Silk Road owner solicited murder for hire

As we learn more about the FBI bust of the deep net financial arm of parts of the underworld, Silk Road, a new fact was revealed. The owner tried to have people murdered.

The federal government has indicted a San Francisco man, Ross William Ulbricht, alleging that he is Dread Pirate Roberts, founder of the online drug marketplace Silk Road.

According to the criminal complaint against Ulbricht, communications this spring “reveal at least one occasion when DPR [Ulbricht] solicited a murder-for-hire” of a Silk Road vendor attempting to extort him with a threat to release the identities of thousands of Silk Road users. The complaint suggests that Ulbricht paid the supposed hit-man approximately $150,000 to kill a Canadian man and received a picture purporting to be the deceased victim. However, Canadian authorities say they have no record of a murder victim matching the man described in the exchange.