Defense attorneys for Ross Ulbricht, the man accused of being head of Silk Road Dread Pirate Roberts, allege that former CEO of now defunct bitcoin exchange Mt. Gox CEO Mark Karpeles was the real mastermind of the online black market.
Motherboard reports that under cross-examination, a Homeland Security agent said he was preparing to get a warrant to search Karpeles’s email back in May of 2013. The agent’s own theory is that Mt. Gox and Silk Road worked together, and the investigation discovered that Mutum Sigilum, a Karpeles holding company, had registered “silkroadmarket.org.” As Homeland Security started moving, Baltimore law enforcement acted early, seizing $3 million in assets from Karpeles. Karpeles offered up Dead Pirate Roberts’s identity in exchange for not being criminally charged with being an unauthorized money service business.
Neither court reporter Sarah Jeong, nor I, have the ability, to even.
I. CAN’T. EVEN. YOU GUYS.
— Sarah Jeong (@sarahjeong) January 15, 2015
Mt.Gox was at one time was the largest bitcoin exchange. It failed spectacularly back in February. As a joint investigation between Le Monde and Ars Technica discovered, Karpeles was convicted of fraud in his native country of France. He never appeared in court, lost by default, and never served his time.
The Ulbricht trial will continue tomorrow and is expected to last about a month.
(Photo: Wikimedia Commons)
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