The Most Illegal Business In The World: Silk Road

beneath the normal internet we all know like youtube facebook and google there lies the dark web an anonymous unregulated world with websites not accessible from search engines a hidden corner of the internet where anything goes for a while the biggest site on the dark web was silk road an online black market for all kinds of illegal goods and services ranging from body parts to weapons to hit men and most commonly of all drugs in fact silk road was dubbed the amazon of drugs because you could simply go to the silk road sites buy any substance you wanted with just a few clicks and have it shipped to your doorstep like an amazon package but what's perhaps most surprising of all about this is who was behind this illegal empire meet ross albrecht our story's surprising protagonists ross grew up in a loving family in texas he was a boy scout as a kid studied physics at university and was thought of as a very sweet guy by all his friends and family so imagine their shock when they realized ross was the criminal mastermind behind the largest online drug empire in history responsible for over 1.2 billion dollars worth of sales of illegal goods and services not just that but this sweet kid who reportedly paid hitmen to kill his enemies or did he [Music] to this day there is debate over whether ross is guilty or not so in this video we're gonna dive into the murky world of the dark web and explore the true story behind the infamous silk rod marketplace we're also going to look at how the government really managed to track down ross despite the fact that ross was using the tour browser which made him completely anonymous how do you find someone who can't be trapped this is a true story filled with mysteries twists and even a couple of corrupt government agents welcome to the fascinating story of the silk road empire [Music] ross ulbricht wanted to change the world but his life so far had been a series of almosts he tried several business ideas but never quite got anywhere with them and he was starting to feel like his life was passing him by however there was one business idea ross kept coming back to an online marketplace where people could buy or sell anything imaginable with no limits or restrictions now you see ross was a staunch libertarian and would regularly debate with people about why the government shouldn't have so much control over people's lives especially when it came to drugs which he felt should all be legalized he'd say it's not the government's right to tell people what they can or can't put in their bodies and whenever someone tried to argue back about safety concerns ross would say well should we outlaw big macs from mcdonald's too because they make people gain weight and have heart attacks and die or what about cars they kill millions every year and so to ross the idea of a marketplace where people could buy and sell whatever they wanted was not just a business to potentially make a lot of money in his view it was also a way to free people and help the world after some research ross discovered there was a web browser called tor which allowed you to access the dark web where you couldn't be tracked or traced the tour browser was actually developed by the us navy as a way to communicate privately over the internet by concealing a user's real ip address and identity by using this ross realized people would be able to buy things online without the government being able to see what they were doing but at first ross didn't go any further with the idea because there was no way to accept payments online that couldn't easily be traced for example credit cards would keep a log of every transaction someone made and be linked to their bank accounts so for a little while the site remained just an idea in ross's mind until the summer of 2010 when ross came across a new technology called bitcoin a digital currency which could be transferred anonymously thus allowing people to buy whatever they wanted without a trace it was exactly what he needed so from his bedroom ross began working on his new online marketplace he decided to call it silk road named after a famous trade route that started over 2000 years ago that people used for centuries to carry all kinds of different goods understandably ross was very wary of anyone knowing about the site he was building which unfortunately meant he had to build it all by himself the only person he told at first was his girlfriend julia now his girlfriend was a little concerned but ross reassured her that thanks to the tour web browser and bitcoin it would all be completely anonymous so nothing could be traced back to him as for making the site itself it was slow work to figure everything out as building an entire online marketplace by himself was a massive job but ross was determined and he worked very long hours to make it a reality sat at his laptop coding all day and most of the nights he would just occasionally take a break to watch one of his favorite shows breaking bad the story of a normal guy who becomes a drug kingpin however as ross was finally nearing completion of the silk road sites he realized he had a problem he needed some product to actually sell on his new marketplace there was no use building the platform if when people first came there was nothing to buy so ross rented out a building in the middle of nowhere and began growing his own magic mushrooms using a book that was essentially a dummy's guide to building your own mushroom farm this would be the first product to ever be sold on the silk road marketplace by early 2011 after a year of work on the sites he was ready to launch it to the world he'd added categories for all different types of drugs to begin with the only item listed was the mushrooms he'd grown himself but the plan was that sellers from all over the world would list their own items for sale of course in order to attract both buyers and sellers to the sites he needed to promote it remember sites on the dark web are not picked up by search engines and it's also not like ross could just run some facebook or google ads to help find customers for his illegal marketplace so to get the word out about his new sites ross went onto several internet forums to spread the words for example he joined a site called the shroomery for fans of shrooms and made a post pretending to be a customer interested in using silk road the reason he did this was so it didn't