Andy Greenberg: WIRED
Nearly 18 months after the Silk Road online drug market was busted by law enforcement, the criminal charges rippling out from the case have now come full circle: back to two of the law enforcement agents involved in the investigation, one of whom is accused of being the Silk Road’s mole inside the Drug Enforcement Agency.DEA special agent Carl Force and Secret Service special agent Shaun Bridges were arrested Monday and charged with wire fraud and money laundering. Bridges is accused of placing $800,000 of Silk Road bitcoins he obtained in a personal account on the Mt. Gox bitcoin exchange. But Bridges’ charges pale in comparison with the accusations against the DEA’s Force, who is additionally charged with theft of government property and conflict of interest in his investigation of the Silk Road. Force allegedly took hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of bitcoin payments from the Silk Road as part of his undercover investigation and transferred them to a personal account rather than confiscate them as government property. He’s also accused of secretly working for the bitcoin exchange firm CoinMKT, using his DEA powers to seize a customer’s funds from the exchange, and later using a subpoena to the payment firm Venmo to try to unlock his frozen funds there.
But there’s an even more surprising set of accusations against Force: That he acted as a paid informant for Silk Road’s recently convicted administrator Ross Ulbricht, allegedly selling information about the investigation back to Ulbricht under two different pseudonyms. Meanwhile, under a third pseudonym, Force is separately accused of trying to blackmail Ulbricht using other law enforcement data he believed might have been Ulbricht’s identity.
The Alleged Mole
Force, a 46-year-old member of Baltimore’s Silk Road task force, began working in 2012 as an undercover agent on the case, communicating directly with Ulbricht, who was allegedly using the pseudonym the Dread Pirate Roberts. In that role, Force even served as a fictitious criminal named “Nob” who helped arrange a murder of Silk Road employee Curtis Clark Green for Ulbricht. That murder-for-hire didn’t happen; The entire killing was staged by the Baltimore task force. But the attempted murder was allegedly paid for by Ulbricht to silence Green as a potential witness, and it represents the first in a series of six killings prosecutors have accused Ulbricht of commissioning.
But allegedly, those anonymous communications with Ulbricht led Force down an even stranger, more corrupt path. “Force then, without authority, developed additional online personas and engaged in a broad range of illegal activities calculated to bring him personal financial gain,” according to a press statement from the Department of Justice.
ttp://www.wired.com/2015/03/dea-agent-charged-acting-paid-mole-silk-road/
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2015/03/30/dea-agent-silk-road-secret-service_n_6970758.html
Nearly 18 months after the Silk Road online drug market was busted by law enforcement, the criminal charges rippling out from the case have now come full circle: back to two of the law enforcement agents involved in the investigation, one of whom is accused of being the Silk Road’s mole inside the Drug Enforcement Agency.DEA special agent Carl Force and Secret Service special agent Shaun Bridges were arrested Monday and charged with wire fraud and money laundering. Bridges is accused of placing $800,000 of Silk Road bitcoins he obtained in a personal account on the Mt. Gox bitcoin exchange. But Bridges’ charges pale in comparison with the accusations against the DEA’s Force, who is additionally charged with theft of government property and conflict of interest in his investigation of the Silk Road. Force allegedly took hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of bitcoin payments from the Silk Road as part of his undercover investigation and transferred them to a personal account rather than confiscate them as government property. He’s also accused of secretly working for the bitcoin exchange firm CoinMKT, using his DEA powers to seize a customer’s funds from the exchange, and later using a subpoena to the payment firm Venmo to try to unlock his frozen funds there.
But there’s an even more surprising set of accusations against Force: That he acted as a paid informant for Silk Road’s recently convicted administrator Ross Ulbricht, allegedly selling information about the investigation back to Ulbricht under two different pseudonyms. Meanwhile, under a third pseudonym, Force is separately accused of trying to blackmail Ulbricht using other law enforcement data he believed might have been Ulbricht’s identity.
The Alleged Mole
Force, a 46-year-old member of Baltimore’s Silk Road task force, began working in 2012 as an undercover agent on the case, communicating directly with Ulbricht, who was allegedly using the pseudonym the Dread Pirate Roberts. In that role, Force even served as a fictitious criminal named “Nob” who helped arrange a murder of Silk Road employee Curtis Clark Green for Ulbricht. That murder-for-hire didn’t happen; The entire killing was staged by the Baltimore task force. But the attempted murder was allegedly paid for by Ulbricht to silence Green as a potential witness, and it represents the first in a series of six killings prosecutors have accused Ulbricht of commissioning.
But allegedly, those anonymous communications with Ulbricht led Force down an even stranger, more corrupt path. “Force then, without authority, developed additional online personas and engaged in a broad range of illegal activities calculated to bring him personal financial gain,” according to a press statement from the Department of Justice.
ttp://www.wired.com/2015/03/dea-agent-charged-acting-paid-mole-silk-road/
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2015/03/30/dea-agent-silk-road-secret-service_n_6970758.html
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