The two agents who brought down Silk Road boss accused of wire fraud and money laundering

In the massive heap of irony that’s only reserved for works of fiction, the two lead investigators behind the Silk Road online black market have been charged with embezzling funds they acquired during the undercover social engineering that brought the site down.

Former DEA officer Carl Mark Force IV and former Secret Service agent Shaun Bridges, both assigned to the same Baltimore-based unit tasked with investigating Silk Road’s illegal activities, are accused of wire fraud and money laundering, with an extra additional of stealing government property a falling om Force’s rep sheet. Force himself was the man responsible for establishing a line of communication with Ross Ulbricht, “Dread Pirate Roberts,” the alleged kingpin of the operation. 

The complaint argues that in the process of doing so, Force used a broad range of fake online personas to conduct illegal activities and steal from both the government and the target of the investigation. In one instance, Force extorted $250,000 from Ulbricht by threatening to share sensitive information with the government lest he pay Force $250,000, and in second, Force compromised the investigation by posing as the online persona “French Maid” and selling pertinent information to Ulbricht for $100,000. And if that wasn’t bad enough, Force contacted a digital exchange company that he secretly worked for and invested it, and ordered it to freeze a customer’s account before transferring the funds to his own account.

Meanwhile, accomplice Shaun Bridges transferred $800,000 worth of bitcoins that he came in control of during the Silk Road investigations into an account at Mt. Gox, the defunct Japan-based bitcoin exchange that he was also investigating. Later, he allegedly wired these funds into a personal investment account a few days before he seized Mt. Gox’s assets under the pretext of the investigation.
 
Force was arrested on Friday, March 27 while Bridge surrendered on March 31. From Ulbricht’s perspective, these allegations could not come at a better time, given his lawyer’s ongoing appeal for a retrial. Lawyer Joshua Dratchel argues that federal agents conducted warrantless surveillance and provided illegally obtained evidence against his client, an act considered unconstitutional. 

Worth pointing out is the Force did have legal authority to entrap Ulbricht using the online persona “Nob,” whom he used to trick Ulbricht into paying him $90,000 worth of bitcoins to arrange a phony assassinations of a different Silk Road vendor that was stealing money from Silk Road. It was Ulbricht’s consenting to this ploy that laid the groundwork for his arrest in the first place. What wasn’t known up until now, and remains illegal regardless of the context, was that Shaun Bridges was that person who was stealing the money. 

Source: Gizmodo & Justice.gov