seem like he was promoting his own websites he knew that by casually name dropping silk road people on the forums would go and check it out for themselves and they did orders soon started coming in now this was all happening at the beginning of 2011 and at the same time russ was working at a little bookstore in texas called goodwagon books but this worked out really well because it meant ross had everything he needed to easily ship out his shrooms because he was able to use the bookshop's padded envelopes and label maker he also used a vacuum sealer that normally would keep food fresh to wrap the mushrooms up so ross was in business and it was initially shipping off orders twice a week but as the site's popularity grew through word of mouth ross soon had to start mailing shipments out every day as more and more orders were coming in but even better than that other people had started selling items on silk road other dealers had created their own listings with everything from weed to coke to ecstasy and of course more products for sale helped attract even more buyers and silk road initially took a 6.23 commission on every single trade in order to make people feel more comfortable using the sites ross also built a rating system where buyers and sellers could review each other similar to ebay's feedback system or amazon reviews ross worked tirelessly on the sites and was constantly exhausted but he was also incredibly excited by its growth when he first made the site he honestly hadn't been sure if anyone would use it at all and yet in just a couple of months he'd already made thousands of dollars in revenue he told his girlfriend julia about the progress of the sites although she was slightly less excited judy was concerned by the fact harder drugs were now being sold on silk road especially when she realized someone had even started selling heroin on there her doubts about the whole thing started to grow and she asked ross what if someone overdoses or sellers send out stuff that's been tampered with or laced with something else ross confidently reminded her of the rating system he said if someone sells bad drugs they'd get a bad rating and no one will buy from them again julia simply said yeah but how are they supposed to give a bad rating if they're dead [Music] while silk road had been growing fairly quickly through word of mouth growth started to get crazy once gawker wrote an article about the sites right after that article went live many other news sites started writing about silk road as well describing it as an underground website that lets you buy any drug imaginable even big tv news networks like abc and nbc began talking about the site that's bringing it even more attention thousands of drugs came through the black website called silk road of course not all that attention was good multiple different government agencies were now watching the sites and beginning to investigate who was running it but because of the use of tour they knew tracking whoever was behind it would be extremely difficult meanwhile ross started working on silk road full-time he had no choice really it was going so much quicker than he ever expected the site now had hundreds of sellers and thousands of buyers and whilst ross had sold all the mushrooms he'd grown he was now making commissions on every sale from the sites as more money rolled in it was exhilarating but one morning he opened his laptop and noticed someone had now listed guns on there ross tried to rationalize that it was an american's constitutional right to have a gun so this wasn't a problem however once again his girlfriend julia saw it differently ross you have to stop this she pleaded think about why someone would need to buy a gun anonymously ross and julia argued about this and julie went off to her friend erica's house to vent julia had become increasingly paranoid about everything ross was doing and so she confided in her friend erica about ross running silk road she made erica promise that she'd never say a word about it to anyone and for a while it seemed like she'd kept that promise however one morning ross logged onto facebook and saw a public post on his wall from julia's best friend erica saying i'm sure the authorities would like to know about ross albrecht's drug websites immediately panic filled his body and he broke down in tears a wave of emotions crashed over him firstly he was angry julie had told someone else that he was running the sights secondly he felt heartbroken that she would betray his trust like that but mostly the strongest emotion he felt was fear he immediately deleted erica's post off his facebook wall and phoned her in tears begging her never to mention it to anyone again as for why erica had made the post calling out ross in the first place it had all started when eric had had a bad trip from a substance she bought of silk road and when she got back from the hospital she'd got into a fight with both julia and ross which had ended with ross telling erica to leave erica in an intoxicated state had then posted on facebook as revenge luckily for ross he'd seen the post quickly enough meaning the post was deleted before hardly anyone saw it and it was only their facebook friends who would have been able to see it anyway who probably assumed it was just a joke so the crisis seemed to have been averted for now but this incident made ross extremely anxious julia and ross's relationship also ended as julia refused to let ross keep running the site from her apartments she issued him with an ultimatum but he had to close the site down or leave he chose to leave in fact after the eric incident ross decided he needed to temporarily leave the country just as a precaution and so he went traveling [Music] ross went to bondi beach in australia to relax he went to vietnam to celebrate the lunar new year he even backpacked through asia hopping from different islands and staying in youth hostels of course the traveller seemed along the way had absolutely no clue ross was running the biggest illegal site in the world and that he was now worth millions of dollars in bitcoin life was good for us the only downside of travelling was that ross often had to rely on internet cafes to access wifi so he could run the sites and he was understandably anxious about people seeing his screen and realizing what he was doing thus he always had to pick a spot in the corner of the internet cafes and he also programmed his