Ross Ulbricht, founder of Silk Road, an online bazaar where anonymous buyers can buy drugs, stolen passports, and hacking tools using Bitcoins, was sentenced with two counts of life in prison on Friday in Federal District Court in Manhattan.
Judge Katherine B. Forrest described Ulbricht's crime as "terribly destructive to our social fabric.” The site was operational for almost three years and had handled 1.5 million transactions for thousands of sellers and more than 100,000 buyers before the federal authorities discovered it and shut it down in 2013. The prosecutors said that Ulbricht, 31, using a pseudonym Dread Pirate Roberts, received millions of dollars in commissions, according to The New York Times.
Ulbricht's family is disappointed of the court's decision. They believe that he does not deserve the life sentence because he was too naive when he created Silk Road. He was 25 years old and wanted to grow his pile of bitcoins at that time; he didn't expected that criminals would use the site for illegal transactions.
“I remember clearly why I created the Silk Road,” Ross said. “I wanted to empower people to be able to make choices in their lives, for themselves and to have privacy and anonymity."
“I’m not saying that because I want to justify anything that’s happened. I just want to set the record straight, because from my point of view, I’m not a self-centered sociopathic person that was trying to express some kind of inner badness. I just made some very serious mistakes.”
Judge Forrest rejected the "too naive" claim and cited evidence that Ross knew exactly how his business should work and how to protect it. The prosecutors have evidence that he planned five murders to protect the business, Bloomberg reported.
Aside from the life sentence, the U.S. government would seize about $184 million from Ulbricht.
Joshua Dratel, Ulbricht's lawyer, told Reuters that they would appeal the case, describing the sentence as "unreasonable, unjust and unfair."
