The hitman scam: Dread Pirate Roberts’ bizarre murder-for-hire attempts
The most disturbing part of the Dread Pirate Roberts (DPR) story is also the strangest: how the boss of the Silk Road drugs marketplace attempted to arrange not one but six murders-for-hire.
No murders actually took place. The first "hit" was purchased from an undercover DEA agent and was meant to take out a former Silk Road staffer; it has been charged in Maryland. But the story of the other five came out at the recent New York City trial of Ross Ulbricht, accused of being DPR and developing the Silk Road site, through a remarkable 33-page transcript of private messages that prosecutors harvested from the Silk Road server after it was captured by the government.
The transcript makes for astonishing reading as Dread Pirate Roberts dispenses cash and orders hits without bothering to verify even basic details about those he interacts with. Looking up the mentioned transactions in Bitcoin's blockchain shows that the transfers did in fact take place; whatever happened here, at least one party seems to have thought it was real—even if the dialogue often reads like a bad movie script.
