A Maryland man has been charged in U.S. District Court with selling drugs on the massive online black market Silk Road, which was shut down earlier this month by federal authorities.
Court documents filed on Monday charge Jacob Theodore George IV, 32, who allegedly used the name "digitalink", with selling heroin and methylone over the sites from November 2011 to January 2012 using its encrypted servers and digital currency.
The indictment earlier this month of Silk Road's alleged owner Ross William Ulbricht, a San Francisco-based engineer who used the name "Dread Pirate Roberts," stunned experts on the so-called Deep Web because the site had been impenetrable to law enforcement. It used a series of servers to conceal its users' identities.
Authorities say buyers and sellers traded more than $1 billion in illegal narcotics on the site, and it offered tutorials on how to hack ATM machines and provided contact lists for hit men and other black-market connections. Ulbricht was also charged with scheming to kill rivals in cases filed in federal courts in Maryland and New York.
The charges filed against George suggest continuing fallout from Ulbricht's arrest and that authorities may have been able to learn more about other site users.
Attempts to locate family of George were not immediatley successful. State court records show he lived in Essex in 2010, when he was charged in Baltimore County with drug possession and sentenced to three years in prison, which was suspended. A notation in the court file said he was ordered to abstain from heroin and illegal drugs and submit to treatment. He's faced a slew of lesser charges handled in Maryland's District Courts.
