The creator of a dark web market that sold illegal drugs, stolen passports and hacking equipment using Bitcoin has been pardoned by President Donald Trump.
Ross Ulbricht was sentenced to life in prison, without 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,” said Preet Bharara, US Attorney for the Southern District of New York said at the time of his incarceration.
What was Silk Road?
According to documents presented at his trial, Ulbricht created Silk Road in January 2011 and owned and operated the underground website until it was shut down by the police in October 2013.
Silk Road took its name from a network of historic trading routes that were active in the second century.
It emerged as 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 dealers, distributing hundreds of kilograms of illegal drugs to more than 100,000 buyers, totaling more than $200m (£131m). Ulbricht was accused of making more than $13m (£10.53m) in commission.
Ulbricht was accused of using a Bitcoin-based payment system to facilitate illegal activity on the site, and he used a special network to conceal the identities and locations of its users.
Read more: How users accessed Silk Road
The FBI said the site had just under a million registered users, but it’s not clear how many of those were active, or which country they were in.
Murder for hire and six deaths
Prosecutors also claimed 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 any of these actually took place and Ulbricht was never tried for them.
The former employee has also voiced support for the campaign to free Ulbricht, and said he did not believe he was dangerous.
Six deaths were connected to drugs sold on the site. Among them, was a 27-year-old Microsoft employee who was found unresponsive in front of his computer, which was logged into Silk Road. He had died of a heroin and prescription drug overdose.
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 “N-Bomb”) that they had bought on the site.
Read more: Seized Silk Road Bitcoins auctioned by US
Caught 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 discussed magic mushrooms. A user nicknamed Altoid started publicising the site, linking off to its dark web location.
Altoid then appeared on another site, discussing virtual currency. In a post asking for an IT expert with a 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 series of social networks, including a YouTube account, which had favourited several clips from the Ludwig von Mises Institute, an Austrian school of economics. 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 check of a package from Canada that contained several forged documents, all with Ulbricht’s photo, being delivered to his flat share in San Francisco.
Another slip-up came when Ulbright posted on a question-and-answer site for programmers, asking questions about an intricate code that 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 sentencing expressing remorse for what he had done.
“I’ve 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 carrying with him photographs of those who died as a result of drugs purchased on his website.
Now aged 39, he most recently wrote to President Joe Biden in October 2022, pleading for release.
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“Over 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 not just change what I do, but who I am. I am no longer the type of man who could break the law and let down so many.”
He said he had worked with prisoners to overcome addictions and come to understand “the damage I caused by helping promote drugs”.
He said he longed to have a future once more and hoped to start a family with his fiance, who “stood by me for all these years”.
Freedom
On the second day of his presidency, Mr Trump said he had called Ulbricht’s mother to let her know “it was my pleasure to have just signed a full and unconditional pardon of her son”.
He called those who had convicted Ulbricht “scum”, citing his own convictions: “[They] were some of the same lunatics who were involved in the modern day weaponization of government against me.”
The ‘Free Ross’ X account posted an image of Ulbricht leaving prison a short while later.
