Silk Road investigators charged with stealing bitcoin during probe

This week, another scandal marked the saga of Silk Road, the dark web marketplace thatpromised its buyers and sellers anonymity by way of encryption and bitcoins before it was shut down in 2013.

The US Department of Justice announced charges on Monday against two former federal agents accused of stealing large amounts of bitcoin during their investigation of Silk Road.Carl Force, a former Drug Enforcement Administration agent, and Shaun Bridges, a special agent with theSecret Service, belonged to a Baltimore-based federal task force investigating thesite. Mr. Force was the lead undercover agent who communicated with Ross Ulbricht, the man pegged as Silk Road's founder and convicted in February on charges of money laundering, drug trafficking, and more for his role in overseeing Silk Road.

Now prosecutors say that Mr. Force used the aliases created during the investigation to extort $250,000 from Ulbricht. The also say he stole $90,000 in bitcoins that Ulbricht paid to an officially sanctioned alias used for the undercover investigation.

Mr. Bridges, meanwhile, diverted over $800,000 worth of bitcoin to his account during the operation, authorities say.

If there is one thing the rise and fall of Silk Road has revealed, it is just how easy it is to get caught using bitcoin. Thepeer-to-peer electronic payment system that bypasses banks, is not anonymous. In fact, despite numerous assertions to the contrary, it never was.

Created as recently as 2009, bitcoin gained notoriety in large part due to the mystique surrounding the Silk Road website, which was only accessible through an anonymous browsing network. Bitcoin was the only form of currency accepted on the site, so individuals trading in illicit goods and services made millions of dollars worth of bitcoin transactions each year.

But after Ulbright was tracked down through bitcoin transactions traced between the sites IP address and the wallets stored on his laptop, the jig was up. The myth that using bitcoin would allow criminals to avoid getting caught was officially dispelled. Instead of abandoning the digital currency however, bitcoin enthusiasts are leaning in and calling for greater regulation.

Its sad to see the public perception being affected by negative headlines," says Alex Waters, the founder of Coin.co, a private company that enables online merchants to accept bitcoin for their goods and services, in a phone interview. "It is a fascinating technology that can help humanity on a very large scale. Its a shame for people not to take it seriously because of the emphasis on its illicit use."

As more and more businesses begin to accept the bitcoin, advocates say, it is important that adequate regulatory laws be put in place.

The[Silk Road] case just brought attention to the fact that bitcoin is not anonymous. But there are more uses for it now. People are using it for different things, says Jesse Powell, co-founder and CEO of Kraken, a digital asset exchange with support for bitcoin.

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Silk Road investigators charged with stealing bitcoin during probe