The unsealing of the indictment late Wednesday lent even more
weirdness to an already bizarre account of events unraveled
earlier that day through a federal complaint. It accused
29-year-old Ross William Ulbricht of San Francisco, CA of
operating the Silk Road website, and in turn masterminding a
criminal conspiracy that involved the mass buying
and selling of illegal drugs and other contraband over the
Internet.
Wednesday’s indictment also indicated for the second time in
under a day that Ulbricht had been under investigation regarding
not one, but two attempted assassinations.
Earlier that day, security researcher Brian Krebs uncovered a
sealed complaint signed by a federal magistrate for
the Southern District of New York Court. It accusied Ulbricht
of narcotics trafficking conspiracy, computer hacking
conspiracy and money laundering conspiracy by way of his alleged
involvement with the Silk Road website. According to the Federal
Bureau of Investigation, Ulbricht used the website to
facilitate the transfer of hundreds of kilograms of
illegal drugs to over a hundred thousand buyers, laundering
hundreds of millions of dollars in the process.
Silk Road “served as a sprawling black-market bazaar, where
illegal drugs and other illicit goods and services have been
regularly bought and sold by the site’s users” using the
encrypted, almost-anonymous digital currency Bitcoin, FBI Agent
Christopher Tarbell testified in the complaint.
Authorities also indicated that through their surveillance of
Ulbricht they believed he asked a Silk Road user to execute
another customer for a fee of $300,000. The would-be victim, a
Silk Road vendor operating under the name “FriendlyChemist”
according to the complaint, threatened to release the identities
of otherwise anonymous Silk Road clients if Ulbricht didn’t pay
him to keep quiet.
“In my eyes, FriendlyChemist is a liability and I wouldn’t
mind if he was executed,” Ulbricht allegedly told Silk Road
user “redandwhite” on March 26 of this year.
When FriendlyChemist threatened again to release the identities
of Silk Road users, Ulbricht reportedly told redandwhite, “I
would like to put a bounty on his head if it’s not too much
trouble for you.”
When redandwhite said the price to execute a hit could be upwards
of $300,000, the FBI claims Ulbricht wrote back contesting the
cost as too high, adding, “Not long ago, I had a clean hit
done for $80k. Are the prices you quoted the best you can
do?”
Although redandwhite later sent images to Ulbricht purported to
be of a slain FriendlyChemist, the FBI does not believe the
murder occurred.
According to the indictment unsealed hours later, though,
Ulbricht wasn’t bluffing when he said he had ordered executions
before.
Indictment against Ulbricht:
An October-1 superseding
indictment made public shortly after the complaint did its rounds
on Wednesday and revealed that the US District Court for the
District of Maryland charged Ulbricht this week with not just
conspiracy regarding the buying and selling of contraband over
Silk Road, but also for the attempted assassination of a Silk
Road employee months earlier.
The FBI’s claims reinforce the comments made about the killing of
FriendlyChemist in March when Ulbricht referred to an earlier
hit. Indeed, authorities say Ulbricht authorized the murder – or
at least intended to – of a former staffer at Silk Road for a
fraction of the $300,000 he spent on the second, likely botched
murder.
Before Ulbricht became concerned that FriendlyChemist would post
the identities of his clients, he was worried that a recently
arrested Silk Road employee would reveal even more to the feds.
The indictment suggests that starting January 26, Ulbricht
engaged in online discussions with an undercover FBI agent that
he believed to be a hit-man. A Silk Road employee had recently
been arrested by law enforcement and had stolen funds from the
website’s users, Ulbricht allegedly told the agent, and in
response he wanted him “beat up, then forced to send the
Bitcoins he stole back.”
One day later, Ulbricht told the agent that the employee “was
on the inside for a while, and now that he’s been arrested, I’m
afraid he’ll give up info.”
Ulbricht “never killed a man or had one killed before, but it
is the right move in this case,” the FBI claims he told the
agent.
Days later, Ulbricht allegedly wired $40,000 from his bank
account to one registered at a Capitol One branch in Washington,
D.C. After he received photos from the undercover agent of a mock
murder, he wired the remaining half of the bounty at the end of
February.
“Ulbricht,” writes the FBI, “did attempt to kill the
employee, with intent to prevent the communication by the
employee to a law enforcement officer of the United States of
information relating to the commission and possible commission of
a federal offense, to wit: narcotics conspiracy in violation of
Title 21, United States Code, Section 846.”
The FBI claims that, beginning in November 2011, it purchased
drugs on more than 100 occasions from Silk Road vendors.
The site, which generated an estimated $1.2 billion in sales
while in operation, went offline this week after Ulbricht was
arrested.
The original complaint against Ulbricht:
Copyright: RT