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Silk Road investigator gets more jail time for second Bitcoin theft
A Secret Service agent already convicted to 71 months in prison for swiping Silk Road Bitcoins will get another two years for a separate Bitcoin theft, Reuters reports. Shaun Bridges pleaded guilty to stealing 1,606 Bitcoins -- worth around $360,000 at the time and now valued at over $11 million -- from a Bitcoin wallet controlled by the Secret Service. The theft was discovered when the agency tried to return some of the coins after they were seized from the European BitStamp exchange.
Crooked Silk Road investigator arrested a second time
You'd think that a former Secret Service agent caught stealing Bitcoins during the Silk Road case would know better than to try to elude authorities, but apparently that isn't the case. Ex-investigator Shaun Bridges was re-arrested January 29th after he was caught with bags containing a passport, records for offshore accounts, documents for his wife's non-US citizenship application and multiple bulletproof vests. Needless to say, that looks more than a little suspicious -- especially when Bridges was a day away from turning himself in to serve a nearly 6-year sentence for corruption charges. It's not exactly certain what he had in mind, but the odds are that he wanted to be out of the US on January 30th.
Another Silk Road spy pleaded guilty to laundering bitcoins
$820,000. That's how much former Secret Service agent Shaun Bridges pilfered in bitcoin during his time investigating the online black market, Silk Road. Bridges pleaded guilty to money laundering and obstruction of justice recently and the Department of Justice says that it was analyzing the "block chain and data" from Silk Road's servers that lead the breadcrumb trail of ill-gotten gains back to him. Bridges funneled his 20,000 bitcoins, at that time worth $350,000, through a series of "complex transactions" with a stop at Mt. Gox before transferring them into US dollars in early 2013. It isn't nearly as flagrant as his colleague Carl Force's transgressions (a movie deal? Seriously?), but the amount of money Bridges tried stealing was an awful lot higher.
Silk Road investigator pleads guilty to stealing bitcoins
Disgraced DEA agent Carl Force has pleaded guilty to charges of extortion, money laundering and obstruction of justice. The official committed the crimes while himself investigating the online black market Silk Road, as well as the activities of its founder, Russ "Dread Pirate Roberts" Ulbricht. In a statement from the Department of Justice, Force used "Nob," a DEA-sanctioned online persona to conduct some after hours business with Ulbricht, amongst other things.
Former feds in Silk Road case stand accused of stealing bitcoins
While Ross Ulbricht was found guilty for creating and running the online black market known as Silk Road, it seems that a couple of Federal agents assigned to the case weren't so innocent either. The US Justice Department has just charged two former Federal agents involved in the investigation for allegedly committing wire fraud and diverting bitcoins into their own personal accounts. Former agents Carl Mark Force IV and Shaun Bridges were part of a Baltimore investigation into Ulbricht -- Force worked for the Drug Enforcement Administration and Bridges worked for the Secret Service -- when they supposedly committed the crimes.
