…Tapering down drug use after a honeymoon period was not only triggered by the practice of ‘portion control’ and/or satiated desires, but also by other life events. For example, P1 (21-25 yrs, USA) explained “After last semester I’m more interested in grades than highs” and P4 (21-25 yrs, Australia) described how “I’d rather buy a flight than a gram of coke”. In the case of P25 (21-25 yrs, Australia), who was buying large amounts from Silk Road and dealing from his home, a police raid resulted in supply charges, which led to a tapering of drug use and cryptomarket activity.

In August 2013, a 18yo South Bunbury, West Australian male Jackson R. was charged with heroin (actually DMT) & 2C-e possession ; in an account on FB then reposted on Reddit , he explains that he had ordered the DMT off SR1 from a Czech seller (the media coverage claiming it was heroin being wrong) and his parents turned the package in to the police after it arrived, with the subsequent police search turning up his 2C-E as well.

At some point in mid-2013 (“just months before it [SR1] was closed down”), the Australian man Luke Hanley was arrested after 2 packages of 25i & 25c (and possibly an amphetamine package) were intercepted by Customs, and pled guilty in 2014 .

An Australian investigation starting in January 2013 arrested two fake ID manufacturers on 2013-09-10; coverage does not mention SR, but a Redditor plausibly identifies them as having been the fake ID seller “Ausid” who stopped selling on SR in March 2013.

As of July 2013, there was “at least one criminal prosecution in WA [Western Australia] that involves Silk Road” , and WA police estimate “47 active Australian-based sellers who use Silk Road”; that prosecution may have been “A 26-year-old man, who was charged with attempting to possess drugs from the site, was fined $1000” as of 2013-08-10 .

Reportedly (2013-07-01) , a June 2013 Parcel Post sting seized 140 packages/$8m & “Six of those arrested were Silk Road members.” These 6 arrests are currently unknown aside from 1 likely being a safrole oil buyer. (Possibly 5, if one assumes that Adam Bunger’s BMR Australian customer is included in that count and the quote is slightly inaccurate.)

On 2013-02-21 , Lee James Matthews’s home was searched and he was arrested. ~2 of 21 packages had been intercepted, and the search turned up MDMA, cocaine, methamphetamine, & amphetamines from his 93 orders, most of which he resold locally.

On 2013-06-20, an Australian man was arrested after a CD of safrole oil (a MDMA precursor) imported from Indonesia; this was part of an investigation triggered by Customs intercepting 4 Indonesian packages of safrole oil. The Indonesian seller was later arrested in Indonesia.

Also on 2013-02-19 , Patrick Franzini was arrested after a search related to 3 customs interceptions November 2012 - February 2013 of methamphetamine & MDMA sent from Netherlands, Canada, & China. The search turned up pseudoephedrine, DMT, and ketamine; Franzini cooperated, providing additional information like his SR1 account (he had made a total of 19 orders).

On 2013-02-19 , Samuel Ryan Ludwig was arrested & bailed after a search of his home prompted by a package intercepted by Customs on 2013-02-15. (The search turned up MDMA, LSD, ketamine, methylamphetamine, and amphetamine.) That was one of ~7 packages intercepted October 2012 - February 2013; 5 more, containing drugs, laser pointers, and safrole oil would be intercepted February-March 2013, and additional MDMA & laser pointer packages would be intercepted, triggering another search of Ludwig’s residence while he was out on bail and a second arrest 2013-08-22.

A 2012-11-07 Australian article claims 30 interceptions a month in an area, but mentions nothing specific about arrests. A December 2012 article quotes Customs claiming a 40% increase in seizures, but then quotes a SR seller as claiming a doubling or quadrupling of Australian buyers (hence, implying the interception rate has halved or worse). Estimating total number of Australian users is difficult, but the 2012 Global Drug Survey reportedly found 184 SR purchasers in its sample of >6600 Australians suggesting a risk of arrest or publicity <5184 (and incidentally, remembering this is a biased sample and the South Australian recent illicit drug use rate is ~14.9%, it suggests a very loose upper bound of all Australian SR users of 23000000⋅0.149⋅1846600<95541).

Another Australian seller (unknown which one, possibly “DownUnderDan” or “DopeBoyAus”), Christopher Owen, was pulled over by police on 2012-04-27 while driving to the post office to mail shipments, the drugs found, his house searched, and was sentenced to 5 years ( discussion ).

On 2013-11-04, 2 men were arrested (media: 1 ; 2 ; 3 ) for selling opium, MDMA, & amphetamine, as well as, apparently, 6 of their customers - others may have been arrested outside Austria but no mention of those. Based on a forum thread & seller profile, I’ve identified this as the SR1 seller “Blackjack021”.

