Who is Ross Ulbricht? Silk Road creator pardoned by President Donald Trump

DONALD Trump's first day back in office saw him sign an unconditional pardon for Silk Road creator Ross Ulbricht.

Silk Road was a dark web marketplace where illegal items could be anonymously traded such as drugs, hacking equipment and stolen passports.

Ulbricht started creating the underground market in 2011 before being arrested in 2013 when the site was shut down.

According to court documents submitted by the FBI, when Ulbricht was arrested, the site had almost one million registered users, though it is not known how many were active at the time.

The drug kingpin who ran the site under the name Dread Pirate Roberts was found out after a tax agent discovered a post about Silk Road in an online forum.

The same user returned to the forum eight months later advertising a job posting and directing all applications to an account registered to Ulbricht who was then identified as a suspect.

After seizing his laptop, the discovered that "the Silk Road generated hundreds of millions of dollars in sales and more than $13 million dollars worth of Bitcoin in commissions."

"On November 3, 2020, law enforcement seized over $1 billion worth of digital currency from this case."

Ulbricht from Austin, Texas, was convicted in New York in 2015 after being found guilty of numerous charges including drug trafficking, computer hacking, and money laundering.

At the time, he said: "I wanted to empower people to make choices in their lives and have privacy and anonymity."

The cyber criminal was handed a life sentence without the chance of parole a decision that has now been pardoned by the new president.

Trump's pardon comes after Ulbricht tried to appeal his sentence twice - once in the US Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit in 2017 and then to the Supreme Court in 2018.