14 DAY TRIAL // Two federal agents face money laundering and wire fraud charges for their involvement in stealing digital currency bitcoin while investigating the operation of online black market Silk Road between 2012 and 2013.
Former DEA agent Carl Force, 46, and former Secret Service agent Shaun Bridges, 32, are accused of abusing their positions as members of the Baltimore Silk Road Task Force and involving themselves in unauthorized operations that led to personal financial gains.
Dread Pirate Roberts meets French Maid
In the criminal complaint against them, unsealed on Monday, it is stated that Force’s role as an undercover agent (using the alias “Nob”) was to communicate with Ross Ulbricht, the administrator of Silk Road, known by his online moniker Dread Pirate Roberts (DPR).
Force allegedly created fictitious personas that were not approved officially and used them to withhold certain facts from the government in exchange for $250,000 / €233,000 from Ulbricht, as well as to sell Ulbricht information about the investigation.
According to the legal document, Force, operating under the name “French Maid,” received from Ulbricht about $100,000 / €93,000 in bitcoins, which were deposited in personal accounts.
It is claimed that the former DEA agent ran bitcoins through multiple personal wallets before making a $235,000 / €219,000 wire transfer to a personal bank account in Panama, in order to launder the money.
Apart from this, Force is also accused of running criminal history checks on individuals, as a service to digital currency exchange company CoinMKT, where he had invested about $110,000 / €102,000 worth of bitcoins.
He also directed the company to freeze a customer’s account with $297,000 / €276,000 in bitcoins, despite lacking legal grounds, and then pocketed the money, the complaint says.
He is also said to have forged his supervisor’s signature on a document that allowed access to one of his accounts at payments company Venmo, which had been suspended for suspicious activity.
Not all chats between Nob and DPR are known
The legal paper also discloses the fact that not all communication between Force, in undercover capacity, and Ulbricht is available to the investigators because some of the conversations were PGP-encrypted and the decryption key was not made available at any time; some decrypted communications were provided by the agent to the DEA and the prosecutors of the case.
This is of great importance because any talks between the two would have helped the Silk Road Task Force gain more information on the illegal operations carried out by Ulbricht, thus fueling the belief that Force did not want the details to transpire to anyone else.
Secret Service agent's company receives funds from Mt. Gox
As far as Shaun Bridges is concerned, he is accused of having stolen a total of $820,000 / €763,000 in bitcoins through a Silk Road admin account he had access to following the arrest of an employee of the illegal website.
“On January 25, 2013, the Silk Road website suffered a sizeable theft of bitcoins, bitcoins which were moved into Mt. Gox, a [now defunct] digital currency exchange based in Japan” the complaint says.
In mid-February, Bridges created a limited liability company called Quantum International Investments, with an account at Fidelity Investments.
Investigators discovered that between March 6 and May 7, 2013, the company received funds exclusively from Mt. Gox. All this stands as probable cause for illegal activity allegedly carried out by Bridges.
The former US Secret Service agent surrendered himself on Monday and the DEA agent was arrested on Friday.