On 2012-08-02, British Columbia resident James Fowler was raided after an investigation started in May 2012 based on an anonymous tip that he was selling drugs online and subsequent “electronic surveillance”. The raid turned up marijuana, psilocybin mushrooms, guns, and computer evidence of his online sales through “different websites, including his own”. La Moustache has identified Fowler as the SR1 seller “warweed” due to a BitcoinTalk.org account with a shared email address and other details (such as warweed’s announcement of being arrested in August 2012).

In May 2012, the high-volume cocaine Canadian seller “moveitnice”/“MiN” mentioned postal delays and then disappeared; according to buyers in the forum discussion , moveitnice accepted Western Union and the recipient of the WU payments matched the names in the arrests of a family of 4 Ottawans for mailing cocaine which was announced by the RCMP on 18 May. (My search of Canadian court records was unable to find their case; possibly their case has been publication-banned or discharged.) Gawker mentions rumors they may have been busted because they accepted payment via Western Union .

The aforementioned Tessellated claimed “we have not even once had a report of anyone having any legal trouble or ‘love letters’ from our product. On several occasions customs has opened our package, not found the product and sent it intact to the buyer.”

In early October 2015, a former SR1 marijuana buyer was , despite no package interceptions & always using PGP, prosecuted & fined for his 2013 SR1 purchases (and, oddly, 1 Outlaw Market order) from, among other sellers, the SR1 seller “Natural Weed”, a man named “Tobias Wald”, who apparently had been arrested at some point prior and turned over seller records which were then linked to order information on the SR1 server image provided by the FBI.

On 2016-01-11 , 2 brothers (30/32yo) from Fürth were sentenced to 4 years prison stemming from an arrest in “early 2015” related to an inspection of a package; they had apparently been buying on SR1 and AfterHour 2012-2014, making ~40 orders of marijuana/amphetamines/MDMA/cocaine for their consumption & local resale.

4 people were arrested in Germany 2013-07-04, apparently by tracing another drug seller’s supplier with repeated orders which were sent from the same spot by the couriers (and were easily busted), and then to that SR seller-group “AfterHour” & possibly payments via mail (German coverage: 1 , 2 , 3 , 4 ; partial translation ). The leader cooperated and was sentenced to 4.83 years, with lesser sentences for the others.

On 2013-07-23, an Indonesian man (likely the seller “joy” ) was arrested in Jakarta for selling safrole oil (one of his Australian buyers had already been CDed and at least 4 shipments intercepted before then).

On 2013-08-05, 3 men (Ryan Thomas McManus, Ryan Milligan, Connor Devenney) who were the seller “sonicdrone” , were arrested in Ireland , and they were sentenced in April 2015; they had been selling a variety of drugs but principally cocaine, mephedrone, MDMA, marijuana, 2C-b, & LSD. How they were caught is unclear, but surveillance of a “virtual mailbox facility” they used to receive packages seem to have played a crucial role, possibly sparked by a failed attempt to mail 60g of marijuana to a Canadian customer. (Media coverage mentions another pseudonym, “blackwater86”, which is the name a mostly-unused SR1F account and not another seller as far as I can tell; possibly it was used in ordering from their American & Chinese supplier.)

On 2015-08-10, DDW published “The Story of an Italian Unlucky Cyber Pusher” , which claims to be the memoir of a small Italian SR1/BMR seller “Fuckthepolice137” who sold internationally 2012-2013 primarily marijuana & MDMA along with some sildenafil. He was arrested at the end of June 2013; Italian customs had intercepted packages to another bigger Italian drug trafficker, who was then arrested, and their emails with him were found, leading to his own raid & arrest.

The MDMA seller “SuperTrips” ( profile ; DoJ announcement ; complaint ; charges ) was arrested on traveling to the USA in August 2013 to meet a SR1 reseller, “UnderGroundSyndicate”/“BTCMaster” (who was arrested with SuperTrip’s help in October). US Customs intercepted >100 packages mailed by SuperTrips, built up a profile, found fingerprints on the packages, checked the Netherlands’s fingerprint databases & found a match, detained SuperTrips when he attempted to enter the USA, seized & searched his laptop’s files (illustrating the lack of civil rights at borders), he admitted selling during an interview, and eventually reached a plea agreement. His arrest was rumored on forums, and DPR2 of SR2 specifically alluded to SuperTrip’s arrest in late 2013/early 2014 that “it was quite boring the third time law enforcement decided to use the ‘SuperTrips’ moniker and claiming to be him as a free man, when I know just as well as ICE where he is now”, although the case was only publicly announced in April 2014.

In April 2013, 6 Dutchmen were arrested for MDMA sales on SR; the arrests stemmed from a car search turning up thousands of pills in 2012-11-22 and then a raid of their manufacturing location 2013-04-05 (one commenter speculates they were the missing MDMA seller “MedicalM”).

Cocaine catches increased from five in 2011–12 to 54 in 2013–14, LSD from three to 85 in the same period, and Ecstasy from 85 to 139. Mr Berry said the interceptions were generally smaller amounts, and did not indicate a similar increase in overall quantities being seized across all entry points to the country. About 2.4 million items of mail come into New Zealand every month.

