From the FBI:
This laptop belonged to an American cybercriminal named Ross William Ulbricht. Known online as Dread Pirate Roberts, Ulbricht ran a darknet market called the Silk Road from 2011 to 2013.
The Silk Road was a digital bazaar for illegal goods and services. Buyers and sellers could only visit the website through a browser called Tor—a network designed to conceal its users' locations.
The FBI worked with federal and state partners to find the Silk Road. On January 27, 2011, a tax agent discovered a post about the website on an online forum.
Eight months later, the agent saw that the same user had published a job posting. The posting directed interested parties to send their responses to an email account registered to Ulbricht.
Investigators traced a series of network records that they obtained under court warrants and eventually identified Ulbricht as a suspect.
The FBI arrested Ulbricht and seized his laptop on October 1, 2013. A judge sentenced Ulbricht to life in prison for drug trafficking, computer hacking, and money laundering in 2015.
The Silk Road generated hundreds of millions of dollars in sales and more than $13 million dollars worth of Bitcoin in commissions. On November 3, 2020, law enforcement seized over $1 billion worth of digital currency from this case.
source:
https://www.fbi.gov/history/artifacts/ross-william-ulbrichts-laptop
From Wikipedia:
Ross William Ulbricht (born March 27, 1984) is an American serving life imprisonment for creating and operating the darknet market website Silk Road from 2011 until his arrest in 2013.[4] The site operated as a hidden service on the Tor network and facilitated the sale of narcotics and other illegal products and services.[5][6] Ulbricht ran the site under the pseudonym "Dread Pirate Roberts", after the fictional character from The Princess Bride.
In October 2013, the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) arrested Ulbricht and took Silk Road offline. In 2015, he was convicted of engaging in a continuing criminal enterprise, distributing narcotics, distributing narcotics by means of the internet, conspiracy to distribute narcotics, conspiracy to commit money laundering, conspiracy to traffic fraudulent identity documents, and conspiracy to commit computer hacking.[7][8] He was sentenced to life in prison without the possibility of parole. Ulbricht's appeals to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit in 2017 and the U.S. Supreme Court in 2018 were unsuccessful.[9][10][11] He is incarcerated at the United States Penitentiary in Tucson.[12]
Cybercriminal Ross Ulbricht’s Family Says He’ll Be Freed In January—Here’s What We Know
The family of Ross Ulbricht on Friday said the founder of the illicit online marketplace Silk Road, who was sentenced to life in prison in 2015 for extensive online criminal activity, would be released from jail in January—and thanked president-elect Donald Trump for his support.
Ulbricht, who was 31 at the time, was convicted of distributing narcotics, distributing narcotics by means of the Internet, conspiring to distribute narcotics, engaging in a continuing criminal enterprise, conspiring to commit computer hacking, conspiring to traffic in false identity documents and conspiring to commit money laundering.
The #FreeRoss movement has been supported by Libertarian voters, to whom Trump promised he’d release Ulbricht if elected in a speech at the party’s national convention in May, and by the cryptocurrency community Trump spent much of his campaign courting, many of whom saw Silk Road as the first real use for the decentralized cryptocurrency Bitcoin.
Trump promised to commute Ulbricht’s sentence, which would see him freed from the high-security federal prison in Tucson, Arizona, in which he is serving time, but not fully pardoned, or relieved of all guilt associated with his convicted crimes.
Ulbricht, a Texas native who went by the moniker “Dread Pirate Roberts,” founded the anonymous e-commerce website Silk Road in 2011, which law enforcement authorities would later call "the most sophisticated and extensive criminal marketplace on the Internet." The website allowed buyers and sellers to exchange goods—and pay via cryptocurrency—without any paper trail connecting them back to their purchase.
The site ran on the Tor network, which allowed Ulbricht to conceal the IP addresses of computers on the network and hide their locations. Before it was shut down in October 2013, Silk Road was used largely as a marketplace to sell illegal drugs and other illegal goods, though Ulbricht’s family has maintained he himself did not participate in the illegal dealings and was simply “an entrepreneur passionate about free markets and privacy.”
Ulbricht earned more than $13 million in commissions from illicit sales on the site and was accused by law enforcement officials of soliciting six murders-for-hire in connection with operating the site, although there was no evidence that those murders were actually carried out. Silk Road was also linked to the drug overdose deaths of six people. At the time of his arrest, then-U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York Preet Bharara called Ulbricht "a drug dealer and criminal profiteer who exploited people’s addictions and contributed to the deaths of at least six young people." (excerpts)
Source:
https://www.forbes.com/sites/maryroeloffs/2024/11/08/cybercriminal-ross-ulbrichts-family-says-hell-be-freed-in-january-heres-what-we-know/
