Silk Road Owner Ross Ulbricht Appears In Court

Ross Ulbricht, the alleged mastermind of Silk Road, the infamous online drug marketplace was arrested earlier this week as the site was taken offline from the Tor (onion network) that it operated on. Tor is a network like the internet which operates outside of the normal world wide web we typically use day to day, it provides a (supposedly) anonymous service that has become a magnet for organised crime.

Ross Ulbricht, 29, has been deemed too dangerous to be bailed. He has been accused of arranging the killing of one of the sites users in which the FBI stated that Mr Ulbricht had sought to pay another Silk Road user to kill another user for threatening to expose details of many of the sites users.

“We deny all charges and that is the end of the discussion at this point,” Mr Ulbricht’s lawyer said.

This is a landmark case given that Tor has been the play ground of many illegal activities and it just goes to show that police are closing in on many of the illegitimate uses of the site. With Silk Road being one of the most popular and well-known services on the network shut down it is likely copy cat sites will take its place.

A request from his legal team for a bail hearing to be pushed back was granted and will now take place on October 9th.

Given the scale of the site which is said to have generated $1.2 billion, we suspect that this case will spawn quite a lot of extra investigations and charges in the coming months.

Thank you BBC for providing us with this information.