In April 2014, the NZ man Peter James Grossett was convicted after 2 packages of methamphetamine from Canada were intercepted in September & November 2013; the search had also turned up LSD and marijuana. (The article mentions he bought from another market after SR1 shut down, but not which one - it could have been Sheep or TorMarket or BMR given the broad time range.)

On 2013-12-11, another 3 NZers were arrested over various orders of “small quantities of LSD, Methamphetamine, MDMA (ecstasy), Class C analogue powders and the psychoactive substance NBOMe” from unspecified DNMs “such as ‘The Silk Road’”. (Inasmuch as Silk Road was busted 2013-10-02, they may have actually been ordering from a replacement such as Sheep MarketPlace.)

Two NZers were searched 2013-08-01 (Matthew Benjamin Collins & Jared Arthur Underwood), turning up a variety of drugs they had imported from the UK & Netherlands after September 2012 from “encrypted internet sites” (given the timing, SR1), apparently for local resale given the pill presses mentioned.

On 2013-04-23 , a student Benjamen Patrick Belmont importing cocaine, MDMA, & LSD from Netherlands & UK for resale had packages intercepted by Customs, leading to a search, guilty pleas, and then sentencing in February 2014 . (That article also estimates 52m items passing through Customs in 2012 with 1.4k intercepted as drugs.)

What seems to be a third NZer, Simon Lim, was arrested sometime in 2012, pled guilty in October 2012 & was sentenced to 18 months probation in 2013-02-07 for buying cocaine, methamphetamine, LSD and others off Silk Road.

A NZ article claimed 80 interceptions a month with 7 arrests January-July 2012 or 1 arrest a month (suggesting each interception has a risk of leading to an arrest of ~1/80; the risk per order then depends on how many of the 52m items were drug packages), specifically: ‘“There have been approximately 80 intercepts a month [from] people we believe have utilised the Silk Road enterprise,” Day said. In cases linked to Silk Road from January to July, 13 search warrants were issued, 15 further properties visited and 7 arrests made.’ Since both the Customs officer & Maki were arrested in that January-July 2012 period (Simon Lim falls outside it), that leaves 5 arrests unaccounted for.

An unnamed Australian student’s MDMA from SR1 (bought for local resale) was intercepted by Customs sometime in 2012 and he was, at a minimum, interviewed, but the 2012-07-11 article makes no mention of additional penalties. A New Zealand Customs officer who highly likely used SR1 (although he denies ordering, saying he had been researching it for his job) was charged with possessing & “supplying” methamphetamine but this “was uncovered during police inquiries into another crime”, with the resolution unclear.

On 2013-06-27, police reportedly stumbled on a suspicious man who dropped a package of pills and searched his trailer, discovering amphetamine, MDMA, & spice; this was the base of operations for the two men running the SR1 account “Speedsweden”, which had made 500 sales ( police writeup / translation , media article ). The second one seems to have gotten off, however.

The 54yo Canadian man Roger Thomas Clark (“Plural of Mongoose”/“Variety Jones”/“VJ”/“cimon”) was arrested in Thailand on 2015-12-03 after a complaint was filed in 2015-04-21 for extradition to the USA; as the SR1 seller Variety Jones, he had sold marijuana seeds and other materials, and as cimon, from December 2011 - October 2013 he was deeply involved in helping Ross Ulbricht run SR1, assisting in source code audits, management of servers & employees, and giving Ulbricht much advice (eg he suggested the “Dread Pirate Roberts” pseudonym to suggest the possibility of multiple DPRs, and pushed for Curtis Clark Green to be killed after Green was arrested & then his admin account used by Carl Mark Force IV to loot bitcoins from the SR1 servers). The sheer extent of cimon’s involvement in SR1 was documented during Ulbricht’s January 2015 trial with excerpts from Ulbricht’s journal, chat logs, and spreadsheets, leading to a great deal of surprise that cimon had apparently escaped unscathed, unlike many of the other SR1 employees, and especially considering that La Moustache identified cimon as Roger Thomas Clark shortly afterwards and even further, hacks of DPR’s abandoned email accounts (due to unredacted passwords in the evidence exhibits for the Ulbricht trial) pointed to Clark as cimon and another Thai expat as the SR1 developer “Smedley”. The complaint further reveals that Clark’s photographic ID, like other SR1 employees, was stored on Ulbricht’s laptop, and that Smedley was cooperating & had identified Clark.

26yo Derby man Adam Yates was raided after a February 2014 intercept at Heathrow Airport of 50 MDMA tablets, turning up phone/computer evidence of purchases & local resale of MDMA/cocaine/ketamine back to December 2011, and was sentenced to 2 years (suspended) in April 2016. The coverage identifies SR1 as his main DNM, but not which one he had ordered from in February 2014 (SR2?).