laptop so that by pressing a certain key he could immediately turn his screen black just in case it felt like anyone was looking at what he was doing the thought of getting caught was especially terrifying because he was technically a wanted man all around the world since silk road was a global site and the thought of ending up in a prison in southeast asia where people had been known to get hanged for selling drugs was particularly scary the site's rapid growth also presented other problems turns out rush trying to build an entire marketplace by himself had meant the code was filled with bugs one particularly bad coding mistake meant that briefly when someone purchased something on silk road ross lost money on the transaction instead of gaining money ross had no choice but to temporarily block new signups on silk road while he desperately tried to fix the issue ross was now working round the clock on the site trying to manage all these new issues that kept popping up like attacks from hackers who demanded ransoms in bitcoin complaints from customers and packages that had been seized in the mail as word about the site continued to grow ross realized that just like any other growing business he needed employees to help him so he started recruiting internally by hiring active users of silk road to help him manage everything soon he had 10 employees some rewriting his shoddy code some moderating the silk road forums and others dealing with support issues and disputes whilst ross was technically paying these staff most of them viewed it as more than a job because they all had similar political views and together they felt they were building something big here and that silk road was going to change the world meanwhile many other product categories also started popping up on the sites for example some sellers started offering spy software and tools to hack into people's webcams you could also buy passports and fake ids or even counterfeit cash that looked just like the real thing and in one case someone had even listed a rocket launcher for sale and another was trying to sell cyanide a well-known poison then one day ross woke up to a message from one of his moderators saying should we let people sell kidneys turns out one user on silk road wanted to sell various human body parts the seller added that they'd all been acquired consensually ross was obviously a little concerned this wasn't quite what he'd envisioned when he initially started the sites but the way he saw it silk road was merely a platform just like facebook or ebay it was the users who chose how to use it it was against his philosophy to tell individuals what they could or couldn't buy and sell he wanted a free market so he didn't interfere and as a result the wide variety of illegal products for sale on silk road continued to grow which continued to attract even more attention to the sites what's interesting though is silk road actually became a bit of a community many viewed it not just as a marketplace but a movement on the community forum ross even introduced to silk red movie nights where once a week many silkworth users would all start watching the same movie at the same time ross's first film choice for this movie night was v for vendetta and the movie's anti-government theme was definitely popular with the silk road community silk road also started running some competitions to help gain new users where people could win various illegal substances however there was one incident where the competition winner ended up disappearing right after winning and some presumed he'd overdosed on the prize ross joked that perhaps a better competition prize would have been rehab there was a particularly active user on silk road who went by the name variety jones and he started helping ross find bugs in the site's code and create a plan to help grow the site further the two of them started chatting via private message every single day and became close friends but in a bizarre way he was kind of like a business coach to ross whoever variety jones was he clearly had a lot of experience with the drugs business one day verizon jones messaged ross saying not to be a downer or anything but what we're doing falls under the u.s drug kingpin laws which provides a maximum penalty of death upon conviction the mandatory minimum is life ross was very well aware of this although he generally tried not to think about it however variety jones said he had a plan the two of them were both fans of the movie the princess bride and in that film there's a feared pirate called dread pirate roberts except it's not just one person the name was passed down from person to person over the years variety jones said ross should change his name on silk road to dread pirate roberts instead of just the user name admin which ros had previously been using ross loved the idea because this way if ross ever got caught or connected to silk road in any way all the blame couldn't be pinned on him ross could admit he'd once been the admin of the site but he could say that just like in the movie it was a title that was passed down from person to person and he personally was no longer involved he could claim someone else had taken over as dread pirate roberts instead from that moment forward ross went by dread pirate robots or dpr for shorts and him and variety jones continued to chat more and more they'd even sign off each day to each other with messages like sweet dreams captain before connecting with variety jones ross had been feeling incredibly lonely since obviously he couldn't tell anyone else what he was doing especially not after what happened with the erica and julia instance ross had to lie to all his family and friends about his life in fact he told them he was a day trader so they assumed he was just on his laptop so much because he was trading stocks but now having this digital friendship with verity jones helped him feel less alone he now had a literal partner in crime of course it wasn't all perfect as the site continued to grow in popularity there were multiple incidents where hackers managed to steal bitcoin from ross because of issues with the sites or they would attack the site and ross would have to pay them a ransom and bitcoin to stop luckily ross was making so much money by this point that the hackers getting some bitcoin from him didn't actually matter that much it was just a normal day at the office ross had never believed the site would