Ross Ulbricht, a San Francisco 30-year-old web developer was arrested by FBI in a sting operation in October 2013 accusing him of being the criminal mastermind running Silk Road, where hundreds of millions of dollars in illegal goods were traded. A separate trial in a Baltimore court, on charges including attempted commission of a murder-for-hire, is still ongoing. Silk Road was an underground online marketplace where users could buy and sell anything from drugs to hacking tutorials. Payments were made using bitcoin, a digital currency that’s difficult to trace.
Source: https://thehackernews.com/2015/02/silk-road-founder-ross-ulbricht_4.html