Bitcoin, continuing to bring out the best in everyone it touches.
Former Secret Service agent Shaun Bridges has already been found to have stolen funds seized by the feds during the investigation of the Silk Road – the former favored black market bazar of the dark web.
He is now tied to at least two other instances of theft, according to court filings unsealed this week.
The bigger case alleges the agent made off with $700,000 worth of Bitcoin from a Secret Service account – an impressive feat insofar as he managed to make the theft happen three months after the agency had been urged to block his access.
Bridges pleaded guilty last year and took six years in prison for stealing more than $800,000 of the crypto currency Bitcoin during the Silk Road investigation. But court documents indicate that Bridges may also have had a private cryptogenic key – meaning he had access to a Bitcoin wallet with the $700,000 in seized virtual currency. At which point, federal authorities began to beg for the funds to be moved.
“Unfortunately, the U.S. Secret Service did not do so and the funds were thereafter stolen, something the U.S. Secret Service only discovered once it was ordered by a court to pay a portion of the seizure back to affected claimants,” a team of prosecutors wrote in an accompanying motion. The Bitcoin in question was moved in July 2015 but only discovered missing in December, the affidavit said.
The Bridges case sheds light on a particularly dark chapter of the Silk Road story – Bridges admitted to both stealing the funds and framing someone else. That frame-up led Silk Road chief Ross Ulbricht to attempt to contract for the murder of the thief. Ulbricht is now serving a life sentence – his procuring murder charge is still pending in Maryland.
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