thecrimeshop

Silk Road saga has a new and improved twist

Double agent?

Well it’s simply a rumor at this stage but, recently news has begun to spring that the attorneys for Ross Ulbricht filed a letter with the US attorney’s office in Maryland saying that they have found evidence that an “unnamed agent” with the US Government sold information regarding the investigation, then deleted the evidence of his/her betrayal.

I don’t mind saying this, I am not surprised. 

Ross Ulbricht if you don’t know, happens to be the former darknet market operator convicted of creating and running the Silk Road who was arrested in 2013.

Ross Ulbricht is also known by his pseudonym – Dread Pirate Roberts.

Ross is currently serving a life sentence without the possibility of parole. He was convicted of money laundering, computer hacking, conspiracy to traffic fraudulent identity documents, and conspiracy to traffic narcotics in February 2015.

According to Ross’s attorneys, they claim that an “unnamed agent” may have sold information to Ross, who was a Silk Road operator with regards to the investigation into the ill fated Silk Road.

That “unnamed agent” then deleted all of the evidence pertaining to the sale.

All that is known about the said agent is that he or she used the aliases “notwonderful” and “albertpacino” while on the Silk Road playing and posting in forums

He or she then deleted all of the evidence pertaining to the exchange “after” the government seized the servers.

Yes, after the government seized the servers.

As luck would have it, Ross’s legal team had forensics experts looking through communications between Ross, AKA Dread Pirate Roberts when they happened across communications between Ross and “notwonderful.”

“Notwonderful,” claimed to be someone working for the government and went on to state that they were willing to sell Ross intel regarding a government investigation into Silk Road and none other than Ross.

Ross’s team claims that someone purposely deleted those communications from evidence that was turned over as part of the investigation into Silk Road but that those communications were deleted after the servers were seized by the government.

Of course, adding fuel to the fire is the fact that two men who were originally part of the investigation were arrested, charged with and sentenced for crimes they committed while investigating the Silk Road.

Shaun Bridges was convicted of money laundering and obstruction of justice, he also tried to flee the country after he was handed down a 71 year sentence for his crimes….

Carl Mark Force was convicted of money laundering, obstruction and extortion.

Yet according to Ross’s attorneys, the culprit in this newest saga is neither one of those two agents.

Now of course that opens up the possibility that the Government’s entire case against Ross is full of corruption and puts the entire investigation into question.

If evidence was in fact deleted from the servers after they had been confiscated, evidence could have potentially also been planted.

It’s not a one way street, you take stuff off a server and you can also load stuff onto a server.

I won’t bore you with how back-up’s and discovery work, but if a server is being backed up, then you could tell if things were tampered with and when they were tampered with.

According to Ross’s attorneys, someone “surgically” removed evidence.

At the end of the day, I personally have always felt that Ross was just the fall guy.

They couldn’t go after the users so they went after Ross and to drive the message home to the users they charged Ross with everything and anything that they could and sentenced him remain behind bars for the rest of his life.

Ross Ulbricht’s charges, sentence and case are very much deserving of a second look, one that would not be so agenda filled.

Cristal M Clark

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