Who is Ross Ulbricht, founder of drug marketplace Silk Road, now pardoned by Trump?
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.
Silk Road
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
Ulbricht during his trial. Pic: AP
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 rossulbricht@gmail.com.
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.
Ross Ulbricht taken from his Google + page
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.
“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”.
A group of supporters had been campaigning for his release. Pic: AP
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.”
Pic: Truth Social
The ‘Free Ross’ X account posted an image of Ulbricht leaving prison a short while later.
US
America will not put up with it for much longer!’: Donald Trump hits out at Ukraine’s President Zelenskyy once again
A state of emergency has been declared in South Carolina as wildfires caused by dry and gusty conditions have forced people to evacuate some areas.
More than 175 fires covered 6.6 square miles in the state on Sunday as the National Weather Service warned of an increased risk of blazes in the region.
The number of fires was down to 163 by early Monday, the state’s forestry commission said.
South Carolina governor Henry McMaster declared a state of emergency on Sunday to support the wildfire response effort and a state-wide burning ban is in effect.
People in eight neighbourhoods were forced to evacuate as several fires raged in the state’s Horry County, officials said.
Soldiers used two Blackhawk helicopters to drop water 600 gallons at a time on the blazes, the South Carolina National Guard said on Sunday.
Meanwhile, firefighters made progress containing a fire in Carolina Forest, where people had been ordered to evacuate several neighbourhoods, according to Horry County Fire Rescue.
Footage showed some people running down the street as smoke filled the sky.
However, Horry County Fire Rescue announced by late Sunday that Carolina Forest evacuees could return home.
The Red Cross of South Carolina said approximately 135 Carolina Forest residents had taken shelter in a county recreation centre.
Smoke is seen rising from fires in Horry County. Pic: AP/Horry County Fire Rescue
The fire in the area had burned 2.5 square miles as of Sunday evening, the South Carolina Forestry Commission estimated.
No structures had succumbed to the blaze and no injuries had been reported as of Sunday morning, officials said.
It came as fire crews were working to contain multiple wildfires burning in four forests across North Carolina.
The largest covered around 0.6 square miles and burned in Uwharrie National Forest – about 50 miles east of Charlotte.
The North Carolina Forest Service said on Sunday that it had been made progress on the fire, reaching about one-third containment.
People flee an area in Myrtle Beach. Pic: AP
The small southwestern town of Tryon in Polk County, North Carolina, had urged some residents to evacuate on Saturday as a fire spread rapidly there.
The evacuations remained in effect on Sunday.
A decision on whether to lift the evacuation orders was expected to be made on Monday after intentional burns are set to try to stop the fire from spreading.
That fire had burned about 0.8 square miles as of Sunday evening, with 0% containment, according to the Polk County Emergency Management and Fire Marshal’s office.
Read more US news:
Crypto prices rally after Trump announcement
US speaker says Zelenskyy might need to resign
New York Dolls singer dies
A helicopter drops water to help contain a fire in the Carolina Forest area. Pic: AP
Keep up with all the latest news from the UK and around the world by following Sky News
The North Carolina Forest Service was conducting water drops and back-burning operations on the ground and residents should expect a lot of smoke during those operations, officials said.
It comes as at least six active fires were burning in Georgia on Sunday, with nearly 5.8 miles burned in a seven-day span that brought the region gusty winds and low humidity, according to a Georgia Forestry Commission fire summary.
Officials have not said what caused any of the fires.
The dry and gusty conditions fuelling the fires are expected to fade as a cold front pushes out the dry air mass over the southeast of the US and brings rain by Tuesday, the National Weather Service said.
The convergence of warmth, dry air and gusty winds is not inconsistent with the season’s La Niña weather phenomenon, which is associated with warmer, drier winters in the Carolinas, according to North Carolina State University.
The blazes come after two wildfires in Los Angeles killed 29 people and scorched thousands of acres across 24 days.
More than 18,000 structures were damaged or destroyed in the deadly Eaton and Palisades blazes, which swept across California in January.
Cryptocurrency prices have jumped after Donald Trump revealed he would like Bitcoin and other lesser-traded tokens to be in a new US strategic crypto reserve.
He said his January executive order on digital assets would create a stockpile of currencies including Bitcoin, Ethereum, XRP, Solana and Cardano (ADA).
The names had not previously been announced.
The American president said in a post on Truth Social: “A US Crypto Reserve will elevate this critical industry after years of corrupt attacks by the Biden Administration, which is why my Executive Order on Digital Assets directed the Presidential Working Group to move forward on a Crypto Strategic Reserve that includes XRP, SOL, and ADA.”
“I will make sure the US is the Crypto Capital of the World.”
“And, obviously, BTC and ETH, as other valuable Cryptocurrencies, will be at the heart of the Reserve,” he said in a follow-up post. “I also love Bitcoin and Ethereum!”
Bitcoin, the world’s largest cryptocurrency by market value, rose over 11% to $94,164 after Sunday’s announcement.
Ethereum, the second-largest cryptocurrency, was up around 13% at $2,516.
XRP surged 33% while the token tied to Solana jumped 25%. Cardano’s coin soared more than 60%.
Bitcoin was trading up around 20% from last week’s lows.
US President Donald Trump signed an executive order on cryptocurrencies in January. Pic: Reuters
The total cryptocurrency market rose about 10%, or more than $300bn (£238bn), in the hours since the announcement, according to cryptocurrency data and analysis company CoinGecko.
This is the first time Mr Trump has specified his support for a crypto “reserve” rather than a “stockpile”. While the former assumes actively buying crypto in regular installments, a stockpile would not sell any of the crypto currently held by the US government.
Mr Trump is hosting the first White House Crypto Summit on Friday, and investors will be watching closely for more clues about the direction of the reserve plans.
His family have also launched their own coins, including his wife Melania.
Read more from Sky News:
TikTok and Reddit investigated over use of children’s data
Second privately funded spacecraft touches down on moon
Mr Trump first introduced the idea of a Bitcoin stockpile, which would “keep 100% of all the Bitcoin the US government currently holds or acquires into the future” last summer at major industry conference Bitcoin 2024 in Nashville.
After his re-election to the White House in November, there were more calls for a strategic Bitcoin reserve, helping to send the price of the flagship cryptocurrency to new all-time highs.
Under his Democratic predecessor, Joe Biden, regulators cracked down on the industry in an attempt to protect Americans from fraud and money laundering.
Under Mr Trump, the Securities and Exchange Commission has withdrawn investigations into several crypto companies and dropped a lawsuit against Coinbase, the largest crypto exchange in the US.
But in recent weeks, crypto prices have fallen sharply, with some of the biggest digital currencies erasing nearly all of the gains made after Mr Trump’s election win triggered excitement across the industry.
-
Sports2 years ago‘Storybook stuff’: Inside the night Bryce Harper sent the Phillies to the World Series
-
Sports11 months agoStory injured on diving stop, exits Red Sox game
-
Sports1 year agoGame 1 of WS least-watched in recorded history
-
Sports2 years agoMLB Rank 2023: Ranking baseball’s top 100 players
-
Sports3 years ago
Team Europe easily wins 4th straight Laver Cup
-
Environment2 years agoJapan and South Korea have a lot at stake in a free and open South China Sea
-
Environment2 years agoGame-changing Lectric XPedition launched as affordable electric cargo bike
-
Business2 years agoBank of England’s extraordinary response to government policy is almost unthinkable | Ed Conway