29 year-old investment advisor, Ross W. Ulbricht, was arrested on Tuesday (Oct. 1st) for creating and
hosting an online black market, known as Silk Road website most commonly used
for the buying and selling of illegal drugs. More commonly known as the
infamous, Captain “Dread Pirate Roberts”, Ulbricht reached an economical gain
of approximately $3.6 million worth Bitcoin currency and reached a worth $1.2
billion in transactions, which was ultimately seized by the FBI. Among the
distribution of illegal drugs such as LSD, cocaine, heroine, etc., the website
also offered illegal services such as hiring “hitmen” and hacking services for
fraud purposes. Ulbricht was charged with several counts, including narcotics
trafficking, laundering money and computer hacking conspiracies.
After reading John Suler’s, “The Online Disinhibition Effect”,
it can be concluded that Ulbricht’s crime was motivated by the disinhibition of dissasociative anonymity. Ulbricht’s use of his online identity,
“Dread Pirate Roberts”, allowed him to create a person outside of his personal
and professional life. His well-known identity as a Pennsylvania State
University graduate and an overall intellectual, smart and well-presented man
made room for the ability to be an anonymous count online and was easily hidden
since his online actions were not an impression of how he carried his personal
and professional self. According to Suler, the use of a pseudonym, or fake
name, gives people the “opportunity to separate their actions online from their
in-person lifestyle and identity” and thus, creating a disassociating of their
online behavior to that of their offline lifestyle. According to an online news
blog, Ulbricht was caught due to his own “carelessness”, after he
unintentionally revealed his real identity on a website used to ask online
questions. It can be argued that because Ulbricht had been the mastermind
behind the Silk Road “drug empire” for nearly two years, he had become so well
acquainted to what he was doing and dissociated due to his well-used anonymity,
his simple mistake led to his arrest.
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