The accused founder of the Silk Road underground Web site was sentenced on Friday to life in prison, convicted of orchestrating a scheme that authorities said enabled more than US$200 million of anonymous online drug sales using the digital currency bitcoin.
Ross William Ulbricht, 31, was sentenced by US District Judge Katherine Forrest in Manhattan after a federal jury in February found him guilty of charges including distributing drugs through the Internet and conspiring to commit computer hacking and money laundering.
“What you did was unprecedented,” Forrest said. “And in breaking that ground as the first person, you sit here as the defendant having to pay the consequences for that.”
Photo: AP
Ulbricht stood silently as Forrest announced the sentence, which also included an order to forfeit US$183.9 million.
Outside the court building, Ulbricht lawyer Joshua Dratel promised an appeal, calling the sentence “unreasonable, unjust and unfair.”
A sniffling Ulbricht, who admitted to creating Silk Road, but denied wrongdoing, in the trial, told the judge before being sentenced that he did not build the site out of greed — contrary to what prosecutors said.
“I wanted to empower people to make choices in their lives and have privacy and anonymity,” he said.
Assistant US Attorney Serrin Turner said Ulbricht was like any other drug kingpin, having fantasized about becoming a billionaire through his criminal enterprise and taking extreme steps, including soliciting murders, to protect it.
“This was not some disinterested do-gooder,” he added.
Silk Road operated for more than two years, allowing users to anonymously buy drugs and other illicit goods and generating more than US$214 million in sales in the process, prosecutors said.
They said Ulbricht ran the site as “Dread Pirate Roberts,” referring to a character in the 1987 movie The Princess Bride.
The Web site relied on the Tor network, which lets users communicate anonymously, and accepted bitcoin as payment, which prosecutors said allowed users to conceal their identities and locations.
Prosecutors said Ulbricht, who grew up in Austin, Texas, took extreme steps to protect Silk Road, soliciting the murders of several people who posed a threat. No evidence exists that the murders were carried out.
The site was shut down in October 2013, when authorities seized it and arrested Ulbricht at a San Francisco library.
“Ulbricht went from hiding his cybercrime identity to becoming the face of cybercrime and as today’s sentence proves, no one is above the law,” Manhattan US Attorney Preet Bharara said in a statement.
At trial, Dratel said his client had indeed created what he intended to be a “freewheeling, free market site” where many harmful items could be sold.
Dratel said Ulbricht handed the site off to others after it became too stressful, and was lured back toward its end to become the “fall guy” for its true operators.
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