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http://www.wsj.com/articles/former-feder...robe-1427735311
Quote:
WASHINGTON—Two former federal agents were charged with stealing hundreds of thousands of dollars of virtual currency during an undercover investigation into an online drug market, bringing an age-old law-enforcement problem into the Internet era.
Prosecutors in San Francisco unsealed charges Monday against former Drug Enforcement Administration agent Carl Force, 46 years old, and former Secret Service agent Shaun Bridges, 32, accusing them of pocketing bitcoins amid their probe of Silk Road, a now-defunct website that linked buyers and sellers of illicit goods.
The site’s founder, Ross Ulbricht—known online as Dread Pirate Roberts—was convicted by a jury in February on an array of charges related to his role in its operation, which authorities say generated $1.2 billion in revenue over 2½ years. Mr. Ulbricht’s lawyer argued his client wasn’t Dread Pirate Roberts and has said he plans to appeal.
The Manhattan U.S. attorney’s office told a judge Monday that the two agents charged had nothing to do with its separate investigation into Silk Road, which was conducted by agents in New York.
Both agents were members of a Silk Road Task Force operating out of Baltimore but don’t appear to have been working together to steal bitcoin, according to the criminal complaint detailing the charges. Mr. Force allegedly created a fake, unauthorized online persona called French Maid and offered to sell Dread Pirate Roberts information about the federal investigation in exchange for about $100,000 of bitcoin. Mr. Force, who also was doing authorized undercover work for the DEA and posing as a supposed drug dealer named Nob, also offered to sell Dread Pirate Roberts information he claimed to be purchasing from a corrupt Justice Department employee. In both cases, Mr. Force allegedly pocketed the money that he was paid for the information.
Mr. Bridges, meanwhile, allegedly used credentials taken from a Silk Road administrator who had been arrested to steal bitcoins from the site. He allegedly transferred $820,000 to his personal account, according to the complaint.
Mr. Bridges appeared in federal court in San Francisco on Monday and was released on a $500,000 bond.
“Mr. Bridges had an unblemished career in law enforcement for several years,” said his attorney, Steve Levine. “He maintains his innocence and will fight the charges at the appropriate time.”
Mr. Force made an initial appearance in federal court in Baltimore on Monday. A detention hearing was set for Thursday. His attorney didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment.
The charges are the latest in a string of embarrassing disclosures for both the Secret Service and the DEA. The Secret Service has been under pressure over lapses in White House security, while the Justice Department’s inspector general last week said the DEA sometimes mishandles internal probes of sexual misconduct, including agents attending sex parties with prostitutes in Colombia.
A Secret Service spokesman referred a request for comment to the Justice Department. A spokesman for the DEA, which is part of the Justice Department, didn’t respond to a request for comment.
Both agents allegedly tried to take steps to cover their tracks once they learned authorities in San Francisco were probing the Baltimore Silk Road Task Force. They each resigned after they learned they were under investigation. Part of the evidence against them appears to have been derived from a computer belonging to Mr. Ulbricht that was seized during his arrest. On it, he kept records of some of his conversations with French Maid, which authorities say was Mr. Force. A Silk Road server copied by agents and prosecutors in New York also appears to have provided some evidence against Mr. Force.
The criminal complaint unsealed Monday is rife with alleged wrongdoing by agents accused of treating the online world of hidden markets and anonymous personas like the Wild West over a two-year period.
Mr. Force allegedly used his DEA credentials to trick a firm into diverting digital currency to an account he controlled.
While working as a DEA agent investigating digital currency, Mr. Force moonlighted as a sort of compliance officer for digital currency-exchange firm CoinMKT, in which he had allegedly invested $110,000.
In February 2014, CoinMKT flagged the account of a user, identified in court papers only as R.P., for suspicious transactions. Mr. Force suspended the account and had a DEA analyst check R.P.’s criminal history but turned up little suspicious information.
