29-year-old Ross Ulbricht is accused of being the proprietor of the ‘darknet’ website Silk Road--which allegedly sold more than $1 billion in narcotics via Bitcoin. Ulbricht, aka Dread Pirate Roberts, is now facing “the equivalent of life in prison for drug trafficking, computer hacking, conspiracy to traffic in fake IDs, running a criminal enterprise, and money laundering.”
Ulbricht’s defense attorney Joshua Dratel admitted in his opening statement that Ulbricht did indeed start Silk Road but “the site was meant merely to be a kind of economic experiment that Ulbricht only controlled for a brief time.” Dratel claims that Ulbricht was tricked into becoming the ‘fall guy’ when adoptive owners of the site foresaw a law-enforcement crackdown.