At Peter Ward/PlutoPete’s sentencing , it came out that the second person was Richard Hiley, who was arrested in December 2013; they had been in partnership to buy & sell marijuana/methamphetamine/cocaine and exchange Bitcoins/dollars. They were sentenced 2016-02-29 to ~5 years each.

A Reddit user claims in June 2014 to have been importing MDMA into the UK from the Netherlands off SR1 for personal consumption & resale through friends for ~6 months; sometime before 2013 a package of 100 pills was detected by customs and he accepted delivery, leading to his house being searched; he was then convicted (in large part due to text messages on his phone & emails on his computer) and given a suspended sentence.

Cambridge man Callum Fay was arrested 2012-06-28 after UKBA intercepted an Indian package of cocaine and a search warrant was executed after delivery; Fay possessed cocaine, MDMA, methamphetamine, many packaging materials such as 20 internationally-addressed packages, and to have sold a great deal (£29,000) of bitcoins previously. He was re-arrested 2015-03-24 for ketamine, heroin, and methamphetamine. Given the Bitcoin volume and addressed packages, Fay was clearly an unknown SR1 seller.

In September 2011, the Silk Road 1 buyer of LSD & MDMA Stacy Litz was arrested in Pennsylvania after reselling LSD to an undercover officer; she became an informant.

On 2013-10-28, the Maryland former seller “digitalink”, Jacob Theodore George IV, was charged in federal court (previously convicted of a number of offenses in state courts) for his heroin & methylone (banned October 2011) sales a year & a half previously (he stopped in January 2012), and pled guilty (plea agreement), ultimately receiving a sentence of 6 years. The complaint/indictment does not specify what evidence the case is based on, why such a long delay, or why no arrest, and many of the PACER documents remain sealed or unavailable as of 2015-02-23 (so we don’t know the details or how exactly he was cooperating); but based on digitalink’s forum posts and forum discussions of him, it seems he was an extremely careless seller who disdained PGP, retrieved product seized by the Post Office (one forum-user presciently exclaimed in August 2011, “Oh wow, the idiocy is unmatched! It seems very possible that digitalink will be busted sometime soon.”), told other people who his methylone supplier was, gave his phone number to buyers, and ultimately failed to deliver $3500 of methylone to a buyer “thoth” who then threatened to give digitalink’s information to the police, possibly resulting in him being interviewed and confessing to everything . An internal timeline of the US investigations says that on 2012-02-01, “HSI Baltimore then revealed [in the meeting] that their informant that told them about the Silk Road in September was just arrested on or around January 17, 2012 for something unrelated and admitted to them then that he was actually a Silk Road vendor”, so it seems digitalink were arrested for offline misbehavior unrelated to his heroin/methylone imports & sales, and only then flipped.

Another filing mentions the alllove account’s use, but the internal timeline goes on to mention several other possible busts:

On October 12, 2011, HSI Baltimore reported in ROI 13 in general case number BA08NR11BA0004 that in September of 2011 an informant told them that the Silk Road existed and they sold drugs there. No further reports were filed or subsequent cases opened on the website. - …On December 8, 2011, HSI Headquarters prepared HSIR ID# ICE-HQINT-00431-12 titled “Digital Currency Bitcoin and the Underground Website Silk Road”. In that report they list 6 HSI investigations that had mentioned the Silk Road, including HSI Chicago and HSI Baltimore. HSI Chicago’s investigation was shown as actively working the website and multiple vendors. HSI Baltimore’s summary was that of only having one report from a CI mentioning the Silk Road existed. The other 4 HSI cases had only mentioned the website from interviews conducted. - On January 03, 2012, HSI Baltimore SA Gregory Miller opened investigation BA13CR12BA0016 and stated in ROI 001 that on December 29, 2011, their CI began telling them some details about the Silk Road website. - …By January 13, 2012, HSI Chicago had over 19 reports, 200 seizures, identified multiple vendors/targets, coordinated POE’s and case information with multiple HSI attaché offices, signed up a CI and had met with the AUSA’s office to prosecute the case. - …In April of 2012, HSI Chicago developed a new informant and informed HSI Baltimore of development. HSI Baltimore requested access directly to the informant but wouldn’t tell HSI Chicago why they wanted the access or what they wanted to ask the CI. HSI Chicago offered to take any questions and directly ask the CI the questions for them, but they would not allow access to the CI without knowing any topic of questions. HSI Baltimore expressed anger over not being allowed direct access to the CI.

