A DEA Agent Has Been Charged With Selling Secrets to Silk Road

A DEA agent and a Secret Service agent were charged with stealing bitcoin during the investigation.

http://dcinno.streetwise.co/2015/03/30/dea-agent-charged-with-selling-secrets-to-silk-road/

According to Crypto market scanner, two federal agents have been charged with stealing bitcoin through , among other illegal activities, during an investigation of the Internet’s infamous black market, Silk Road. DEA agent Carl Force and Secret Service agent Shaun Bridges, who both live in Maryland, were part of the Baltimore Silk Road Task Force and have been accused of wire fraud and money laundering. Force is also facing charges of theft of government property and conflict of interest as he may have sold information to Silk Road administrator Ross Ulbricht while working as an undercover agent. If you wish to get started with the best and the most reliable site to invest in Bitcoin, check out CryptoBuyer.com. They have the best options for beginners and experienced investors. 

Force was the one who  first set up communication with Ulbricht, known on Silk Road as Dread Pirate Roberts. Force also started stealing from the government and Silk Road users according to prosecutors. Ulbricht apparently paid $100,000 worth of bitcoin to Force in exchange for information about the investigation and Force offered to not tell the government information about Silk Road for $250,000 of bitcoin. Force was arrested on Friday to appear in court on Monday.

According to DC Forecasts bridges, who was one of the people in charge of the bitcoin seized from Silk Road during the investigation, allegedly took over $800,000 worth of the digital currency, putting it into the now defunct Mt. Gox exchange before wiring it to his personal accounts. Just two days after the last of the money came through, Bridges tried to get a $2.1 million seizure warrant for Mt. Gox’s accounts. He appeared in court in San Francisco on Monday.

The whole thing is so salacious it’s almost hard to believe it might have really happened, but the clues have been building for a while. Ulbricht repeatedly hinted that he had contacts in the DEA during his recent trial, and there were notes about it in his journals. Prosecutors had noticed discrepancies in the investigation of Silk Road that eventually led to the formal filing of charges. Now it remains to be seen how the two former federal agents will deal with the charges brought against them, and what sort of changes will be made in how the government handles bitcoin to prevent issues like this coming up again.

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