get this big by the time the site was a year old it was estimated to be getting at least half a million dollars worth of sales per week which meant a lot of commission for ross plus around this time the price of bitcoin was rapidly increasing so all the money russ was making from the site's transaction fees was suddenly worth a lot more by the end of silk road's second year it reached almost one million users and ross's personal net worth was reportedly tens of millions of dollars most of which was bitcoin stored on thumb drives scattered around his apartments but ross told variety jones that by the time he was 30 he wanted to be worth one billion dollars and incredibly it looked like it could actually be possible they just had to keep expanding within two years of launching silk road was at nearly a million users by its peak if silkworm was a normal company it would be called a unicorn the label given to businesses valued at over a billion dollars it was unbelievable really a guy in his 20s running the world's largest illegal empire from his laptop ross had a slightly surreal moment whilst visiting the country of dominica where he realized silk road was worth more than the entire country's gdp but occasionally ross would get a brutal reminder that the empire he was building did have some very real life consequences like when he saw this on the news the synthetic lsd that killed the president was brought online so potent it made him think he could fly he fell from a balcony and suffered horrific head injuries ross listened to the story of some kids who'd purchased a party pack from silk road containing a synthetic drug from china made it in an unregulated lab the kids had heard about the site simply gone online followed the guide about how to buy bitcoin made an order on silk road and the items turned up in the mail easy but when one of the kids took it he started panicking he suddenly didn't know where he was or what he was doing the room was spinning he got up and started running he had no idea where he was going i ran straight off the hotel balcony falling 30 feet into the parking lot below [Music] i would just absolutely love to have seen what it turned out to be no matter what your thoughts on ross you've seen what can happen if your browsing isn't protected i think we can all agree we want to keep our personal information private and secure and that's why i want to tell you about today's video sponsor guardio guardio is a browser extension that can keep you and your family safe online it 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members safe the u.s government was devoting more and more resources to the search for dread pirate roberts but considering multiple different government agencies were working on the case of silk road like the fbi and the dea it might surprise you that the biggest breakthrough of all came from an irs agent making a simple google search gary alford was a tax inspector who'd been assigned to the silk road case to try and track some of the money being laundered however he had pretty much no knowledge of bitcoin tour or anything else to do with silk road what gary did have in his favor was that he was very detail-oriented and he read everything three times to make sure he never missed anything gary also liked to think outside the box his favorite ever criminal case was how they caught the serial killer son of sam who went on a killing spree in new york in the 70s for while no matter how many detectives they put on the case nobody could figure out who the killer was but then one day an officer decided to take a different approach and look for cars in the nearby area that would receive parking tickets around the same time of the murders the logic being that the murderer would hardly be concerned about running back to top up the parking meter whilst in the middle of killing someone they found a pattern where the same car had received parking tickets on the night of the murders and always located fairly close to the scene of the crime they then traced the owner of the car and that led them straight to the murderer who confessed gary liked this case because it proved you could outperform more experienced people by looking at the problem differently and gary was convinced the founder of silk road must have left a similarly small mistake behind the digital equivalent of a parking ticket gary started his search by asking what's the earliest post about silk road on the internet since he figured whoever started the site would have had to drop off interest in the first place so gary went to google type the silk road web address into the search box and using advanced search he filtered by dates looking for results only from early 2011 which is when the silk road was rumored to have started only a few search results came up and one of them was a post from a user called altoid on a forum called the shroomery the post sounded more like a user not the creator of the site but it was the first record online of someone mentioning silk road so gary searched for other posts by a user called altoid from around the same date and stumbled across a post on another forum called bitcointalk where someone with the same outward username had posted has anyone seen silk road yet it's kind of like an anonymous amazon.com gary thought it was interesting that the first mentions of silk road online were both coming from this same username and this person had been promoting silk road on multiple different forums right around the time that silk road launched so gary looked through altoid's post history on the forum and a few months after silk road started altoid had made another post saying it pro needed for a bitcoin startup it was a job ad for a bitcoin related project but inside the post reg if interested please send your answers to the following questions to ross albrecht gmail.com now when gary told his colleagues about these findings they dismissed that they said just because this user was the first one to publicly post about silk road didn't mean he was the creator which is true they certainly needed more evidence to prove anything but the more gary looked into this ross albrecht's character the more convinced he became that this was the guy behind silk road first by searching the name ross albrecht gary fan ross's youtube channel containing videos about libertarianism along with a saved video about how to get away with stealing but also ross would use the