The September 2011 informant seems to have not been a bust given the lack of any followup and to have simply been an informant (someone paid for money); the December report about “actively working…multiple vendors” may refer to investigating them and perhaps conducting undercover buys, not necessarily flipping them (in which case they might be referred to as CIs); the Baltimore claim of a CI dating from 2011-12-29 may seem to be “digitalink” but the date does not tally up with the other entry in which digitalink only offers to flip after his arrest almost a full month later and there are no known arrests near Baltimore in late 2011 (indeed, the only 2011 arrest so far is Stacy Litz from September 2011, which would be awkward as the CI - ~4 months to begin talking?), so I consider this evidence of an unknown bust in December 2011; the 2012-01-13 mention of a new CI in Chicago is also not consistent with any known busts and given the fierce rivalry between the Baltimore & Chicago offices (the focus of the timeline), this is likely another unknown bust; finally, the April 2012 mention of another new Chicago CI lines up almost perfectly with the known “dripsofacid” CI used by the Chicago office’s Der-Yeghiayan from his testimony. This leaves 2 unknown busts: the Baltimore CI in December 2011 and the Chicago CI in January 2012.

During the SR1 trial, the DHS agent Deryeghiayan engaged in purchases “from March 2012 until September 2013…Using an account obtained from an actual user, with the screen name of ‘dripsofacid’”, which was used for at least one buy in April 2013; “dripsofacid”’s account may have been obtained after an unknown arrest during that time period. (Another LE account was “Mr Wonderful”, who was used in the 2013 “Emailgate” in which he canvassed SR1 employees over Tormail and tried to flip them by offering money and immunity, to which DPR1 was alerted by his DEA informant Carl Force; Mr Wonderful is not a known seller account, and all mentions of Mr Wonderful such as Force’s dismissive comments seem to be imply his contact was done off SR1 and to be a fresh pseudonym, so it does not sound like a flipped buyer or seller to me and so is not included in the table. Similarly, an FBI presentation in mid-April 2015 in the Netherlands had a screenshot taken with the account “Aspire28”, but my searches do not turn up mentions of any seller of that name, so it was probably a throwaway or flipped buyer - impossible to know.)

On 2012-05-05, the Massachusetts Bard College student Mehran Jahedi’s rooms were searched & campus security found “LSD, ketamine, amphetamines, hallucinogenic mushrooms, MDMA, mescaline and marijuana, as well as packaging originating from as far away as China, Germany and Poland”, which he had been reselling locally after sourcing them from the “darknet”, and ultimately received a suspended sentence in 2014; given the variety, it is almost certain he was purchasing from SR1 rather than any of the other SR1-era markets (BMR/Darkbay/Sheep/Atlantis).

The account of the SR1 clonazepam/marijuana seller “alllove” was used by the FBI in 2012-09-27 & earlier as part of its investigation into SR1, and screenshots taken with it were entered into evidence at Ross Ulbricht’s 2015 trial. alllove must have been busted somehow before September 2012, for his account to have become the FBI’s property, and explaining his abrupt disappearance sometime before 2012-05-19 (remarked upon at the time on Reddit; there may be more accurate timings in SR1F hits for “alllove”) but all other details are unknown. One post-trial exhibit (a Der-Yeghiayan affidavit seeking copies of Mark Karpeles’s email accounts) states that “In September of 2012, HSI was able to verify that a commission rate exists on the Silk Road by using a Silk Road vendor account and setting a price on a product for sale on the Silk Road marketplace. HSI then logged in to the Silk Road using a different account and observed the same product offered for sale at a higher price than what was set by the vendor. The difference in price matched the advertised commission rates from the Silk Road administrator.”; while this could possibly have been an unknown seller, digitalink, davidd, or alllove (all USA SR1 seller accounts compromised by September 2012), the former had disappeared off the market by September 2012, and the last fits best given that we know the alllove account was being used for other parts of the investigation. (The old SR1 seller Grand Wizard says that alllove may also have sold bitcoins for cash in the mail or other fiat; this is an extremely risky occupation and if true, almost certainly how he was busted.)

In December 2012, a New Jersey buyer was busted for marijuana in a controlled delivery when the package was detected in the mail; he cooperated (no additional penalties specified in article) and 2 sellers (SourDieselMan) were eventually arrested & charged in July 2013.

SR forum posters have claimed that a DMT seller, cocaine seller, & 2 others have all been busted but apparently for their offline connections and activities (the poster claims the DMT seller had too many people visiting and his neighbors squealed; this was likely the Canadian seller “Trojan”, but the other 3 I’m not sure about).

In “early 2013” (personal communication), an American ordered MDMA from a European seller; IRL activities led to his arrest (he had been reselling locally and one of his buyers was themselves caught & snitched) although the SR1 connection was not uncovered, and eventually he pled to a lesser charge.

In January 2013, according to the SR bust indictments, a seller & SR employee (“chronic pain”/“chronicpain”/“Flush”) was arrested & charged in Maryland after receiving a kilo of cocaine from an undercover agent; he then cooperated with the FBI in entrapping Ulbricht into ordering a hit on him and then pretending to be dead. He was identified in October as Curtis Clark Green (discussion). Green’s plea-agreement (transcript) was released on 2013-11-07, without any details of his cooperation after his arrest in Utah (although “the U.S. attorney’s office said his computer was forensically examined after it was seized”); interestingly, the plea-agreement notes that the undercover agent did not know the cocaine package was being delivered to the same SR administrator who had helped him find a seller for his cocaine. Curtis Green’s cooperation earned him 2 days imprisonment & 4 years probation.

