An officer with Britain’s National Crime Agency who stole cryptocurrency from the operator of an illegal dark web marketplace was jailed on Wednesday for 5-1/2 years.
The NCA was investigating the Silk Road 2.0 site – which allowed users to buy drugs and other illicit goods after the original Silk Road was shut down by the FBI in 2013 – and arrested Liverpool-based Thomas White in 2014
Intelligence officer Paul Chowles took the details of White’s “retirement wallet” and stole 50 bitcoin before sending it to a cryptocurrency “mixing” service called Bitcoin Fog to obscure the source, prosecutors said.
Chowles, 42, appeared in Liverpool Crown Court having pleaded guilty to one count of theft, one count of transferring criminal property, and one count of concealing criminal property.
Prosecutor Craig Hassall said the bitcoin Chowles stole was worth just under 60,000 pounds (around $80,000) at the time of the theft in May 2017 and is now worth over 4 million pounds, though Chowles had realised nearly 145,000 pounds..
