Have you ever wanted to visit a store that sold illegal weapons and drugs? Of course you haven’t, because such a store would be highly illegal.
That wasn’t the thought for 31-year-old San Francisco programmer, Ross Ulbricht. In his youth, he took it upon himself to develop a website that served as a dark web internet store, a store that featured nearly every illegal item you could think of; passports, IDs, drugs, weapons, and much more.
Back in 2014, the United States Federal Bureau of Investigation took action against the site and after months of planning and hacking, located the host server, bringing it down and seizing just about $4 million worth of assets. Just like many things on the internet, a second edition of this illegal based website appeared and is now the “new” go-to illegal domain.
Still fighting, the FBI captured and charged Ross Ulbricht with operating, funding, and monitoring the illegal based website. Today in New York, Federal Judge Katherine Forrest issued a life sentence for Ulbricht in United States Federal Prison.
Ulbricht was originally looking at a 20 year sentence, but with so much against him and the harm done by this website, a life sentence was issued.
U.S. Attorney Preet Bharara had this to say about the subject: “Make no mistake: Ulbricht was a drug dealer and criminal profiteer who exploited people’s addictions and contributed to the deaths of at least six young people… Ulbricht went from hiding his cybercrime identity to becoming the face of cybercrime and as today’s sentence proves, no one is above the law.”
These illegal based websites will always be present and the war on drugs will be never ending. With the 2.0 edition of the illegal based website now having 100,000 users, the FBI will continue to hunt down those who disobey the laws and without its leader, bound to fall and crash on its own.
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