While investigating the Silk Road anonymous marketplace, Secret Service Special Agent Shaun Bridges stole $820,000 in bitcoins. He has pleaded guilty to money laundering and obstruction and now presumably will be going to prison. Bridges clearly didn’t know he should have been a bankster. Then he would have been able to launder money at will, knowing the government would only fine the company he worked for. Silly Shaun.
Between 2012 and 2014, Bridges was assigned to the Baltimore Silk Road Task Force, a multi-agency group investigating illegal activity on Silk Road. Bridges’ responsibilities included, among other things, conducting forensic computer investigations in an effort to locate, identify and prosecute targets, including Ross Ulbricht, aka Dread Pirate Roberts, who ran Silk Road.
According to his plea agreement, Bridges admitted that in January 2013 he used an administrator account on the Silk Road website that belonged to another individual to fraudulently obtain access to that website, reset passwords of various accounts and to move bitcoin from those accounts into a bitcoin “wallet” that Bridges controlled
According to his admissions, he liquidated the bitcoin into $820,000 of U.S. currency between March and May 2013, and had the funds transferred to personal investment accounts in the United States.
DEA Agent Carl Force will also being going to prison, and appears to be not very bright. Presumably DEA agents have regular security audits and inquiring minds would probably want to know where the money to pay off his mortgage came from.
Force allegedly extorted enough money to pay off his mortgage, repay a $22,000 government loan, wire $235,000 to an offshore account in Panama, and invest tens of thousands of dollars in real estate and stocks.