InfoBytes Blog
DOJ Announces Sentencing of Former Secret Service Agent for Involvement in Silk Road Investigation
On December 7, the DOJ announced that a former Secret Service agent was sentenced to 71 months in prison on charges of money laundering and obstruction of justice. Between 2012 and 2014, the former agent conducted forensic computer investigations from the Northern District of California to locate, identify, and prosecute persons involved in operating Silk Road, a covert online marketplace for illicit goods, as part of the Baltimore Silk Road Task Force. As part of his guilty plea, the agent admitted to using account information from a January 2013 search and arrest of a Silk Road customer support representative to “reset passwords and pins of various accounts on Silk Road and move approximately 20,000 bitcoin, at the time worth approximately $350,000, from those accounts into a bitcoin ‘wallet’ [he] controlled.” The former agent also admitted to (i) moving stolen bitcoin money into an account on a Japan-based online digital currency exchange; (ii) liquidating the bitcoin into $820,000 in U.S. currency and transferring those funds into a personal investment account in the U.S.; (iii) using the customer support representative’s access to Silk Road to steal bitcoin, which limited the investigation of Silk Road; and (iv) making false and misleading statements to both prosecutors and investigators involved in the San Francisco grand jury investigation into his activity. In addition to the prison sentence, the court ordered the former agent to forfeit more than $650,000. The Secret Service agent is the second federal agent to be sentenced this year in connection with the Baltimore Silk Road Task Force’s investigation into the Silk Road.