“Based on the forgoing,” the complaint says, “I submit that there is probably cause to believe that STEVEN SADLER and JENNA WHITE have conspired to distribute cocaine, heroin, and methamphetamine.” 
 
 Nothing about this series of arrests, or last week’s criminal complaint against Silk Road’s proprietor, should be comforting to Silk Road dealers. Investigators seem to have caught on to Silk Road about as fast as users did. 
 
 And those users are getting worried too. “Got a call…” writes one user on Reddit. “Apparently I have to meet with the local police agency. Is this a true law in the states that I have to go?” Many other users seem to be named, or at least identified by address, in the complaint against Sadler and White; if authorities were interested in prosecuting their customers, they have a lot of information to work with. 
 
 A user on the encrypted Silk Road forums claiming to be one of the sellers targeted in the UK investigation has a rosier outlook. “I’m the one arrested in Devon, anyone know who the others are?” asks the user, who says he is popular Silk Road user PlutoPete. “Unlike other vendors, my address was no secret, PlanetPluto is a registered business selling legal products. I break a few small rules such as selling seeds together with a growguide, but they would look so pathetic doing me for stuff like that the publicity would just send me more customers,” he wrote on Oct. 4, soon after British authorities seized his “legal herbs” (Salvia, Kratom) and computers. 
 
 “They got the warrant on the suspicion that i’m involved in the large scale distribution of class A drugs, my lawyer says there’s no way they could suspect that from the evidence that had been disclosed to that point, but that was before i returned home and found the copy of the evidence list, 18 pages of stuff they’ve seized,” he writes. 
 
 Regardless, this will send a shock through the so-called dark net. Feds are going after Silk Road like a simple drug ring, not an exotic website, and have been investigating it effectively since 2011. 
 
 The relative difficulty of accessing Silk Road — setting up Tor, converting cash to Bitcoins, setting up encrypted communications — may have given users a sense of security and secrecy. But these technological safeguards aren’t really safeguards at all: Buying and selling illegal substances through a service run by the government, it turns out, is more than enough to get you caught. 

 Welp, that settles that. Anybody who was wondering if authorities were going to keep going after the arrest of Silk Road kingpin Ross Ulbricht and start targeting users don't need to wonder anymore. Multiple arrests have now been made worldwide, and it looks like more are on the way. 
 
 This new wave of arrests knows no borders. Feds charged a 40-year-old Washington man believed to have been in "top one percent of sellers" on Silk Road along with his roommate for selling methamphetamine, heroin and cocaine—including one particular blend called "1980s Time Machine." Meanwhile, four users in the United Kingdom were taken in for drug charges, and a pair of men in Sweden were arrested for selling pot on Silk Road. 
 
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 It's unclear how related to Ross Ulbricht's case this latest wave of arrests is. Common sense suggests that the FBI could have easily used data on Silk Roads servers which they managed to physically track down and seize. In the UK, it was not local police who are going after the suspected Silk Road drug dealers but rather the National Crime Agency, a new organization that more or less amounts to a British FBI. But again, we don't yet know if they're working with the FBI or if the arrests are isolated. 
 
 What we do know is that Silk Road users are freaking out. On Reddit, there are now numerous different threads going in which clearly rattled former Silk Road users are wondering if the Feds are coming for them next and if they should talk to a lawyer. Some Reddit users even say that the authorities have contacted them or their parents about receiving drugs through the mail, although it's possible that those calls are related to a scam that's been going around that has nothing to do with the Silk Road case. 
 
 For now, we can probably sit tight and expect more arrests. There were thousands of people selling drugs on Silk Road, and apparently, the Feds have information that incriminates some of the more serious sellers. It's unlikely that authorities are going to go after everyone, especially the small time users who bought a couple hits of molly for a glow stick party. Then again, these people were buying and selling drugs, and that's illegal whether you do it in a dark alley or the dark net. [BuzzFeed]
– It's the last thing users of the now-shuttered Silk Road website wanted to hear about: more drug-related arrests. Last week, authorities in San Francisco nabbed the site's alleged leader, Ross Ulbricht. Now it appears that the investigation won't stop there. Eight more alleged drug dealers who used the site—described as a kind of black-market eBay for illicit drugs—have been arrested around the world, reports BuzzFeed. That includes two people in Washington state (one accused of being a top seller), four in Britain, and two in Sweden. Much about the investigation is unclear, but "what we do know is that Silk Road users are freaking out," writes Adam Clarke Estes at Gizmodo. "On Reddit, there are now numerous different threads going in which clearly rattled former Silk Road users are wondering if the Feds are coming for them next and if they should talk to a lawyer." They probably had a false sense of security because the site was so hard to access and conducted its encrypted transactions in Bitcoins, adds BuzzFeed's John Herman. "But these technological safeguards aren’t really safeguards at all: Buying and selling illegal substances through a service run by the government, it turns out, is more than enough to get you caught."