Also in January 2013, the criminal complaint documenting the DEA corruption during the SR1 investigation mentions offhandedly that the dirty copes Force & Bridge controlled the account “TrustusJones” as of 2013-01-23 ; TrustusJones was an East Coast marijuana SR1 seller beginning around February 2012 (forum archive). Curiously, in February 2013, the account announced on the SR1 forums (thread #118718) that he would be selling off all his bitcoins (at ~30% off) in exchange for MoneyPak; this might sound like Force laundering coins from the January 2013 theft, except the use of TrustusJones is noted in internal DEA documents, suggesting that the sales were more about busting any SR1 users unwise enough to buy MoneyPak. (The original TrustusJones had even mocked MoneyPak in an earlier thread, #16083.) It’s unclear when exactly TJ was busted or how; my best guess, based on his SR1F posts, is that he was busted on or before 2012-04-29, and his OPSEC sounded good, it was probably due to the usual mail-tracing approach.

In February 2013, there were two cases of Americans being busted in Florida and Louisiana by signing for MDMA in what is called a “controlled delivery”; the simultaneity, drug type, & amount immediately led to speculation that they were both ordering from the SR MDMA Canadian seller “luckylucianno” who was previously having issues with order interceptions, which was confirmed when one of the arrested men posted on the SR forums warning away others and relevant threads were deleted by forum moderators (although a moderator claimed the Louisiana bust was unrelated to SR or the Florida bust).

Sometime in March 2013, an Alaskan buyer of heroin & cocaine apparently received a controlled delivery, and received felony charges; he cooperated in the ongoing investigation of his seller, “NOD”, according to the indictment for NOD.

An otherwise-unknown female buyer from NOD seems to have been similarly arrested in April/May according to the TSG article on NOD.

On 2013-03-21, the large Californian marijuana group seller “SourDieselMan” replaced their profile page with the message “i am down forever” (last forum comment was 2013-03-18); SR users noted that on 19 March, a series of marijuana-related raids were executed in California near where SourDieselMan apparently shipped from, and speculate that SourDieselMan may have been arrested in them (though two users say SourDieselMan was either banned by SR over selling Bitcoins for cash in the mail or traced via this, an activity attested to in the review thread). Additional July news coverage revealed SourDieselMan to be a group, 2 members of which (Matthew Gillum & Jolene Chan) were arrested & charged with marijuana & finance-related charges. The complaint says the investigation started in August 2012 due to the large sums of cash in mail, did a controlled delivery to a SR marijuana buyer in New Jersey in December 2012 (he cooperated), flipped one of the SourDieselMan members, and went from there; for additional details, see the PACER court records and the filings for Gillum & Chan. Gillum was sentenced to 9 years.

On 2013-04-12, a South Carolinian man (the seller “Casey Jones”, judging by forum search hits and his posts) had ₿11 (then $935) confiscated via a drug law provision (Hughes blames it on the “actions of one of his house guests” and an additional Bitcoin seizure casts a little doubt on the charges); he was arrested in June 2013 and triply charged in Charleston with distribution/possession of marijuana/clonazepam/DMT/methylone but he did not seem to be selling marijuana on SR and the available court records do not indicate whether he is being charged due to offline or online drug dealing, but the mention of “two undercover drug buys…in April” imply he was selling off-SR and may have been caught that way.

On 2013-04-26, 2 Iowan men, Adam Lawin & Benjamin Walker, were raided for importing MDMA from the UK & Belgium (press release; sentencing). Customs interceptions of their packages beginning in 2012 were followed by a local undercover buy, which triggered the raid.

During May 2013, a teen in Indiana was arrested after his mother informed on him. I also know of another case involving an American who was convicted after a controlled delivery of LSD mailed from the Netherlands; his package was likely detected.

A complaint filed 2013-06-13 against a David Lawrence Handel charges him with distributing methylone, 2C-E, and 2C-C; no full complaint is available and it is apparently sealed. Handel is known to be SR-related because the edgarnumbers complaint says so. La Moustache suggests that Handel was the research-chemical seller daviddd, based on davidd’s sales volume, public silence since the right time, a rumor that he had been arrested, the coincidence that davidd listed 1kg of methylone for sale just like the LE-controlled Digitalink & edgarnumbers seller profiles had, and a suspicious attempt by the davidd attempt to send a ‘free sample’ to a SR1 moderator. This identification as the SR1 seller davidd was eventually confirmed when Handel pled guilty in 2015 (plea agreement; sentencing order). He had been the target of several undercover buys by the Maryland Marco Polo task force which led to his profiling & identification; he was arrested after picking up a package from post office, was carrying a gun, apartment was searched, and wound up handing over his SR1 seller account.

