Silk Road's Ross Ulbricht sentenced to life

originally posted by: combatmaster
a reply to: roadgravel

woah, a life sentence... and he didnt even kill anyone! lol.... all this over a website!

He actually did kill someone. He hired a hitman previously, then hired one again and that's how the FBI caught him. Enough drugs were moving through Silk Road that he was on par with a Mexican cartel, a murder, and an attempted murder. I could let him slide on the website, I think he was actually benefiting society through it by creating peer reviewed drug suppliers and getting people away from shady dealers on the streets.

The hitmen are too much though, he deserves life for that.

a reply to: Mugly

BMR was probably the best marketplace. The guy that ran it had some real integrity you don't usually see in people running anonymous websites. If he wasn't 100% confident that things were secure, he would take the entire thing down rather than put users at risk.

originally posted by: Aazadan

originally posted by: combatmaster
a reply to: roadgravel

woah, a life sentence... and he didnt even kill anyone! lol.... all this over a website!

He actually did kill someone. He hired a hitman previously, then hired one again and that's how the FBI caught him. Enough drugs were moving through Silk Road that he was on par with a Mexican cartel, a murder, and an attempted murder. I could let him slide on the website, I think he was actually benefiting society through it by creating peer reviewed drug suppliers and getting people away from shady dealers on the streets.

The hitmen are too much though, he deserves life for that.

actually he didnt kill anyone. i already explained it twice.
he didnt kill anyone personally.
he did pay to have people killed though. the people were not killed but he thought they were.

just saying. we have to stick to the facts.

i thought it was only 2 attempted hits. thats all the wired article mentioned

en.wikipedia.org...

Ulbricht was indicted on charges of money laundering, computer hacking, conspiracy to traffic narcotics,[32][33] and attempting to have six people killed

Prosecutors alleged that Ulbricht paid $730,000 to others to commit the murders, although none of the murders actually occurred

i think we are splitting hairs here really but the fact is he never had anyone killed.

the other fact is he paid to have people killed. wanted people killed and thought he had people killed.

so yeah, the dude is a major scum bag

a reply to: Mugly

I guess it will be a matter of what they can prove in court on his alleged activities of trying to get people killed. I bet he will have a pretty good lawyer and that a lot of the stuff will be kind of tricky. But maybe it already happened? I have not been following it. The judge will likely sentence him either way - life in prison even just for a drug site!

a reply to: Aazadan

He actually did kill someone. He hired a hitman previously, then hired one again and that's how the FBI caught him.

That's not how they caught him. He had an account on the Shroomery that he used a personal email to activate, then plugged Silk road with that account.

That's what the FBI claim anyway. Personally I can't see how anyone could be so stupid, they (the FBI) more likely used illegal means to catch him and just made that story up.

Enough drugs were moving through Silk Road that he was on par with a Mexican cartel

Yeah, not quite on par with the Mexican cartels, what a silly statement. He tried to have 2 people whacked, who weren't exactly angels themselves. He didn't litter the streets with bodies.

originally posted by: corsair00
a reply to: Mugly

I guess it will be a matter of what they can prove in court on his alleged activities of trying to get people killed. I bet he will have a pretty good lawyer and that a lot of the stuff will be kind of tricky. But maybe it already happened? I have not been following it. The judge will likely sentence him either way - life in prison even just for a drug site!

the trial has happened. he was sentenced to life and not for the murder for hire plot

en.wikipedia.org...

Ulbricht ultimately was not prosecuted for any of the alleged murders

2 of the agents involved in the bust are facing criminal charges too

In late March 2015 a criminal complaint issued by the United States District Court for the Northern District of California led to the arrest of two former federal agents who had worked undercover in the Baltimore Silk Road investigation of Ulbricht.[45] The agents are alleged to have kept funds Ulbricht transferred to them in exchange for purported information about the investigation.[45][46] The agents were charged with wire fraud and money laundering

All six charges for the hits were dropped, so he got life for the website...I'm sure it'll lessen on appeal, though.

CNN

a reply to: Subaeruginosa

it was a little more in depth than that.
a dea agent was posing as some ex cartel member or something like that under the name nob.
there was an entire team working on it for almost 2 years.

i forgot how they figured it out but they found out that the silk road was leaking ip addresses or something like that.
they found it led to some server in iceland and they went there and pulled the mirror and the techs started going through it and built their case that way.

that is the gist.

if you can grab this months issue of wired it is the second part of the article. you might be able to read the 1st part online. it covers the whole deal.
pretty good read

originally posted by: WizardVanWizard
All six charges for the hits were dropped, so he got life for the website...I'm sure it'll lessen on appeal, though.

