At 29 years of age, Ross William Ulbricht has been charged with running Silk Road.

What confuses me, is that these are supposedly the ways he got caught. All of which seem like trivial things that he should never have been doing.

• He avertised Silk Road on drug forums and bitcointalk.org with the username “altoid”, then eight months later used the same username whilst looking for developers, along with his personal email address.
• The FBI used a seized web server to track through a VPN to an IP address at a coffee shop near a friend of his.
• USA customs found a package containing nine counterfeit ID’s, all of which had photos of Ross Ulbricht, but with different names.
• He posted a question using his real name on Stack Overflow about using Tor hidden services using Curl in PHP, then changed his name a few minutes later.

Here is a snapshot from his LinkedIn page, in case it is taken down at some point.