Prosecutors Using Murder-for-Hire Plots Against Ross Ulbricht in Drug Case
The alleged architect of the first Silk Road, known to users as Dread Pirate Roberts and to the government as Ross Ulbricht, is currently facing two separate federal cases. The first is in Baltimore for a single murder-for-hire plot which the government feels it has enough evidence to proceed. The other is in New York for four counts of participation in a narcotics trafficking conspiracy, running a continuing criminal enterprise, computer hacking, and a money laundering conspiracy. Also read: SecondMarket's Bitcoin Investment Trust Syndicate Won 48,000 BTC in Latest Silk Road Bitcoin....
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Ross Ulbricht's defense attorney, Joshua Dratel, does not deny that his client founded the Silk Road. Indeed, Ulbricht began the illicit dark web drug market in February 2011, Dratel says, as a sort "economic experiment" relating to Ulbricht's libertarian belief system. However, the defense claims that after a few months, Ulbricht "found it too stressful" and turned the reigns over to other people who had begun working on it with him. Also read: Prosecutors Using Murder-for-Hire Plots Against Ross Ulbricht in Drug Case. Ross Ulbricht: Dread Pirate Roberts? In a 2013 interview with what....
Ross Ulbricht, the alleged owner of the seized online drug marketplace Silk Road, is now accused of plotting murder schemes of six people, including his own employee who, he believed, had stolen around $350,000 worth of Bitcoins from him. The US investigators, who were collecting evidence from Ulbricht's laptop to prove his alleged involvement with Silk Road, found some electronic communications which mentioned the suspected thief and the illegal methods to get rid of him, according to the filing mentioned on Bloomberg. The conversation was conducted in January and February 2013, in which....
Ross Ulbricht, the alleged owner and operator of Silk Road, is currently in two federal cases. In New York he is facing charges of narcotics conspiracy, money laundering and computer fraud and in Baltimore for a single murder-for-hire plot. Ulbricht will go on trial in New York on January 5, 2015, and while murder is not part of the charges he is facing, it is being used to discredit him and continues to creep into the case. In response to a request from prosecutors, Judge Katherine Forrest has allowed prosecutors to keep a list of their witnesses secret until January 2nd, the Friday....
The Silk Road trial is heating up as sittings have entered the third week. Most importantly, the first hints of an alleged murder-for-hire plot are now surfacing, while the Federal prosecutors have added new proof to the already overwhelming stack of evidence suggesting Ross Ulbricht and Dread Pirate Roberts (DPR) are one and the same. The third week of sittings took off where the second week left off: the prosecution's attempt to link the Dread Pirate Roberts alias to Ross Ulbricht. And much like the second week, matters are looking bleak for Ulbricht. “I saw the relative ease that came....
Ross Ulbricht has appealed his conviction and life sentence for running the online drug marketplace Silk Road, according to court documents filed Thursday. A jury found Ulbricht guilty in February on all seven counts with which he was charged, such as running a narcotics-trafficking enterprise, money laundering and computer hacking. Ulbricht wrote a letter to Judge Katherine Forrest asking her to "leave a light at the end of the tunnel" in sentencing and to "leave me my old age." She did not. Instead, Ulbricht received the harshest sentence possible, including a 20 year life sentence, one....