Historical — seized 2013
No .onion address on file
Silk Road darknet market
Silk Road is a historical catalog entry. The FBI and the Manhattan U.S. Attorney announced an October 2013 seizure and the arrest of Ross Ulbricht. It is not an active market and has no live onion address in our files. This is an editorial profile, not a marketplace listing.
Catalog facts
- Reported launch
- Reported 2011
- Public focus
- Historical — seized 2013
- Catalog status
- Seized — Seized October 2013 (FBI / SDNY)
About Silk Road
Public reporting dates Silk Road to 2011 as a Tor-reachable marketplace that used Bitcoin for payments. It was a single centralized shop using Tor as transport — not a feature of the Tor network. That distinction is the reason this catalog treats the name as a shutdown row, not as a description of Tor itself.
On 1 October 2013 FBI agents arrested Ross Ulbricht in a San Francisco public library. The Manhattan U.S. Attorney announced the site seizure the same week under a civil forfeiture complaint. Court papers cited more than two and a half years of turnover above $1 billion; later summaries say the government seized roughly 174,000 bitcoins from the server and Ulbricht’s hardware. Those figures are case-record claims, not an in-house count.
The case became the template later takedowns copied: locate the server, identify the operator through ordinary investigative errors, replace the site with a banner. Ulbricht was sentenced to life in 2015. In January 2025 he received a presidential pardon. Neither the sentence nor the pardon puts a live shop back in this catalog.
Those public reports treat the original shop as closed. Onion rows stay empty. A reused Silk Road brand after a widely reported takedown is a common phishing lure — treat any address you find elsewhere as untrusted until you check a signed canary and a second independent source.
Reported history
- 2011
- Public summaries date the shop here as a Tor-reachable marketplace using Bitcoin.
- 1–2 October 2013
- The FBI arrested Ulbricht in San Francisco. The Manhattan U.S. Attorney announced the seizure under a civil forfeiture complaint.
- 2015
- Ulbricht was sentenced to life. The shop remained a seized historical name.
- January 2025
- Ulbricht received a presidential pardon. This catalog still lists Silk Road as Seized — a historical row.
Reported public features
- Historical entry only. Tags in our file: Historical.
- Public reporting describes a centralized marketplace that used Tor for transport and Bitcoin for payments.
- Court and press accounts say the 2013 action combined a server seizure with an operator arrest — the pattern later shops are measured against.
- Turnover and bitcoin-seizure figures come from court papers and later summaries. We do not copy competing integers onto the card.
What this page does not claim
- This is not an active market. There is no live onion in our files.
- Silk Road was not a Tor service. A shop using Tor does not define the overlay network.
- A 2025 pardon of the original operator is not a live listing and not a verified mirror.
- Any “Silk Road is back” page should be treated as a clone until a signed canary and a second independent source agree.
Public sources
How TorBible records Silk Road
Status, tags, and listing counts come from our catalog file. Editorial notes below the card come from open public reporting and are worded as reported when we have not verified them in-house. Treat every mirror you find elsewhere as untrusted until you check a PGP canary and a second independent source. See phishing detection and OPSEC fundamentals.