username oh yeah ross which was interesting because whenever dread pirate roberts messaged anyone or wrote on the silk road forum he'd always write yeah not yes oh yeah always just yeah it was a small detail but perhaps more than just a coincidence secondly gary found ross's linkedin profile which had anti-government posts russ had written the most widespread and systematic use of force is amongst institutions and governments so this is my current point of efforts the best way to change the government is to change the minds of the governed to that end i'm creating an economic simulation to give people a first-hand experience of what it would be like to live in a world without the systematic use of force thirdly they found a coding question related to tor posted on stack overflow which had been posted by a user called ross albrecht but within a minute of posting he changed his username to frosty insteads clearly he realized he'd slipped up by using his real name and so that's why he changed it right away gary couldn't shake the feeling that this was the guy they were looking for so gary asked a colleague who worked for the department of homeland security to do a search on ross albert's name and they found a recent incident on his file where he'd ordered fake ids online that had been intercepted when ross had been questioned by an officer about this he made a comment about how hypothetically anyone could go on a website called silk road and buy them why ross said that is anyone's guess maybe he was trying to make the point that buying fake ids wasn't that big of a deal these days or maybe he just got overconfident that silk road could never be traced to him but either way gary felt this whole thing was suspicious now of course all these different details still weren't conclusive evidence ross albrecht was the creator and owner of silk road but here's the thing other important details about the case hadn't been shared with gary to be honest nobody expected this irs agent would crack the case that other agencies had been working on for over two years so they hadn't bothered to fill him in on recent developments you see whilst gary had been doing this research the fbi had managed to find out the ip address of the server silk road was hosted on using that ip address they'd managed to find out the server was hosted in a data center in iceland and by working with the icelandic authorities the fbi were able to infiltrate the silk road server now as for exactly how the government found the service ip address in the first place that's a bit of a controversial issue some believe the nsa had some involvement and used an illegal spying tactic that would have infringed on ross's fourth amendment rights however the government denied this and said the way they were able to get access to the server was because of vulnerabilities in silk roads code which leaked the server's ip address this is definitely possible because as we've already established silkworth's code had plenty of problems because of how quickly it had been developed by ross who'd initially been working on it all by himself either way now that the fbi had tracked down the silk road server in iceland they could access a lot of crucial data most importantly of all they could see activity on the server like whenever the silk road admin logged in or out the logs showed the most recent admin login had come from an internet cafe in san francisco whilst this was a major breakthrough the fbi still didn't have any leads on who the hell dred pirate roberts actually was and that's when they got a call from gary at the irs gary got on a group call with agents from other departments working on the case like the dea and fbi and he laid out everything he'd found gary explained that this person with the username altoid had been the first one to mention silk road online and he'd made multiple posts about silk road on different forums almost like he was promoting the site when it first began gary said that the user had slipped up and on one of his later posts included his personal email rossualbricht gmail.com gary then went on to explain how on stack overflow a user had posted a coding question related to tor under the name ross albrecht but then a minute later changed the name to the pseudonym frosty at that exact moment one of the other agents on the call cut gary off and said wait did you just say frosty gary was a little frustrated he still had more to explain yes i said frosty but why are you focusing on that part gary asks the agent replied when we got the server from iceland we found that both the server and the computer that belongs to dpr had both been given the same name frosty there was a brief silence on the call the dot was starting to connect gary then added that he tracked where ross was currently living because of the incident with the fake ids on his record however when gary shared ross's current address with the fbi they couldn't believe it ross was living in san francisco just a couple of blocks from the internet cafe where they tracked the silk road admin ip address this was clearly their guy the truth was now clear to everyone on the call the fbi agents the dea agents and gary from the irs ross albrecht was dread pirate roberts gary had been right the elusive criminal mastermind they'd been chasing for the last couple of years perhaps wasn't quite the criminal mastermind they'd thought he'd made several major mistakes that exposed his true identity his downfall was simply because of human error this was a guy in his 20s who'd never expected silk road to become what it did and thus hadn't taken enough care to cover his tracks or as gary would say this was the digital equivalent of the parking tickets a minor detail that had been overlooked either way the authorities finally knew that ros albrecht was the one behind silk road now they just had to catch him but surprisingly that wasn't going to be as easy as you'd think the fbi assigned a team of undercover agents to track ross and watches every move because they had access to the silk road server logs now they could literally see when the silk road admin logged in or out and it always coincided with when ross opened or closed his laptop it was undeniable he was their guy so why weren't they rushing in immediately to arrest him well you see they needed to catch him with his laptop open that laptop contained all kinds of valuable data that would not only help in prosecuting