![]() CLARK also provided advice to Ulbricht on developing a “cover story” to make it appear as though Ulbricht had sold Silk Road. In his journal, Ulbricht described CLARK as a “real mentor” who advised Ulbricht about, among other things, security vulnerabilities in the Silk Road site, technical infrastructure, the rules that governed Silk Road users and vendors, and the promotion of sales on Silk Road, including the sales of narcotics. Silk Road was specifically designed to allow its users to buy and sell drugs and other illegal goods and services anonymously and outside the reach of law enforcement through the use of the Tor network and a Bitcoin-based payment system. Silk Road was also used to launder hundreds of millions of dollars deriving from these unlawful transactions. The drugs sold on Silk Road included more than 82 kilograms of cocaine and 26 kilograms of heroin. These transactions had a total value of approximately $213 million, including more than $183 million in drug sales. ![]() Silk Road was massive in scope there were more than 1.5 million transactions on the site, involving more than 115,000 buyer accounts and 3,000 seller accounts. Silk Road emerged as the most sophisticated and extensive criminal marketplace on the Internet at the time and one of the first online marketplaces to exclusively use cryptocurrency to facilitate illegal transactions. Ulbricht created Silk Road in approximately January 2011 and owned and operated the underground website until it was shut down by law enforcement in October 2013. Today’s sentence is another reminder that criminal marketplaces, like Silk Road, are a road to prison.”Īccording to the allegations in the Superseding Indictment, court filings, statements made in court, and evidence presented during the 2015 trial of Ross Ulbricht, Silk Road’s founder: Roger Thomas Clark was a central figure in helping to lead Silk Road and in advocating violence, even murder, to protect this digital drug empire. Attorney Damian Williams said: “Silk Road was a secret online marketplace for illegal drugs, computer hacking services, and a host of other criminal activity. CLARK previously pled guilty before the late U.S. CLARK advised Ulbricht on all aspects of the enterprise, including urging and facilitating an attempted murder-for-hire. During its operation from 2011 until 2013, Silk Road was used by thousands of drug dealers and other unlawful vendors to distribute illegal drugs and other illicit goods and services to more than 100,000 buyers and to launder hundreds of millions of dollars derived from those unlawful transactions. Damian Williams, the United States Attorney for the Southern District of New York, announced that ROGER THOMAS CLARK, a/k/a “Plural of Mongoose,” a/k/a “Variety Jones,” a/k/a “VJ,” a/k/a “cimon,” was sentenced to 20 years in prison today for conspiring to distribute massive quantities of narcotics, arising out of his role as the top adviser to Ross Ulbricht, a/k/a “Dread Pirate Roberts,” the owner and operator of the “Silk Road” online illicit black market. ![]()
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