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Trump Frees Silk Road Creator Ross Ulbricht After 11 Years in Prison
Donald Trump pardoned the creator of the world’s first dark web drug market, who is now a libertarian cause célèbre in some parts of the crypto community.
A little over 11 years and three months ago, Ross Ulbricht was arrested in the science fiction section of a branch of San Francisco’s public library, caught with his laptop still logged into the Silk Road, the world’s first dark web drug market that he created and ran under the pseudonym the Dread Pirate Roberts. For close to two and a half years after Ulbricht created the Silk Road in 2011, the dark web site facilitated the sale of vast amounts of narcotics, as well as counterfeit documents, money laundering services and, at times, guns, for hundreds of millions of dollars in Bitcoin payments. After the FBI located the Silk Road’s server in Iceland in 2013 and arrested then-29-year-old Ulbricht in San Francisco, he was convicted on seven charges relating to the distribution of narcotics, money laundering, and computer hacking, as well as a “continuing criminal enterprise” statute—sometimes known as the “kingpin statute”—usually reserved for mob bosses and cartel leaders.
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