1. Ross William Ulbricht is an American who created and operated the illegal darknet market Silk Road from 2011 until his arrest in 2013.
39 Facts About Ross Ulbricht
1. 2.
In October 2013, the Federal Bureau of Investigation arrested Ross Ulbricht and took Silk Road offline.
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Ross Ulbricht was sentenced to double life in prison plus 40 years without the possibility of parole.
4.
Ross Ulbricht was a Boy Scout, attaining the rank of Eagle Scout.
5.
Ross Ulbricht attended West Ridge Middle School and Westlake High School both in the Eanes Independent School District in the suburbs of Austin, graduating from high school in 2002.
6.
Ross Ulbricht attended the University of Texas at Dallas on a full academic scholarship and graduated in 2006 with a bachelor's degree in physics.
7.
Ross Ulbricht received an additional scholarship to attend Pennsylvania State University, where he was in a master's degree program in materials science and engineering and studied crystallography.
8.
Ross Ulbricht graduated from Penn State in 2009 and returned to Austin.
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Ross Ulbricht tried day trading and started a video game company, but neither venture succeeded.
10.
Ross Ulbricht eventually partnered with his friend Donny Palmertree to help build an online used bookseller, Good Wagon Books.
11.
Palmertree, cofounder of Good Wagon Books, eventually moved to Dallas, leaving Ross Ulbricht to run the bookseller by himself.
12.
Around this time, Ross Ulbricht began planning Silk Road.
13.
Ross Ulbricht used the "Dread Pirate Roberts" username for Silk Road, although it is disputed whether only he used that account.
14.
Ross Ulbricht attributed his inspiration for creating the Silk Road marketplace to the novel Alongside Night and the works of Samuel Edward Konkin III.
15.
Ross Ulbricht found Ulbricht's chats showed Pacific time, narrowing down his likely location.
16.
Ross Ulbricht was connected to "Dread Pirate Roberts" by Gary Alford, an Internal Revenue Service investigator working with the Drug Enforcement Administration on the Silk Road case, in mid-2013.
17.
The connection was made by linking the username "altoid", used during Silk Road's early days to announce the website, and a forum post in which Ross Ulbricht, posting under the nickname "altoid", asked for programming help and gave his email address, which contained his full name.
18.
Once Ross Ulbricht was sufficiently distracted, according to Joshuah Bearman of Wired, several agents quickly moved in to arrest him while another agent grabbed the laptop and handed it to agent Thomas Kiernan.
19.
On February 4,2014, Ross Ulbricht was charged with engaging in a continuing criminal enterprise, narcotics conspiracy, conspiracy to commit money laundering, and conspiracy to commit computer hacking.
20.
Federal prosecutors alleged that Ross Ulbricht had paid $730,000 in murder-for-hire deals targeting at least five people, because they purportedly threatened to reveal the Silk Road enterprise.
21.
Ross Ulbricht was not charged in his trial in New York federal court with this offense, though some evidence was introduced at trial supporting the allegations.
22.
The district court found by a preponderance of the evidence that Ross Ulbricht probably sent messages inquiring about such orders.
23.
The possibility that Ross Ulbricht might have commissioned hits was considered by the judge in sentencing Ross Ulbricht to life and was a factor in the Second Circuit's decision to uphold the sentence.
24.
Ross Ulbricht was separately indicted in federal court in Maryland on a single related charge, alleging that he contracted to have one of his employees killed.
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On February 4,2015, Ross Ulbricht was convicted on all counts after a jury trial that had taken place in January 2015.
26.
Ross Ulbricht was ordered to pay about $183 million in restitution, based on the total sales of illegal drugs and counterfeit IDs through Silk Road.
27.
Ross Ulbricht appealed his conviction and sentence to the US Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit in January 2016, claiming that the prosecution illegally withheld evidence of DEA agents' malfeasance in the investigation of Silk Road, of which two agents were convicted.
28.
In December 2017, Ross Ulbricht filed a petition for certiorari with the US Supreme Court, asking the Court to hear his appeal on evidentiary and sentencing issues.
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Ross Ulbricht's petition asked whether the warrantless seizure of an individual's internet traffic information, without probable cause, violated the Fourth Amendment, and whether the Sixth Amendment permits judges to find facts necessary to support an otherwise unreasonable sentence.
30.
Ross Ulbricht's conviction became a cause celebre in American libertarian circles.
31.
The Bitcoin had been stolen from Silk Road in 2013, and Ross Ulbricht had been unsuccessful in getting them back.
32.
Ross Ulbricht was given two life sentences, plus 40 years.
33.
Ross Ulbricht was released from a federal prison in Arizona that evening.
34.
In 2010, Ross Ulbricht partnered with his friend Donny Palmertree to help build an online used bookseller, Good Wagon Books.
35.
The son of Kirk and Lyn Ross Ulbricht, he has a sister, Cally, who was residing in Australia at the time of his arrest, and a half-brother, Travis.
36.
Ross Ulbricht's parents were reported to earn most of their income from renting out beachside vacation homes in Costa Rica.
37.
Ross Ulbricht moved with him to Austin after he received his master's degree and they lived together while he was creating Silk Road.
38.
Ross Ulbricht urged him to visit her in Austin, but he was arrested before he did so.
39.
Ross Ulbricht expressed gratitude to his mother and wife for their efforts in campaigning for his freedom.