A serial fabricator bearing a pretty shady past has recently been suggested as the real identity behind the pseudonym “Individual X”. The Silk Road hacker Individual X had stolen Bitcoin (BTC) worth $4 billion from the darknet market. The reason behind it was to have the cryptocurrency that the federal government had seized.

The Silk Road hacker using the pseudonym “Individual X” has been identified as Raymond Ngan, aged 49 years. He had been implicated in the brazen digital heist in the court documents that had been filed by Jay Bloom, the Las Vegas entrepreneur. The entrepreneur had sought to recover a civil judgement worth $2.2 billion from the accused, who was then wholly bankrupt, reported Smoking Gun.

The conjecture had taken a table’s turn since November. The Department of Justice had announced that it seized a massive collection of Bitcoin (BTC) from a person who had been publicly identified as “Individual X”. 

The Silk Road hacker had agreed to surrender the illegal profit to the federal government. The illicit profit is currently looking forward to the court approval for a decent auction in civil forfeiture. However, Jay Bloom wishes to intervene and had argued to have deserved a cut of the billions for paying off the judgment he won against the accused.

The swirled tale dated back to 2012 when the dark web market Silk Road had been operating as the Tor network. It had been the world’s premier darknet marketplace or black market trading weapons, illicit drugs and even offered hitman-for hire services.

Silk Road had been seized by the law enforcement agencies back in 2013 while the founder Ross Ulbricht had been convicted on seven criminal counts. The criminal counts also included money laundering and conspiracy to distribute drugs. The founder had operated the darknet marketplace under the pseudonym/alias ‘Dread Pirate Roberts’. He had been accused of commissioning five murders against a price of $650,000. He had been sentenced to serve two life sentences. 

Yet, the question remains – what had been the fate of all the money Ross Ulbricht had made while he ran the illegal black market on the Tor network?

The investigators had estimated that the Silk Road had taken around 600,000 Bitcoins as sales commissions. Bitcoin bears a net value of approximately $36 billion. Only a fraction of the commission had been recovered.

In November, the DOJ had revealed that a Silk Road hacker stole a lump sum quantity of Bitcoin from the founder. Ross had never unveiled the embarrassing security breach to his clients at the Silk Road.

During the theft, Bitcoin used to trade around $5 that made the total value of the money heist about $359,000. On Monday, the Bitcoin price remained over $60,000, and the value of the stolen cryptocurrency had been over $4 billion.

Individual X, the Silk Road hacker, had agreed to surrender the trove of stolen cryptocurrency in exchange for the Prosecutors’ undisclosed concessions. This might be a deal to avoid the prosecution. However, as a part of the deal, the law enforcement officers had promised to keep his identity undisclosed. The court documents did refer to Individual X as ‘he’ and ‘him’.

The Department of Justice (DOJ) had sought court permissions for auctioning off the seized assets and that the money would go to the Treasury. Jay Bloom had intervened in the court filings where he claimed that he owed a cut of the stolen funds. Although the filings made by Bloom did not explicitly name the accused, the filings made it clear that Bloom believes Individual X is the accused, Ngan.

Back in March 2017, Bloom had won a record-breaking $2.2 billion summary judgement against the accused Ngan in Nevada. Bloom had alleged the accused to have reversed the deals for providing some $160 million to finance a business venture. 

The court records show that the accused had infuriated the Nevada court on failing to appear in the case. He had substantially evaded the court processes until he was arrested back in June 2018 near the Yellowstone National Park in Montana. A bench warrant had been issued from a federal bankruptcy court. 

Limited information could be acquired from the mysterious Silk Road hacker who had claimed to be a child refugee from a concentration camp in Cambodia. He stated that he had attended the prestigious Massachusetts Institute of Technology just at the age of 14.

At various times, the Silk Road hacker had claimed to bear advanced degrees from Wharton. He stated that he had amassed billions of managing funds for the Middle Eastern foreign governments and helped to find out a significant retail business in Asia.

In the bankruptcy court, the accused had claimed that his sole asset had been a checking account holding around $500.

During the accused’s bankruptcy proceeding, he had been jailed twice on the contempt charges based on the failure to turn over the documents or appear for the depositions. His lawyers had also perpetually quit, mentioning their frustration with a client who had refused to communicate with them.

The final lawyer of the Silk Road hacker provided the court with a letter from a Las Vegas doctor before withdrawing in January. The letter had revealed that – 

“Ngan is presented with complaints of alcohol addiction…anxiety, depression, and suicidal ideations”.

The letter also revealed that the lab results showed that the accused had been suffering from a chronic viral condition. Dr Daniel Royal also wrote that these ailments had left the accused physically and mentally unable to be deposed further. However, Dr Royal had also recommended him to be placed under 30 days of consistent observation for ensuring that he became mentally stable and physically sober and that his tendency to suicide had abated.

The Silk Road hacker could not be reached, and he did not respond to the repeated messages from The Smoking Gun. The San Francisco attorney, Adam Gasner, who represents Individual X, did not immediately respond to the messages. 

‘My client will continue to live a quiet, anonymous life in the comfort of his own home,’ Gasner told Litigation Daily in February. ‘Privacy and freedom are worth more than money.’ 

Source: MSN

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