Former National Crime Agency Officer in the UK Sentenced to Prison for Stealing 50 Bitcoins in Silk Road 2.0 Investigation

BlockBeats News, July 17th, according to Cointelegraph, a former official of the UK's National Crime Agency (NCA) has been sentenced to prison for stealing 50 bitcoins during the Silk Road 2.0 investigation. Silk Road 2.0 was a follow-up version of the original Silk Road, launched a month after the FBI shut down the original Silk Road and arrested its founder, Ross Ulbricht, in October 2013, and was shut down by the FBI after running for a year. Paul Chowles, an NCA operation officer who was involved in the investigation, was responsible for extracting and analyzing the device data of Silk Road 2.0's co-founders during the law enforcement operation. At that time, 50 of the seized 97 bitcoins were transferred in May 2017. These bitcoins were subsequently processed through the cryptocurrency mixing service Bitcoin Fog, apparently to conceal their source. Paul Chowles has pleaded guilty to charges of theft, transferring criminal property, and concealing criminal property and has been sentenced to more than five years in prison. The UK's Crown Prosecution Service calculated that he illegally benefited approximately £613,150 (USD 821,345) from it.