Founder of Silk Road drug marketplace has been sentenced to life in prison

A San Francisco man who created the underground drug-selling website Silk Road was sentenced Friday to life in prison by a judge who cited six deaths from drugs bought on his site and five people he tried to have killed. U.S. District Judge Katherine Forrest told 31-year-old Ross Ulbricht he was a criminal even though he doesn’t fit the typical profile — he has two collegiate degrees — and she brushed aside his efforts to characterise the business as merely a big mistake.

It was a carefully planned life’s work. It was your opus.

U.S. District Judge Katherine Forrest

Ulbricht’s 2013 arrest shut down what prosecutors described as an unprecedented one-stop online shopping mall where the supply of drugs was virtually limitless, enabling nearly 4,000 drug dealers to expand their markets from the sidewalk to cyberspace, selling drugs on a never-before-seen scale to more than 100,000 buyers in markets stretching from Argentina to Australia, from the United States to Ukraine.

Americas Ross Ulbricht