How A Delaware Doctor Was Linked To Silk Road Drug Sales

For years, Silk Road was regarded as an impressively extrajudicial place where people could buy and sell illicit goods  outside of the reach of the arm of the law. In the last few months that narrative has unraveled as law enforcement has taken the site down, arrested its alleged founder, and begun charging suspected Silk Road drug vendors. (Forbes has been tracking the busts here.) The latest indictment against Olivia Bolles, a 32-year-old doctor in Delaware, lays out in graphic detail how illusory anonymity via Silk Road was once commerce conducted on the site moved into the real world.

Bolles was arrested last week as was her roommate/fiance, Alexandra Gold, who is also a doctor and was listed until recently as an OBGYN instructor at Johns Hopkins University. Bolles, who was a chief OBGYN resident at a Delaware hospital, is accused of operating on the site as MDPRO -- a bit of an identity giveaway if the allegations are true -- and making over 600 sales in 17 countries through Silk Road of Xanax, Adderall, and Oxycontin, among other controlled substances. The drugs were hidden in packages from an invented company called "Samples Unlimited" that contained candy. Unfortunately for MDPRO, an undercover DEA agent in Miami was one of her customers. He ordered lots of pills, a THC e-cigarette and hash oil from MDPRO, which came in four different shipments, along with Sour Patch watermelon candy, Airheads, Lifesaver gummies, and Jolly Ranchers. (Obviously, MDPRO's specialty wasn't dentistry.) According to Philly.com, Gold admitted to the DEA that she helped package the drugs.

While Silk Road may have hidden people's identities through IP masking with TOR and financial masking with Bitcoin, identities could leak once they had to actually send physical goods from one place to another. Until you can 3-D print drugs, there are going to be lots of ways to be caught. This is how the DEA agent says he connected MDPRO's identity to Bolles:

• When he got his first package (four Oxycontin tablets and Sour Patch candy), it had a USPS tracking number and a return address for Samples Unlimited's P.O. box. All the other shipments came from the same address. That was pretty revealing. The box was rented from PostNet, a business center. PostNet told the agent that it had been rented by Olivia Bolles and it had copies of her driver's license and vehicle registration, as well as her phone number and VISA credit card information. Well, all those things could have potentially been stolen from her. Identity theft happens... but the list goes on.

• The P.O. box contained a package bound for Sacramento that had been returned to the sender. It contained Swedish fish and Xanax. It also had a USPS tracking number on it, which revealed it had been sent from an Automatic Postal Machine. And surprise (!), those things take photos of you. Back in 2004, EPIC found out in a FOIA that the machines take photos and keep them for 30 days (pg. 12). If the camera doesn't manage to take a good photo of you, it won't let you pay for your postage. When the postal inspector gave the agent the photo of the package sender, he compared it with Bolles's license and with publicly available photos on her Facebook page, and MySpace page. "The photographs all matched," he writes in the criminal complaint. (Arbitrary link  here to Onion video on Facebook being CIA's dream come true.)
• Moreover, the VISA card led the agent to M&T Bank , which showed a bunch of Bitcoin deposits. Bolles had an account with Bitcoin exchange Coinbase. She had signed up with the email address oBOLLES@tormail.org. (Um, not the best stealth email address ever if that's what it was intended to be.) With the exception of a seven Bitcoin purchase from Coinbase in March 2013 for $311.16, all the transactions went in the other direction. Over a five month period in 2013, Bolles cashed in 265.5 Bitcoin for $29,587.72. (Ouch, she should have held onto them! They'd be worth over $200,000 today.)
• There was also an eBay account, again with the username "oBolles," which was used to purchase Breaking Bad-style lab equipment and chemicals useful for making THC and MDMA, including 2 liters of chloroform. (In other news, apparently you can buy chloroform on eBay.)

There were a couple of other channels through which the DEA agent collected information about MDPRO and Bolles detailed in the criminal complaint. According to the Department of Justice, she faces up to 20 years if convicted. A message left on her cell phone has not been returned.

More Silk Road vendor arrests seem likely depending on how many undercover agents were among the site's user base. Perhaps some vendors were less careful than others in shielding their identities, but given how hard it is to go through today's world without leaving a trail -- digital or otherwise -- it seems increasingly obvious that Silk Road's promise of an identity-free marketplace was a false one.