In the
absence of usual digital clues, the feds fell back on a
low-tech approach: keep going back in time until you find the first guy to ever talk about the Silk Road. Find that guy and you probably have a person of interest, if not Roberts himself.
So they looked, assigning
one agent to conduct "an extensive search of the Internet," in the FBI's words, looking for early Silk Road publicity. The earliest post ever to mention the site appeared on a drug-oriented forum called shroomery.org, where a user named "altoid" had made a single post. It read:
I came across this website called Silk Road. It's a Tor hidden service that claims to allow you to buy and sell anything online anonymously. I'm thinking of buying off it, but wanted to see if anyone here had heard of it and could recommend it.
The post directed readers to visit silkroad420.wordpress.com, belonging to the blogging operator WordPress, where further instructions would be found for accessing the real Silk Road site. A subpoena to WordPress Revealed that the blog had been set up on January 23, only four days before the Altoid post. If this wasn't the first mention of Silk Road, it was certainly one of them.
Altoid became a person of interest, but who was he? Further research revealed that Altoid had been posting on a board called Bitcoin Talk—further suggesting a possible link to the Silk Road, which operated on Bitcoin. A key break came when the
agent found an October 11, 2011 post by Altoid, looking for an "IT pro in the Bitcoin community" and directing all inquiries to "rossulbricht at gmail dot com."
A
subpoena to Google revealed that this account was in fact registered to one "Ross Ulbricht."