Ross_Ulbricht

 

At some point in this digital age, someone was going to take their drug-dealings away from the streets and into the cyber world.  So, this story below shouldn’t come as no surprise. 

 

Ross William Ulbricht, also known as Dread Pirate Robinson, was recently captured and charged for running a billion dollar illegal drug website. The website ‘Silk Road’ was a secret community of users who used the site to purchase and/or distribute illegal drugs (i.e. heroin, marijuana, psychedelics, stimulants, etc).  The site had over 1 million users registered worldwide.  Its popularity was fueled by the fact that an user could register and browse through the catalogue of drugs anonymously.  Federal authorities claims that Ulbricht brokered over $1 billion in transactions on Silk Road and ordered a failed murder-for-hire on a former employee.

 

After two years of investigation, the Feds captured 29 year old Ulbricht in a quiet library in San Francisco, California.  Ulbricht is originally from Austin, Texas but took up modest living in San Fran with two roommates.

 

Ulbricht first came to the attention of federal agents in 2011 when they figured out he was “altoid,” someone who they say was marketing Silk Road on other drug-related websites the FBI was watching. In October 2011, “altoid” posted an advertisement for a computer expert with experience in Bitcoin, an electronic currency, and gave an email address.

 

From there, investigators began to monitor Ulbricht’s online behavior closely, according to the court records. Investigators said Ulbricht was living within 500 feet of a San Francisco Internet cafe on June 3, 2013, when someone “logged into a server used to administer the Silk Road website.”

 

Court documents show investigators slowly connected Ulbricht to Silk Road by monitoring his email and picking up on some slipups, including using his real name to ask a programmers’ website a highly technical question about connecting to secret sites like Silk Road.

 

His final mistake, according to the court papers, was ordering fake identification documents from a Silk Road vendor from Canada. One of the nine documents was a California driver’s license with Ulbricht’s photograph, birthdate but a different name. The package was intercepted at the border during a routine U.S. Customs search.

 

On July 26, Homeland Security investigators visited Ulbricht at his San Francisco residence. He “generally refused to answer questions,” the agents said.

 

The investigators left that day without arresting Ulbricht, who holds a bachelor’s of science degree in physics from the University of Texas at Dallas and a master’s degree from Penn State University.

 

They returned Tuesday and arrested him at the library. He faces the prospect of life in prison if convicted of all the charges. (AP)