Despite learning that a technical glitch had caused the suspicious transactions, Mr. Force told CoinMKT to seize the account, which contained more than $300,000 in cash and virtual currencies. Using his DEA email, Mr. Force allegedly told the firm to transfer the money to what it thought was a DEA account. But authorities say the money went instead to a personal account controlled by Mr. Force. Not long after the seizure, he started a firm aimed at investing in virtual currency.
CoinMKT didn’t respond to requests for comment.
Among the most brazen episodes contained in the complaint was an alleged theft by Mr. Bridges, then a Secret Service agent, who purportedly used an arrested Silk Road administrator’s login information to siphon bitcoin from the online marketplace during a period when the administrator was still debriefing investigators on the workings of the site.
In January 2013, federal investigators had arrested Curtis Green, an employee of Silk Road, after he purchased cocaine from an undercover agent. Mr. Green agreed to cooperate and showed investigators how to use his login information, which gave him administrator privileges. While Mr. Green was talking to investigators, large sums of bitcoin began to disappear from the accounts of vendors on the site. The missing bitcoin ended up in accounts controlled by Mr. Bridges, who allegedly transferred the money to a bitcoin exchange called Mt. Gox. That spring, he transferred $820,000 from Mt. Gox into a Fidelity account, investigators say.
It wasn’t clear to most of the investigators where the money was going, but the theft prompted Dread Pirate Roberts, the site’s creator, to offer Mr. Force—who was posing as the drug dealer Nob for the DEA—$80,000 to kill Mr. Green, according to authorities. The DEA agents on the task force faked Mr. Green’s death, sending pictures of his supposed corpse to Dread Pirate Roberts, who authorities say paid the $80,000.
Anupam Chander, a University of California, Davis, law professor who studied the Silk Road case, said the charges show that the government is getting used to dealing with virtual currency.
“It might be hard for supervisors to recognize [virtual currencies’] value, because in some sense there will be a vast part of society that says these things are worthless,” he said. “But in this case, what we’ve seen is that the government was actually acting carefully and making sure that all these coins are accounted for.”
Quote:
WASHINGTON—Two former federal agents were charged with stealing hundreds of thousands of dollars of virtual currency during an undercover investigation into an online drug market, bringing an age-old law-enforcement problem into the Internet era.
Prosecutors in San Francisco unsealed charges Monday against former Drug Enforcement Administration agent Carl Force, 46 years old, and former Secret Service agent Shaun Bridges, 32, accusing them of pocketing bitcoins amid their probe of Silk Road, a now-defunct website that linked buyers and sellers of illicit goods.
The site’s founder, Ross Ulbricht—known online as Dread Pirate Roberts—was convicted by a jury in February on an array of charges related to his role in its operation, which authorities say generated $1.2 billion in revenue over 2½ years. Mr. Ulbricht’s lawyer argued his client wasn’t Dread Pirate Roberts and has said he plans to appeal.
The Manhattan U.S. attorney’s office told a judge Monday that the two agents charged had nothing to do with its separate investigation into Silk Road, which was conducted by agents in New York.
Both agents were members of a Silk Road Task Force operating out of Baltimore but don’t appear to have been working together to steal bitcoin, according to the criminal complaint detailing the charges. Mr. Force allegedly created a fake, unauthorized online persona called French Maid and offered to sell Dread Pirate Roberts information about the federal investigation in exchange for about $100,000 of bitcoin. Mr. Force, who also was doing authorized undercover work for the DEA and posing as a supposed drug dealer named Nob, also offered to sell Dread Pirate Roberts information he claimed to be purchasing from a corrupt Justice Department employee. In both cases, Mr. Force allegedly pocketed the money that he was paid for the information.
Mr. Bridges, meanwhile, allegedly used credentials taken from a Silk Road administrator who had been arrested to steal bitcoins from the site. He allegedly transferred $820,000 to his personal account, according to the complaint.
Mr. Bridges appeared in federal court in San Francisco on Monday and was released on a $500,000 bond.
