Defunct: Blake Benthall

Blake Benthall was born in Houston, Texas sometime during either 1987 or 1988. He is best known for his role as lead administrator of the second iteration of the Silk Road (Silk Road 2.0), which he was arrested consequently at age 26 when the market was seized by law enforcement as part of their “Operation Onymous” on November 6, 2014. He has often been referred to as the creator of the second Silk Road, which is false as he was later put in charge as the lead administrator by the sites’ creator, Dread Pirate Roberts 2, who was later identified as Robert White. Before being the Silk Road’s administrator, Benthall founded his first web-business at age 15, had attended the University of Florida, was a SpaceX engineer for a couple of weeks before quitting, created a tech startup to bring Linux to the iPod, and dabbled in other technology-based startups. He was also home-schooled and was a frequent church-goer who never touched drugs and had sworn-off booze, according to his friends.

About one month after Robert White launched the second Silk Road, three of the markets’ administrators were arrested by law enforcement, which prompted him to disable all deposits and withdraws on the marketplace, and later instated Defcon (Blake Benthall), a user who was very disappointed and vocal about the Silk Road’s seizure, as the sites’ lead administrator. After becoming administrator, he configured and maintained the markets’ virtual private servers (VPSs) and performed virtually every duty of a dark-net market administrator.

His arrest came following a series of events performed by law enforcement to take down Silk Road 2.0. The market had been partially compromised before it was even launched as Robert White chose a DHS undercover agents as one of his moderators. According to the FBI, they themselves identified a foreign server in May, 2014, and commissioned someone to perform a forensic analysis of it, and confirmed that it was indeed one of the Silk Road’s servers, though they never stated how they identified the server, it has been widely speculated that the undercover DHS agent obtained information about it from administrators or by connecting to it and exploiting it. After the FBI successfully located and accessed the server, they found that it frequently sent customer service emails to an individual Gmail address, which they later issued a subpoena to Goodle for its’ associated account, leading them to discover that it was registered to “Blake Benthall”, who identified himself as such in multiple emails sent from that account.

The FBI also obtained that users’ IP address from Google, which they matched with one found to have connection and administrative access to the Silk Road 2.0 server. The agency noticed, that the server was briefly accessed from an IP address in Las Vegas for a couple of days in April that belonged to a hotel and, after later searching guest records, found that Benthall had stayed at that particular hotel during those days. The same incident occurred once again later in June at Lake Tahoe. The FBI found that Blake Benthall had exchanged at least $273,626.60 worth of Bitcoin into US dollars. After searching his emails, they came to the conclusion that he had bought at least $25,000 worth of goods using Bitcoin, and that he had put a $70,000 down payment on a Tesla model S that cost $127,000. During September, FBI agents decided to follow Benthall during a trip to visit his family in Houston, Texas, where they monitored activity outside of his family’s house while working with the undercover agent, in which they noted Defcon was active when Benthall was inside the house and silent when he was gone. The FBI was able to obtain a Pen Register from a court, which allows them to monitor a homes’ internet usage, and found that Benthall was using Tor when Defcon was active, which was the final piece of evidence needed to fully confirm his link to the Silk Road. It wasn’t until November 6 when law enforcement decided to arrest Benthall and seize the Silk Road marketplace. It was reported that, due to his extensive cooperation with law enforcement, he was released not even two months later, and had all charges against him, excluding those pertaining to the failure to report income and pay taxes, were dropped. Not long after his arrested, he was released from custody having spent less than 2 months behind bars. This is due to his excessive cooperation with law enforcement and the fact that he had collected personal information, including real names and home addresses, on many of the markets’ buyers and sellers who failed to encrypt their messages. This information was easily accessible to LE without his consent as the information was stored on his laptop where all forms of hard drive and file encryption were entirely absent from.

Aside from being the head administrators for the Silk Road markets, both Ross Ulbricht and Blake Benthall have notable similarities as they were born in Texas and were San Francisco residents at the time of their arrests, used their personal email addresses for their operations, were eagle scouts, and greatly surprised many of their friends and family members when they were confirmed to be Silk Road kingpins.