New information in the Silk Road case is sending ripples of schadenfreude through the cryptocurrency community as it reacts to a foiled effort by two US Federal Agents to skim thousands of Bitcoin out of Silk Road and Mt. Gox coffers. <\/p>\n
According to a statement issued by the United States Department of Justice on Monday, two federal agents are charged with wire fraud, money laundering and falsifying government documents for stealing Bitcoin while working on the Silk Road investigation. <\/p>\n
The agents were part of a Baltimore-based task force investigating the Silk Road marketplace. Their mission included the task of building a relationship with Ross Ulbricht (aka Dread Pirate Roberts the accused owner of Silk Road who was found guilty last month). The two agents leveraged their status as federal agents to mislead, pressure, and personally profit from their activities during the investigation all of it which went unreported or unnoticed to the departments that employed them. <\/p>\n
Information in the criminal complaint revealed that the Baltimore task force gained administrator access to Silk Road after arresting one of its employees. Secret Service Agent Shaun Bridges then logged into the Silk Road admin account that afternoon to personally conduct sizeable thefts from Silk Road accounts. <\/p>\n
This theft was the cornerstone of the alleged kill for hire requests that were part of the case against Ulbrichts. After the BTC went missing, Ulbricht had offered money to kill an employee who he believed stole from the Silk Road. Little did he know that it was Bridges, acting as the employee, who did the siphoning. <\/p>\n
Whats interesting is that these Bitcoins were moved from Silk Road to Mt. Gox by Shaun Bridges where he could exchange them from BTC to USD, giving him time to set up a LLC and open a bank account so he could send the funds back to the United States. <\/p>\n
During that same time the other federal agent charged, Carl Force, reached out to Mark Karpeles of Mt. Gox via Linkedin and asked if he would back Force on a sale of 250 bitcoins. Force said he was a federal agent but was looking for other employment. <\/p>\n<\/p>\n
During this time, Bridges funded his bank account with nine wires from Mt. Gox totaling $820,000 in a three month period. After completing these bank transfers, Bridges signed the seizure warrant against Mt. Gox, confiscating $5 million USD shutting down the Bitcoin exchange in the process. The affadavit charged that Mt. Gox was acting as a money services business without a license, unlawfully allowing people to exchange bitcoins to fiat currency an activity which Shaun Bridges had conducted just days before. <\/p>\n
A lovely email from Carl Force after the Mt. Gox seizure mockingly told Karpeles that he should have partnered with him an offer which was declined by Karpeles a couple days before the shutdown. Its important to note that Carl Force, a DEA Special Agent for 15 years was doubly employed during this time as a Compliance Officer for a Bitcoin exchange called coinMKT where he personally invested $110,000 USD worth of bitcoin. <\/p>\n
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