“Mr. Bridges had an unblemished career in law enforcement for several years,” said his attorney, Steve Levine. “He maintains his innocence and will fight the charges at the appropriate time.”
Mr. Force made an initial appearance in federal court in Baltimore on Monday. A detention hearing was set for Thursday. His attorney didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment.
The charges are the latest in a string of embarrassing disclosures for both the Secret Service and the DEA. The Secret Service has been under pressure over lapses in White House security, while the Justice Department’s inspector general last week said the DEA sometimes mishandles internal probes of sexual misconduct, including agents attending sex parties with prostitutes in Colombia.
A Secret Service spokesman referred a request for comment to the Justice Department. A spokesman for the DEA, which is part of the Justice Department, didn’t respond to a request for comment.
Both agents allegedly tried to take steps to cover their tracks once they learned authorities in San Francisco were probing the Baltimore Silk Road Task Force. They each resigned after they learned they were under investigation. Part of the evidence against them appears to have been derived from a computer belonging to Mr. Ulbricht that was seized during his arrest. On it, he kept records of some of his conversations with French Maid, which authorities say was Mr. Force. A Silk Road server copied by agents and prosecutors in New York also appears to have provided some evidence against Mr. Force.
The criminal complaint unsealed Monday is rife with alleged wrongdoing by agents accused of treating the online world of hidden markets and anonymous personas like the Wild West over a two-year period.
Mr. Force allegedly used his DEA credentials to trick a firm into diverting digital currency to an account he controlled.
While working as a DEA agent investigating digital currency, Mr. Force moonlighted as a sort of compliance officer for digital currency-exchange firm CoinMKT, in which he had allegedly invested $110,000.
In February 2014, CoinMKT flagged the account of a user, identified in court papers only as R.P., for suspicious transactions. Mr. Force suspended the account and had a DEA analyst check R.P.’s criminal history but turned up little suspicious information.
Despite learning that a technical glitch had caused the suspicious transactions, Mr. Force told CoinMKT to seize the account, which contained more than $300,000 in cash and virtual currencies. Using his DEA email, Mr. Force allegedly told the firm to transfer the money to what it thought was a DEA account. But authorities say the money went instead to a personal account controlled by Mr. Force. Not long after the seizure, he started a firm aimed at investing in virtual currency.
CoinMKT didn’t respond to requests for comment.
Among the most brazen episodes contained in the complaint was an alleged theft by Mr. Bridges, then a Secret Service agent, who purportedly used an arrested Silk Road administrator’s login information to siphon bitcoin from the online marketplace during a period when the administrator was still debriefing investigators on the workings of the site.
In January 2013, federal investigators had arrested Curtis Green, an employee of Silk Road, after he purchased cocaine from an undercover agent. Mr. Green agreed to cooperate and showed investigators how to use his login information, which gave him administrator privileges. While Mr. Green was talking to investigators, large sums of bitcoin began to disappear from the accounts of vendors on the site. The missing bitcoin ended up in accounts controlled by Mr. Bridges, who allegedly transferred the money to a bitcoin exchange called Mt. Gox. That spring, he transferred $820,000 from Mt. Gox into a Fidelity account, investigators say.
It wasn’t clear to most of the investigators where the money was going, but the theft prompted Dread Pirate Roberts, the site’s creator, to offer Mr. Force—who was posing as the drug dealer Nob for the DEA—$80,000 to kill Mr. Green, according to authorities. The DEA agents on the task force faked Mr. Green’s death, sending pictures of his supposed corpse to Dread Pirate Roberts, who authorities say paid the $80,000.
Anupam Chander, a University of California, Davis, law professor who studied the Silk Road case, said the charges show that the government is getting used to dealing with virtual currency.
“It might be hard for supervisors to recognize [virtual currencies’] value, because in some sense there will be a vast part of society that says these things are worthless,” he said. “But in this case, what we’ve seen is that the government was actually acting carefully and making sure that all these coins are accounted for.”