On 2013-06-28, the seller Sheldon Kennedy (“edgarnumbers”; profile) was raided in Nebraska (he had sold methylone among others on SR, and guns on the short-lived Armory); he cooperated (turning over his customers’ addresses), was eventually officially arrested 2014-02-19, and his case was unsealed the next day (complaint), finally being sentenced to a reduced two years. He had been busted after “digitalink” turned over all his customers’ addresses in November 2011, which included edgarnumbers’s address; he was then targeted for undercover buys and confirmation that he was a drug & gun dealer through his lack of visible income, Gmail & Amazon accounts, Facebook & Google+ profiles, interviews at his local post office & debit card records of many postal purchases, and a return address. (Kennedy turns out to be the SR1 seller mentioned in an article on the Internet sex-cam site Chaturbate.)

In July 2013 according to DHS agent DerYeghiayan’s testimony, the Texas seller and then SR1 employee “CaptainMal”/“scout”/“cirrus”’s account was taken over by law enforcement and the account used to infiltrate SR1 and later SR2; she was likely arrested at some point before that in June or July 2013 on some charge (possibly relating to her activity as a seller selling bitcoins, although an LE agent may have implied she got in trouble for something unrelated to SR1 and offered to flip); a later account by D-Y states that Scout was caught when she made the mistake of accepting a free toy from Dutch SR1 seller “Nomad Bloodbath”, who had been tracked through mail & flipped earlier. Cirrus has been suspected long before as there were only a few suspects for the UC who was reported in October 2013 as chatting with Ulbricht as he was arrested, but the hard confirmation came when the evidence list was leaked 2014-12-19.

On 2013-07-11, two young Algoma, Wisconsin men, J.J. Savoie & S.J. Paape importing MDMA from Germany (mugshot) - possibly from Afterhour? - saw their package detected by Customs and received a controlled delivery.

Also on 2013-07-24, the Wisconsin SR1 buyer Ryan M Petersen was searched over an intercepted package of MDMA from Belgium, after his friend he was using as a drop had been searched after an earlier 2013-04-26 CD (he then cooperated). He eventually reached a plea bargain (court records #2014CF000288)

A New York man Nicholas C Moffitt was prosecuted in August 2013 after selling Suboxone in person, having his mail monitored, and then his store (with drugs on the premises) raided; he pled guilty

Also in August 2013, the large Dutch MDMA seller SuperTrips was arrested (forfeiture; press release; plea agreement); profiling of his packages and fingerprints provided enough grounds that when he tried to visit the USA, he was detained at the airport, his unencrypted laptop examined and all his records found (including all buyer addresses), whereupon he confessed & began cooperating (helping bust his collaborator UnderGroundSyndicate in October 2013). (His account would be used by a DHS undercover agent until SR1 was raided 2 months later.) He was sentenced to 10 years prison.

Also in September 2013, a Vermont student Sid Hammer was charged with drug possession; he had purchased them off SR for local resale, and was reported to police through complaints of “smells of burnt marijuana”.

In October 2013, the founder of SR, Ross Ulbricht, was arrested in San Francisco and charged with a laundry list of crimes; he was ultimately convicted and sentenced to life without parole. Logs from his laptop implicated a college friend, Richard Bates (“baronsyntax”) in helping program SR1 and buying some drugs; this was used as leverage to force Bates to testify against Ulbricht in his trial. Reportedly there were, besides NOD, Ulbricht, 4 UKers and 2 Swedes, “at least half a dozen other arrests currently in the works” (a promise fulfilled subsequently).

Simultaneous with the SR bust, a Washington state man & his girlfriend, the seller “NOD”, was charged with heroin selling (complaint, docket, interview) with some leniency since they cooperated after their July bust & was sentenced to (a perhaps surprisingly low) 5 years. A pseudonymous Redditor claims to have been a customer of NOD, among other sellers, and to have been searched, arrested & charged on 2013-10-08, with (apparently) another pseudonymous Redditor reporting state charges & posting his indictment. (Interestingly, NOD may have done a interview for the Drugs Inc. TV series somewhere around March 2013.)

The Florida seller “UnderGroundSyndicate”/“BTCMaster” Angel William Quinones (profile, plea agreement) was arrested near-simultaneously with DPR thanks to the cooperation of his partner/supplier, the Dutch seller SuperTrips, who had been arrested when he earlier tried to fly into the USA in August 2013 with an unencrypted laptop after having been identified through latent fingerprints on packaging.

The NY seller of clonazepam/hydrocodone/heroin “deezletime” (profile), Michael Duch, was arrested on 2013-10-01 as well, ultimately reaching a plea deal on 2014-12-10, in time to testify in the Ulbricht trial. In exchange for his testimony, he was sentenced to 2.5 years in July 2015 (most already served).

