Agent who stole bitcoins from Silk Road gets 71 months in prison

A former US Secret Service forensic expert who was part of a special unit to investigate Silk Road has been sentenced to 71 months in prison for stealing bitcoins during the investigation.

This was announced by the United States Department of Justice on Monday. Former agent Shaun Bridges was sentenced by a local California court to pay a fine of $650,000 in addition to five years and 11 months in prison.

Bridges confessed, among other things, that he modified account information obtained during the investigation in January 2013 during the arrest of Curtis Green, a Silk Road customer service representative, by changing passwords and PINs. With the changed information, he moved about 20,000 bitcoins from the accounts to a private bitcoin wallet. At the time of the theft, the value was approximately $350,000.

After Ross Ulbricht, the founder of Silk Road, learned that Green’s access to Silk Road had been used to transfer bitcoins to another wallet, Ulbricht terminated Green’s access to Silk Road. He is said to have tried to have him killed as revenge for the theft of the bitcoins.

Bridges had moved the bitcoins to an account at Mt. Gox and exchanged the bitcoins to a letterbox firm called Quantum International Investments between March and May 2013. The value was then about $820,000.

By using Green’s access to Silk Road, Bridges hindered research into Ulbricht and Silk Road. To mask his own illegal activities, Bridges lied to the jury and prosecutors during the Silk Road investigation.

Another former DEA agent Carl Force was sentenced to 78 months in prison at the end of October for stealing bitcoins. Force also embezzled bitcoins during the investigation into the free-trade site Silk Road, which operates through the Tor network.