Ross Ulbricht: Silk Road mastermind appears in San Francisco court

Ross Ulbricht, the alleged mastermind behind the online illegal drugs marketplace Silk Road, is too dangerous to be bailed, US prosecutors have said.

Ross Ulbricht, 29, was arrested this week and is charged with being the administrator of Silk Road site which has now been shut down.

He is also accused of trying to arrange the killing of one of the site’s users.

“We deny all charges and that is the end of the discussion at this point,” Ross Ulbricht’s lawyer said.

Ross Ulbricht appeared in a San Francisco court on Friday wearing a green T-shirt under red jail clothes and had his ankles shackled.

A request from Ross Ulbricht’s legal team for his bail hearing to be pushed back was granted – it will now take place on October 9.

Federal magistrate Joseph Spero asked Ross Ulbricht’s lawyer Brandon LeBlanc whether seeing the criminal indictment that included a murder-for-hire charge had “changed his calculus” on whether he thought Ulbricht would be granted bail.

As part of its criminal complaint, the FBI alleged that Ross Ulbricht had sought to pay a Silk Road user to kill another user who had threatened to expose details of the site’s users.

Prosecutors opposed the delay, arguing that Ross Ulbricht represented a danger to the community, and that there was a high likelihood that he may attempt to flee.

The Silk Road was a well-known destination on Tor, a so-called “dark web” service that anonymizes users, making it much more difficult for authorities to track locations.

The Silk Road sold a range of items, but was most famous for offering a host of illegal drugs, paid for using virtual currency Bitcoin.