CNN

www.huffingtonpost.com...

federal jury found him guilty of charges including conspiracy to commit drug trafficking, money laundering and computer hacking

again, not saying i agree with life(not sure i disagree either)
but it was a tad more than having a website

a reply to: Mugly

Haha I know. I was just clarifying the sentence was related to activities surrounding the site, not the hits. You nipped in before me haha.

I think a life sentence was a bit much, especially since the judge mentioned she had "no doubt" he paid for the murders, even though those charges had been dropped. (also from that CNN article)

I'm not saying this guy doesn't deserve to do some time, but life seems excessive.

What really makes a mockery of the US JustUs system is the disparity in sentences between this guy and the officers of banking institutions that have done stuff like launder millions for cartels, facilitate trade with nations like Iran, package loans they referred to in internal emails as vomit to sell to pensions, and rip every person in the planet who has borrowed money by manipulating a rate that most interest is based off of.To the best of my knowledge, the grand total of the number of institutions that had their charter revoked was zero along with zero years in sentences for those involved.

Gotta love American JustUs.

a reply to: Subaeruginosa

My mistake then. Like I said, I don't agree with life for just the website.

originally posted by: Mugly
a reply to: Subaeruginosa

it was a little more in depth than that.
a dea agent was posing as some ex cartel member or something like that under the name nob.
there was an entire team working on it for almost 2 years.

Yeah, your tax dollars at work. They spent 2 years trying to shut the site down and in the end only connected the name 'Ross Ulbricht' to silk road by doing a google search, lol. Once they arrested him and seized his computer, I'm sure they then used more 'advanced' methods to build a case against him and vendors of the site.

Ironically, all the bust has done is wasted a whole lot of tax payers money and made this method of purchasing more popular though all the media reports. But that's the war on drugs for ya, pointless and wasteful.

But they just keep putting people in jail, expecting a different result each time. That's Einsteins definition of insanity, isn't it?

The undercover Feds involved actually posed as the hitmen and convinced him to order the hit.
He would have been better off committing a few rapes, touching some children and shooting a black guy..... His sentence would have been much lighter.
The justice system is a joke.

a reply to: Vasa Croe

That is one of those knee-jerk stories that was presented to the jury at the sentencing, Ulbricht is not at fault for drug addicts ODing. The State really had it out for Ulbricht, no doubt they wanted to make an example of him.

Hasn't Craigslist ads been directly responsible for deaths too?

His arrogance got the better of him and he trusted the wrong people. There are still underground markets.

a reply to: Mugly

I'm pretty sure they found the IP address thanks to a reddit 'tip' that there was a flaw. Ulbricht ignored this and a diligent FBI agent eyes found that thread and eventually ended up in Iceland to where the server was housed.

Read all about it here:
The Untold Story of Silk Road, part 1

The Untold Story of Silk Road, part2

Also this is a good read about the DEA and Secret Service who were charged with fraud and money laundering as a result of the DEA's 'investigating' of the Silk Road.

DEA agent charged for acting as paid mole

a reply to: homerJ

I am still fairly young, but from things I have seen, (second-hand) experienced and learned from others, many law enforcement investigations, ranging from the utterly mundane to the more serious, usually involve various forms of entrapment on the part of the cops etc. I see them merely as spiders in a spider web waiting for something to fly in, for the mundane stuff - like the other weekend I was doing a paper route on a Friday night, and a cop followed me around (he admitted later after he pulled me over) and was basically just waiting for me to make a small mistake because he had a small suspicion I was drinking or something, paper dudes drive all over and kind of fast because they do the route every single day, so he basically made a thing out of it. And also - they probably have quotas they need to fill... and likely get bored on the job waiting for something to happen, basically.

But on the bigger cases (or more serious than rolling a stop sign and not wearing a seat belt...) the investigators will go well out of their way to almost ENCOURAGE illegal activity when they are operating under minor to major suspicion, and thus cause people to do something they never would have done otherwise. This Ulbricht guy might not have had any intentions to be involved with hit men in the first place, but it may turn out it was just undercovers doing that!

It is truly insanity, from my point of view...

The more difficult a crime is to prosecute the more likely the penalty will be harsh. The idea is to send a message, "Chances are you won't be caught, but if you are you will pay dearly for it."

So, are you willing to take the risk? Want to sell some heroin in Indonesia? I hear it's big bucks.

originally posted by: Vasa Croe
Well...I think his sales were attributed to 5 or 6 deaths.

Nobody forced those drugs down their throats, and if they didn't get the drugs from that website it would have been off to the local dealer to get some. Blaming their deaths on Ulbricht is ridiculous.

Women judges..Get the wrong one when you are a male or female and they will nail you to a cross. Making an example of someone is not a fair implementation of the law at all. Imagine having Hillary as a judge and winding up in her court. I would make sure I never made it to trial.

a reply to: roadgravel

The song explains itself quite well.

Megadeth - Captive Honour