Ross Ulbricht

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**Ross William Ulbricht** (March 27, 1984 - ) is a American drug dealer who created and operated the darknet market website, the Silk Road, from 2011 to his arrest in 2013 by the FBI. He is currently serving his two counts of life imprisonment and 40 years in United States Penitentiary, Tucson.

Ulbricht used the username "Dread Pirate Roberts" on Silk Road, which is the name of the character from the novel and film adaptation of *The Princess Bride.* The Silk Road used Tor for anonymity and bitcoin as currency and hosted the trade of illicit products such as weapons and drugs. Silk Road became the main source of allegations that illegal products were sold on the Deep Web.

## Biography

### Childhood

Ross William Ulbricht was born on March 27, 1984 in Austin, Texas, United States to Kirk and Lyn Ulbricht. He spent his childhood in a metropolitan area in Austin, Texas. He was a boy scout in Austin, Texas, and at the scout camp he attended, he had the rank of Eagle Scout, the highest rank a scout can receive. He had a family with very strict rules, but he loved vacationing in bamboo houses with them in Costa Rica, where he learned to surf. His family described him as friendly, compassionate and caring.

### Education

People who knew him as a child described him as an extremely intelligent and attractive child. He attended West Ridge Middle School and Westlake High School, both near Austin. Even though he seemed like a student who didn't care much about exams when he was in high school, he always got high grades. He was driving an old Volvo and smoking marijuana. His friends described him as carefree but caring. He graduated from the high school's honors program in 2002 with a 1460 on the SAT, taking several AP classes.

#### University

As a result of SAT, he was accepted to the University of Texas Physics Department with a full academic scholarship and graduated with a bachelor's degree in 2006. He then attended Pennsylvania State University, where he studied crystallography. Here he started dating a girl named Julia. He first met her on the campus lawn, and Julia began to frequently visit Ross' office on campus. Ross made a plain blue crystal, glued it to a ring, and gave it to Julia.

At the university, Ross came across and became interested in the ideas of Ludwig von Mises, the Australian-American economist who became a totem of modern American libertarian orthodoxy. He began to think that science had disappointed him, so he gave up all interest and became interested in economics. He began to see taxes and governments as a system of coercion enforced by the state's monopoly on violence and began joining libertarian groups at his university.

He traveled to universities around the country, attended many meetings, had an answer to every argument, and became interested in libertarianism. One day, while discussing drugs in a school debate, he said that drugs should be legal and states should be concerned with making the world a better place, not with what people put into their bodies.

### After the University

In 2009, he completed his master's degree in Materials Science and Engineering and returned to Austin with his girlfriend Julia and rented an apartment. Ross first became interested in the stock market, but it did not go as he wanted and he went bankrupt. He founded a game company, but this attempt also failed. His neighbor Donny Palmertree offered Ross a job at Good Wagon Books, which collects second-hand books and sells them on digital stores like Amazon.

Ross established Good Wagon's website, learned inventory management, and wrote special coding for the company. But there was something that made him unhappy; he abandoned his career as a scientist to become an entrepreneur. Shortly after, Julia, to whom he gave the ring, the only job he ever did in his career, broke up with him. He met women on applications such as Tinder but leaved them before their relationships could get any further. His neighbor, Palmertree, who found him a job at the Good Wagon, found another job in Dallas and left the Good Wagon entirely to Ross.

He built shelves in Good Wagon's warehouse and hired 5 college students part-time. Good Wagon Books, which he took over, closed the month with a profit of $10,000 at the end of December. But this money did not excite him because he had promised himself as a child that he would become a billionaire by the age of 30, and in late 2010 he ventured into trading once again, during which he came across Bitcoin and Tor.

## Silk Road

After being introduced to Bitcoin and Tor, he wrote in his diary that he wants to create a website where people could buy anything they wanted anonymously, without leaving a trace. While he was running Good Wagon, he was also thinking about his own website. One night in 2011, the shelves collapsed because he forgot to tighten a screw. So he abandoned Good Wagon and started thinking more about his own site. His ex-girlfriend Julia said, "*I remember when he had the idea ... He said something about ... the Silk Road in Asia ... and what a big network it was ... And that's what he wanted to create, so he thought it was the perfect name.*" Ulbricht alluded to Silk Road on his public LinkedIn page, where he discussed his wish to "*use economic theory as a means to abolish the use of coercion and aggression amongst mankind*" and claimed, "*I am creating an economic simulation to give people a first-hand experience of what it would be like to live in a world without the systemic use of force.*"

He learned everything he needed to learn to launch the site, and Silk Road was now live. He didn't have a stock, inventory or advertisement; he was thinking about who would use the site and why. He undertook all the work related to the site, developed the software for the site, and installed a database system on the site. Silk Road ran on Tor, a network that implements protocols that encrypt data and route internet traffic through intermediary servers that anonymize IP addresses before reaching a final destination . Ulbricht was able to hide his IP address by keeping the site he founded in Tor.  Bitcoin, a cryptocurrency , was used for transactions on the site. Although all bitcoin transactions are publicly recorded on a so-called blockchain, users who avoid tying their identity to their online “wallet” can remain largely anonymous.  Ulbricht used the username "Dread Pirate Roberts" on Silk Road.

He grew and sold hallucinogen and psilocybin mushrooms by reading manuals on simple mushroom cultivation. To advertise the site, he talked about the quality of the products he bought from Silk Road in different forums. He made a profit of 80 million dollars from the site. Silk Road began to spread further on the Internet, and Ross was taking out thousands of packages every day, vacuum-sealing the packages and sending them in small cartons because shipping companies only checked large packages. While his ex-girlfriend warned him, Ross expanded the site and began selling harder drugs over time. Newspaper Adrian Chen, who heard about Silk Road and wanted to introduce the issue to the press, created an account on the forum. Seeing this, Ross said, "Rather than feeding the United States of America with your taxes, direct your productive energy to Silk Road." In April 2012, a user named Nob told Ross he wanted to buy the site, and Ross asked for $1 billion. Then Silk Road moderator, Curtis Green stole $350,000 from the site. Then Ross told Nob what happened. Ross allegedly hired hitman to kill Nob a Green and four others, but nothing came of it in the case. Later he learned that Green was caught at the same time.

## Arrest and Trial

The nine different fake IDs he carried were noticed by the police, and he asked questions about Silk Road directly on the stackoverflow site with a clear username, and then changed his name to Frosty and hid himself. The questions asked by this user named Frosty were noticed by an IRS officer. The IPs showed an apartment in San Francisco, and Silk Road's service was connected to a server named Frosty. At the same time, Ross's movements were also monitored through other captured Silk Road moderators. The FBI was watching him before they operated on him. He had to be caught with his laptop open because they couldn't access the encrypted files. In October 2013, Ulbricht was arrested by the FBI at the San Francisco Public Library's Glen Park library, where he went for better Wi-Fi and accused of being the "mastermind" behind the site.

On August 21, 2014, Ulbricht was charged with 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. It was decided that he would be detained without bail. Before the trial, Ulbricht was offered a plea deal in which he would likely receive a ten-year prison sentence in exchange for a guilty plea, but he turned it down, deciding to defend himself in court.

Following a jury trial in January 2015, Ulbricht was found guilty on all counts on February 4, 2015. On May 29, 2015, he was sentenced to two counts of life imprisonment and forty years in prison without the possibility of parole.

## Gallery

Ross with his family.Ross with his grandma.Ross with his sister, Cally.