Who is Ross Ulbricht, the founder of the drug marketplace Silk Road, now pardoned by Trump? | american news

The creator of a dark web marketplace that sold illegal drugs, stolen passports and hacking equipment using Bitcoin has been pardoned by President Donald Trump.

Ross Ulbricht was sentenced to life imprisonmentwithout the possibility of parole, in 2015 in connection with his ownership and operation of the hidden website. The then 26-year-old was also ordered to forfeit $183.9m (£120.2m).

“Make no mistake: Ulbricht was a drug dealer and criminal profiteer who exploited people’s addictions and contributed to the deaths of at least six young people,” Preet Bharara, U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York, said as he was jailed. .

What was the Silk Road?

According to documents presented during the trial, Ulbricht created Silk Road in January 2011 and owned and operated the underground website until it was shut down by police in October 2013.

The Silk Road took its name from a network of historic trade routes active in the second century.

It turned out to be the most sophisticated and extensive criminal marketplace on the Internet, where a variety of illegal drugs were bought and sold.

Silk Road was used by thousands of drug traffickers and distributed hundreds of kilograms of illegal drugs to more than 100,000 buyers, totaling more than $200m (£131m). Ulbricht was accused of earning more than $13m (£10.53m) in kickbacks.

Ulbricht was accused of using a Bitcoin-based payment system to facilitate illegal activity on the site, and he used a special network to hide users’ identities and locations.

Read more: How users gained access to Silk Road

The FBI said the site had just under a million registered users, but it’s not clear how many of them were active or what country they were in.

Murder for hire and six deaths

Prosecutors also alleged that Ulbricht was willing to use violence to protect his criminal enterprise.

They said he solicited six murders-for-hire – including one against a former employee – although there was no evidence that any of these actually took place and Ulbricht was never prosecuted for them.

The former employee has also voiced support for the campaign to free Ulbricht, saying he did not believe he was dangerous.

Six deaths were linked to drugs sold at the site. Among them was a 27-year-old Microsoft employee who was found unresponsive in front of his computer logged into Silk Road. He had died of an overdose of heroin and prescription drugs.

Two sixteen-year-old boys, one from Australia and one from California, both died from taking 25i-NBOMe, a powerful synthetic drug designed to mimic LSD (and commonly referred to as the “N-Bomb”), which they had purchased on the Internet .

Read more: Seized Silk Road Bitcoins to be auctioned by US

Captured by a Gmail account

It was a painstaking process to identify the man behind Silk Road, known online as Dread Pirate Roberts (DPR), a reference to a character in the 1987 film The Princess Bride.

It began with a post made on a web forum where users were discussing magic mushrooms. A user nicknamed Altoid began publicizing the site, linking to its dark web location.

Altoid then appeared on another site discussing virtual currency. In a post asking for an IT expert with knowledge of Bitcoin, he asked people to contact him via [email protected].

This email address was the breakthrough that ultimately linked Ulbricht to Silk Road.

An undercover agent linked this address to a number of social networks, including a YouTube account, which had favored several clips from the Ludwig von Mises Institute, an Austrian economics school. DPR would later make several references to the Institute on Silk Road discussion forums.

A further lead came in the form of a routine border inspection of a package from Canada containing several forged documents, all bearing Ulbricht’s photo, delivered to his apartment in San Francisco.

Another downfall came when Ulbright posted on a question-and-answer site for programmers and asked questions about a complex code that would later become part of the source code for Silk Road. He accidentally identified himself as Ross Ulbricht before quickly correcting it.

Life in prison

Ulbricht spoke after the sentencing and expressed remorse for what he had done.

“I have essentially ruined my life and broken the hearts of every member of my family and my closest friends,” he said. He walked out of the courtroom with pictures of those who died from drugs bought on his website.

Now aged 39, he most recently wrote to President Joe Biden in October 2022 asking for his release.

“For countless hours I have searched my soul and examined the misguided decisions I made when I was younger,” he wrote.

“I have dug deep and made a sincere effort to change not just what I do, but who I am. I am no longer the type of man who could break the law and let so many down.”

He said he had worked with prisoners to overcome addiction and understand “the harm I caused by helping to promote drugs”.

He said he longed to have a future again and hoped to start a family with his fiancee, who “stood by me all these years”.

Freedom

On the second day of his presidency, Trump said he had called Ulbricht’s mother to tell her that “it was my pleasure to have just signed a full and unconditional pardon of her son”.

He called those who had convicted Ulbricht “scum”, referring to his own beliefs: “(They) were some of the same lunatics who were involved in the modern weaponization of the government against me.”

The ‘Free Ross’ X account posted a photo of Ulbricht leaving the prison a short time later.