Silk Road

Silk Road
With $1.2 billion in sales and close to 1 million customers, the Silk Road website was the largest black market site on the Dark Web, or "darknet." The website served as a marketplace for illegal drugs, guns, fake passports and driver's licenses, and services such as computer hackers and hit-men. Silk Road used free computer software called "The Onion Router," better known by "Tor," that enables anonymous communication. Tor is an underground computer routing system that randomly sends computer messages through several places on the Internet, while also heavily encrypting them, to hide the link between the source of the message and its destination; this is to ensure privacy. This allowed sellers and buyers on the Silk Road to conduct illegal business more freely and securely. Most transactions were conducted using crypto-currency known as bitcoin.