ross but also in tracking down other people who'd worked on silk road or big dealers on the sites but if a team of agents just suddenly swarmed into a restaurant he would likely have time to close his laptop lid which would lock it i mean all the data was encrypted and near impossible to break into plus if they didn't catch ross literally sitting at his laptop it would give him some kind of deniability so they had to catch him red-handed with the laptop open in front of him so they could definitely prove he was responsible when ross woke up on october 1st 2013 it seemed just like any other day he initially went to a nearby cafe but it was quite busy and he couldn't get a spot to work in that was private enough so instead he went to sit in the san francisco public library he found a secluded spot where nobody could see his screen and logged into the silk road admin area of course ross was completely unaware that the library was filled with undercover fbi agents who were watching him but remember one wrong move from the authorities and ross could panic and close the laptop that's encrypting all the data they couldn't let us know they were onto him or it would all be over so two undercover agents created a distraction right behind ross posing as a couple arguing one of them swore loudly in the quiet library causing ross to turn around to see what was going on at that exact moment ross turned around another agent who'd been positioned right next to him swooped in and grabbed the laptop off the table in front of ross ross tried to reach out to grab it but it was too late another agent had come up behind him and handcuffed him placing him under arrests it was all perfectly timed so ross had no chance to react ross had been caught logged into the admin section of silk road and in the corner of the computer was the name frosty and not just that on his unlocked computer was a full diary about running silk road along with thousands of chat messages he sent whilst running the sites all of which could be used as evidence to convict him and verify this story newspapers and tv stations all around the world covered the story the boy scout had been secretly running a website that trafficked an estimated 1.2 billion dollars of drugs weapons poisons and other illegal goods his family was sure he'd been framed or there'd been a mistake this couldn't possibly be their us could it sometimes when i'm researching these business stories they feel more like the plot of a hollywood movie than real life but they do say that the truth is often stranger than fiction and this next part is absolutely ridiculous so after the authorities got hold of ross's open laptop they could see everything including all his chat histories but this led the fbi to realize there was a government agent who'd been working on the silkworld case who had been privately messaging ross and accepting secret payments from him in exchange for information about the case this corrupt agent was called force and he obviously thought because the messages were encrypted and the payment was in bitcoin he would never get caught but now the government had russ's chat histories and records of the bitcoin transactions it all started when carl initially posed as a big-time drug smuggler on the silk road forums under the username knob he began messaging ross or as he knew him back then dread pirate roberts and started to build a relationship with him once carla built up some trust with ross he told him that he knew of a mole within the dea and started selling information about the silk road case to ross of course carl himself was the mole he was taking payments from ross in exchange for information about the case over the course of several months carl received over 750 000 in bitcoin in exchange for sending information to ross about the silk road case but things get much crazier you see one of the employees rusted hired to help him with silk road was a guy called curtis green who had become a site moderator but one day when curtis got a large shipment of coke sent to his house he was caught by the baltimore task force and got arrested ross was obviously confused why his moderator suddenly stopped replying to him because at first he had no idea curtis had been arrested and then he noticed curtis had stolen 350 thousand dollars from silk road because as a moderator curtis had access to some of the site's funds that were being held in escrow now ross obviously assumed curtis had betrayed him that he'd stolen money from the sites and then vanished but in yet another twist it wasn't curtis who stole the money from the sites it was another corrupt agent on the baltimore task force called sean bridges after arresting curtis greene sean had logged into curtis's silk road account that had moderated privileges and started transferring some of the silk road bitcoins to his own personal accounts so this government agent was basically siphoning money off silk road to his own personal bitcoin wallet whilst logged in with curtis's moderator accounts and just to be clear sean wasn't doing this to turn the money over to the government he was moving the funds to his own personal private accounts thinking he wouldn't get caught because it was in bitcoin so just to recap we now have two different corrupt agents working on the silk road case who are both part of the baltimore task force both with their own separate schemes to steal bitcoin for themselves as for ross he obviously had no idea about any of this he just assumed curtis had robbed him so according to the chat logs from ross's computer he decided to hire someone to go after curtis initially ross didn't want to kill him he just wanted his money back and maybe to beat him up a bit however ross's in a circle that he spoke to on silk road like variety jones persuaded ross it was the right decision to have curtis killed because he needed to send a message that he couldn't be crossed otherwise other silk road employees might think about betraying ross in the future as well ross had to send a message ultimately ross agreed and asked if anyone could kill curtis one of the people who saw that request was carl force the other corrupt agent who was part of the same team who just arrested curtis senting an opportunity to make yet more money for himself carl replied using his knob username and said he knew some pros who could get the job done he said they need 40k up front and 40k after the execution was