On 2013-11-21, the seller “MDpro” was arrested in Delaware (seller profile, forum discussions, forum posts, BMR posts under her real name) and charged in federal court (PACER web data, complaint/filings), ultimately sentenced to 2.5 years; based on the complaint, it seems her fatal mistake was either using tracking on her shipments through an account registered in her real name or putting valid return addresses on her shipments to a PO box registered to her real name, which allowed the undercover buyer to find her and compile the extensive case against her. Among her many security mistakes included accepting shipments from other sellers to her apartment addressed to her partner (and partner in crime).

On 2013-12-17, 4 members of the methamphetamine group seller “hammertime” were arrested in Oregon as well as 3 others charged (PACER, indictment; more coverage; trial; plea agreement; sentencing for two). The leader, Jason Weld Hagen, was ultimately sentenced to 3 years; the cited reason for such a light sentence was concerns over the Force/Bridges SR1 corruption scandal.

On 2013-12-19 (indictment; girlfriend’s report), the former SR administrator/employee “Inigo” was arrested in Virginia.

On 2014-01-26, the Bitcoin seller “BTCKing” (SR1/2) & an accomplice at BitInstant were arrested in Florida & NY (respectively) after an IRS investigation (indictment); BTCKing offered a service in which he sent buyers a bank account number to deposit cash to (which he then converted into bitcoins via BitInstant), then transferred bitcoins to the buyer on Silk Road. He was arrested after an undercover agent (starting in August 2012) made purchases, received the bank account information, and obtained his bank records; the case was further cemented by using the SR messages from the FBI’s copy of the servers (apparently BTCKing did not believe in using PGP), the home IP embedded in BTCKing’s emails with BitInstant (BTCKing used Safe-mail.net but apparently did not connect over Tor), and his accomplice’s Gmail emails & chats obtained. (Ironically, BTCKing had declined Dread Pirate Robert’s July 2013 invitation to join him in creating an “Anonymous Bitcoin Exchange” by pointing out his vulnerability to investigation: “All LE has to do is go to the bank and ask who is the Trustee of RMF Trust and BANG… They will seize the funds and me.”) He pled guilty and was sentenced to 4 years

In late May 2014, the SR1 oxycodone/hydrocodone seller “CALIGIRL” (profile), Matthew Jones, was arrested in Dallas, Texas (press release, criminal complaint & excerpts, PACER), pled guilty, and was sentenced to 5 years & ten months. An undercover agent had made 2 purchases through SR1 and 6 over Bitmessage after the SR1 bust; CALIGIRL did not vary packaging methods or drop off location, allowing his packages to be profiled, traced back to a sorting facility, where the agent discovered they were all dropped off at a single postal box. In addition, on the last purchase, the agent social-engineered CALIGIRL into accepting part of the payment to his personal bank account. This all fed into a comprehensive investigation of CALIGIRL’s life which drew on information from (but likely not exclusive to): Facebook; Amazon shopping logs and IP; #bitcoin-otc IP & transactions; Local Bitcoin transactions; domain names and telephone; cellphone apps (Ding) usage & callers & IPs; Post Office photos (from automated postal machine); the landlord for his post box; travel records; electronic toll records recording movements of his car; hotels he stayed at (he used places he stayed or was near as return addresses); and financial records from: Xoom (and IP addresses), Wells Fargo, JP Morgan Chase, Western Union, & MoneyGram. There are currently no known controlled deliveries or arrests of CALIGIRL customers (possibly the SR1 bust eliminated most of his business).

On 2014-11-05, Marylanders Tom & Amanda Callahan (SR1 Bitcoin seller/exchanger “JumboMonkeyBiscuit”) were raided by the Baltimore task force (see exhibit B of Bridges, and “United States v. 50.44 Bitcoins”) for money laundering. The SR1 server image had been used to identify a PO box that JumboMonkeyBiscuit used for their Bitcoin-for-mailed-cash sales, registered in their name, which in conjunction with an October 2014 intercept by USPS of $10000 cash (they apparently had moved on to other DNMs but it is unspecified which). Their case came to light as part of the investigation of dirty cop Shaun Bridges, who stole some of the seized bitcoins.

On 2015-05-28, charges were announced against 30yo Louisiana man Beau Wattigney for being the SR1/2 “PurpleLotus” seller of counterfeit coupons (complaint; press release; media); he pled guilty and was sentenced January 2016 to 3.4 years prison. PurpleLotus had retired well before May 2015; the complaint says only that he was caught in part based on “forensic analysis of images of servers seized during the dismantlement of Silk Road 1.0, the Federal Bureau of Investigation (‘FBI’) was able to recover, among other things, transaction histories and private message communications associated with Silk Road 1.0 users.” and also quotes a (unencrypted) PM from PurpleLotus to a buyer explaining how to use counterfeit coupons. A Redditor claiming to be SR1 seller RXMan says that he remembers trading prescription pills for coupons and that PurpleLotus provided, via unencrypted PMs, the name Beau Wattigney & a mailing address.