The court found Silk Road founder Ross Ulbricht, known as Dread Pirate Roberts, guilty of all charges and faces a life sentence for operating a black market.
Ross Ulbricht, a 30-year-old web developer from San Francisco, was arrested by the FBI in an operation in October 2013, on charges of being the mastermind behind Silk Road, which trafficked hundreds of millions of dollars in illegal goods.
Ross Ulbricht had claimed to have created Silk Road, but that he was not the infamous leader of the website “Dread Pirate Roberts.”
The trial lasted a little over three weeks and today the jury consisting of six men and six women convicted Ross Ulbricht of seven charges including money laundering, drug trafficking and computer hacking, among others.
"The supposed anonymity of the dark web is not a protective shield from arrest and criminal prosecution," according to a statement from Manhattan U.S. Attorney Preet Bharara after the verdict.
Prosecutors alleged that Ulbricht ran the $1.2 billion “empire” from 2011 to 2013, armed with only a laptop and a Wi-Fi connection. Silk Road ran on the Tor to continue its operations, but federal agents seized the Silk Road servers, along with of bitcoins , and shut down the site.
Silk Road was an underground online marketplace where users could buy and sell everything from drugs to hacking tutorials. Payments were made using Bitcoin, a digital currency that is difficult to trace.
A separate trial in a Baltimore court, on charges including attempted murder, is still ongoing.