complete so ross sent the first half of the payments carl then got curtis who he had under arrest and staged his death they took a photo of what looked like curtis's dead body except curtis wasn't dead it was just a staged photo but ross didn't know that he assumed the hit had been carried out successfully and paid the rest of the money to carl ross did right back that he was a little disturbed by the photo and explained i'm new to this kind of thing it was clear he was quite distressed about issuing a hit on someone but as far as ross knew curtis had stolen hundreds of thousands of dollars from him so he rationalized that having him killed was necessary in reality of course curtis was alive and it was the corrupt agent sean who stolen the money from curtis's moderator accounts and the other corrupt agent carl who'd faked goods his death in order to make even more money from her supposed hit job shortly after this ross would end up ordering hits on five other people who crossed him including a hacker who was trying to extort money from him as far as ross was concerned he now had the power to pay to get anyone killed if he needed to in the diary on ross's computer he wrote sent payment to angels for hit on tony 76 and his three associates which was then followed by an update about some work he done on the site that day it seemed like ordering a hit on someone had now just become a fairly normal part of the job to russ but again just like with the hitti ordered on curtis none of these murders ross paid for ever took place no bodies were ever found it seems ross was simply getting scammed by other people claiming to be hit men and nobody had actually been killed which was lucky for us because when he eventually got caught in the library and all these messages he'd sent were discovered the murder for higher charges against him were dropped because even though they had evidence from his chat logs that he paid for those hits and that he believed the orders had been carried out it was all an elaborate scam and he couldn't be convicted of murder when nobody had been murdered now for legal reasons i should stress that ross's family still maintains that someone planted those messages on his computer and that ross never wrote them himself as for carl and sean the two corrupt agents both were sentenced to around six years in prison each it's seriously crazy that two separate government agents working on the same case both try to steal so much money and secretly transfer it to their own bitcoin wallets and if ross hadn't been caught they likely wouldn't have been caught either but of course ross was caught and now it's time we look at the final and most crucial part of all of this what actually happened to ross okay it's time for a very quick break while i ask you a favor if you're enjoying this video so far please turn on the notification bell for magnates media i'm posting mini movies about business money marketing and more but just subscribing doesn't always mean you'll see them so please consider turning on notifications and i'll love you forever ross was being charged with seven different offenses including drug trafficking money laundering and the kingpin statutes something which was normally reserved for cartel leaders however even though ross had been caught with his fingers on the laptop whilst logged in as the admin on silk road he still played not guilty his lawyers admitted that ross had started the silk road but claimed he had done so as a social experiment not as a business to make money they then said shortly after he started the site things have begun to get a little out of control and thus ross had decided to sell the site to someone else who went by the name dread pirate roberts they claimed that after that ross had no further involvement in the site and that ross was simply being set up as the full guy by the real dpr they argued the chat logs and diary on ross's computer had been planted there to try and pin all the blame on him however unfortunately for ross the evidence against him was overwhelming he had literally been caught logged into the silk road admin page loaded on his laptop whilst at the library not just that the chat logs on his computer dated back multiple years and showed everything he'd said including the conversation with variety jones where they invented the dread pirate robert's name as an alibi if he was ever caught messages also showed dpr telling someone he was buying fake ids because he needed to expand silk road service base and these messages were sent right at the same time that ross's fake ids were intercepted as for the notion that ross sold the sites there was absolutely no record or indication of that plus ross had still been receiving all the bitcoin from psych commissions so it seemed clear he was still the one who'd been running it all this time from start to finish ross had been dread pirate roberts despite this advocates came from all over to support ross during the trial but many of them protesting on the steps of the courthouse that he was a hero they said that all ross had done was run a website and if that was a crime then the ceos of ebay and craigslist should stand trial too as illegal goods were sold on those websites as well the jury did not see it the same way they returned their verdict guilty on all counts the chat logs and files on ross's computer were just too damning if he'd only close the laptop lid within the library it's likely they wouldn't have been able to prove so much before his sentencing ross sent a letter to the judge which said i've had my youth and i know you must take away my middle years but please leave me with my old age please leave a small light at the end of the tunnel an excuse to stay healthy and excuse to dream of better days ahead and a chance to redeem myself in the free world before i meet my maker the judge did not listen to this ross received two life sentences plus 40 years with no parole in other words ross would spend the entire rest of his life in prison some felt this was overly harsh but it seemed the judge wanted to make an example of him to try and deter other people from setting up similar marketplaces in future the judge also explained her decision by saying that she disagreed with ross's philosophy that drug use only affects those who take the drugs she said there are many other people who are hurt because of the dangerous substances sold on silk road people die and lose loved ones families get ripped apart junkies are created and in many instances i'd exclude their ability to care for their children and a generation can grow up neglected and orphaned in other words silk road caused irreparable harm to many people the judge also pointed out that whilst no bodies had been found ross had commissioned five murders which he paid for and he fully believed they'd taken place ultimately the evidence against ross seemed conclusive and thus ross was sentenced to life in jail of course there's two sides to this on the one hand there have been studies that showed people were much less likely to be physically harmed buying these substances online compared to on the streets and ross tried to argue silk road actually made the experience much safer especially with the review system on the sides if these people were going to buy illegal goods anyway silk road was probably a much safer way to do it ross was also technically a first-time offender and this was a non-violent charge and so the life sentencing did seem unusually extreme because yes ross built the silk road platform but aside from the initial shrooms he grew he wasn't selling any drugs himself he was a web admin and you could argue that drug trades happen all the time on platforms like facebook and snapchat but that doesn't mean the platform creator is to blame on the other hand there is clearly a big difference between silk road and those other sites those other sites don't allow illegal sales whereas silk road actively encouraged it and made it possible plus in 2015 a study from the centers for disease control and prevention said that for the first time in recent history more people had died from opioid related overdoses in america than from gun deaths they found one of the main reasons for the rise in deaths was due to the ease in which people could now gain access to these substances the growth in substance abuse coincided with the growth in popularity of silk roads in other words people got access to items they likely wouldn't have been able to access without silk road and in multiple cases that led to people dying silk road made it easy for people of all ages to access unsafe substances and illegal goods and ross enabled that in fact he personally approved the sale of countless extremely dangerous items however no matter what side of the debate you fall on you have to recognize it's not fully black and white what does seem clear is that ross was the creator and operator of silk road and that from february 6 2011 to july 23 2013 it's estimated well over 1.2 million unique transactions happened on the site and 9 million 519 664 bitcoin was generated in sales of that 614 305 bitcoin was taken by silk road as commission some of that money was reinvested back into site growth staff and maintenance and some of it ross took himself back in 2013 when ross was caught that money was worth hundreds of millions of dollars as of today it would be worth tens of billions of dollars it's ironic really that ross was a big fan of the show breaking bad as there's clearly parallels with his own story a seemingly total normal guy who descends into becoming a drug kingpin gradually getting more extreme along the way like ordering a hit to get someone killed and likewise both started out with a more noble objective for walt it was to pay his medical bills for us it was to give people freedom but both seem to end up liking the power and wealth they gained a little too much and they got carried away and pushed things too far until finally it all caught up with them even though the judge had expected that the sentencing she gave to ross would deter anyone else from creating another silk road in reality almost immediately after the original silk road site got shut down silk road 2.0 popped up arguably all the attention of the silk road case just got more people interested in the idea however sequels are rarely better than the original and indeed the multiple silk road sequels haven't quite gained the same notoriety as ross's original sites silk road 2 lasted exactly one year before federal agents found the server hosting silk road 2 in a foreign country and realized the server was registered to the email address blake bentle.net turns out a guy called blake bental who was allegedly operating the site had used his own personal email account with his full name in to set up the server for silk road 2. so just like ross's use of his personal email address led the fbi to him the same happened with blake i'm still not sure why you would possibly use your real personal email address for that anyway once again there was some controversy around how the authorities were able to locate this server in the first place something governments used a potentially illegal spying technique and others think the tor network itself may be compromised there's all kinds of theories but none of that has stopped countless other similar dark marketplaces popping up over the last few years generally as one shuts down another one tends to open although quite often it turns out the entire site was a scam in the first place or even a honeypot by the government to catch dealers interestingly though many of the people who set up these silk road clones or similar illegal marketplaces do so under the name dread pirate roberts so in a way ross's vision of a free market that would live on and be passed down from person to person did kind of happen although since russ is facing the rest of his life in prison i doubt that's much consolation now if you found this story of silk road interesting i think you're really gonna enjoy this video i made about mark zuckerberg's enemy the bitcoin billionaires this video looks at the rise of bitcoin including its ties to silk road and you can click here right now to watch the insane full story for yourself finally i just want to say thank you for watching this video to the end you are a legend and i'll see you in the next one cheers

Channel: MagnatesMedia

Views: 5,146,078

Keywords: Silk Road website, Silk road dark web, Ross Ulbricht, Silk road kingpin, how did they catch ross Ulbricht, how did they find silk road, silk road marketplace, silk road tor, silk road documentary, silk road movie, silk road business, business movies, magnatesmedia, magnates media, silk road darkweb, silk road dark web history, silk road dark web explained

Id: fsfoqdqyykI

Length: 44min 31sec (2671 seconds)

Published: Fri Aug 26 2022